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Welcome to Fair Play, a column exploring the shifting dynamics of sex, dating and culture by Playboy Senior Editor Magdalene Taylor.
This week, dating app Bumble—famous for being the app where women make the first move—announced that it would no longer be the app where women make the first move. Instead, it will function much like every other mainstream dating app, allowing users of all genders to start the conversation. The question, though, is whether anyone actually will.
Launched in 2014, Bumble was established as a swipe-left-or-swipe-right dating app with a twist: among straight singles, only the woman could initiate the conversation. If she didn’t do so within 24 hours of matching, the opportunity would disappear. Over the next several years, Bumble grew into one of the most profitable dating apps on the market with a peak valuation of over $7 billion. Post-COVID, however, that valuation has dropped dramatically to $400 million today. With that decline, Bumble has made some changes to try to retain customers and value… including entirely walking back on its original “woman in charge” ethos.
“While women making the first move was a radical idea, being women-first was never about prescribing just one way to connect. It was about designing an experience with women’s needs in mind to create better outcomes for everyone,” said Whitney Wolfe Herd, founder and CEO of Bumble in a press release. “Today, our community is asking for more flexibility, less pressure, and more opportunities to create real, meaningful connections and that is what this new experience provides.”
Wolfe Herd is probably right about what people want right now from dating. Still, it’s unclear how Bumble changing their core strategy will help achieve it. The shift doesn’t incentivize men to return to making the first move, but rather perpetuates the issue already at hand: that no one, regardless of gender, wants to make the first move.
A lot of people had a total love-hate relationship with the app in its women-led form. For many men, it was a relief to have at least one location where the expectation wasn’t for them to make the first move. “I liked that a woman had to message first,” Adrian, 32 tells me. “Mostly because after matching with a woman, if she chose not to interact it would at least save me the disappointment of not getting a response had I made the first interaction as I often did on the other apps.”
He says he received fewer matches on Bumble than on Tinder, but those that he did receive were generally better. “There were a lot less dead ends, mostly due to the woman starting the conversation, in my opinion,” he says.
Other guys tell me that even though women had to send the first message, they still often felt it was up to the guy to carry the conversation. “I almost always got, like, a bee emoji or a ‘hey’ so it felt like the buck was passed to me anyway,” says Ian, 34. “That’s why I bailed long ago.”
Many women, it turns out, also didn’t really enjoy making the first move, to begin with. “I personally don’t mind [the app’s change] because I didn’t enjoy having to make the first move — too much effort and didn’t really allow me to gauge what men were truly interested vs. just swiping like crazy,” a woman named Elliot, 33, tells me. “I knew a guy once who used to like every woman. He had a scarcity mindset.”
Elliot and several other women mentioned how Bumble felt like a relic of 2010s feminism, a sort of girlbossification of romance that ignored some of the realities of dating. “It always made me so pissed off,” says Zofia, 26. “The only parts about the patriarchy that benefit me are that I don’t have to initiate and I don’t have to pay. Men are opting out of the patriarchy when it’s convenient for them.”
In that same vein, this move from Bumble seems like yet another instance of people “opting out” of romance in general. For some, opting out is a feminist reclamation. For others, it’s giving up. As writer Laura Roscioli tells me, “I feel like women have stopped making the move as a kind of manifesto in modern dating. All I’m hearing is that women are done with putting any effort into men! There’s almost like this universal anger, they want men to ‘step up’ but are also really judgemental of how they do it.”
“The thing is that men are so scared to make the first move now more than ever, so I don’t know how this will go,” says Roscioli. “Will just no one talk to each other?”
With that, there seems to be shared suspicion between the genders that Bumble’s shift is going to be effective at helping people date. After all, if people want an app where men generally make the first move, they can just use Tinder, Hinge, or nearly every other app where that’s the norm. If the one thing that made Bumble different from the rest is no longer working, perhaps Bumble itself isn’t working at all.
It is time to step away from the gendered discourse around the first move — something that Bumble is somewhat indeed doing here. But instead of revitalizing the app, it might just lead to a stand off. That distance, born from opposite genders who are both scared, tired, and bored with scrolling but unable to stop, probably won’t be filled by more Bumble dates regardless of who is starting the conversation.
