Fewer than one in ten Kiwi singles say dating feels exciting – in fact, almost half call it frustrating or exhausting. Elise Dalrymple-Keast, CEO of matchmaking company Compatico, surveyed nearly 500 New Zealand singles and found what many suspect but few say out loud: dating apps aren’t broken — they were never built to find you a partner in the first place. In this opinion piece, she unpacks the attention-economy mechanics behind swiping culture, the mismatch between what men and women are actually looking for, and why more volume will never solve what is fundamentally a targeting problem.
Earlier this year, we surveyed almost 500 New Zealand singles about how dating feels right now. The results were revealing and insightful, and unfortunately, a little depressing.
Perhaps most notably, is the finding that fewer than one in ten Kiwi singles say dating feels exciting. Almost half describe it as frustrating or exhausting, and a third specifically named dating app fatigue as a reason they’re struggling to meet someone.
Through running a matchmaking business, I hear these sentiments every day but I didn’t expect it to be quite so universal.
Globally, it’s the same story. A Forbes Health survey found 78% of dating app users reported burnout. Bumble lost 20% of its paying subscribers in the final quarter of 2025. Tinder lost 8%. The tide is turning on dating apps.
What frustrates me is how the conversation usually goes from here. Apps add new features and people blame themselves, their photos, their bios, their standards, and then they download the next app. Society blames young generations for having commitment issues and never being satisfied.
Nobody really asks the key question: is the whole model fundamentally flawed?
Above: Compatico CEO, Elise Dalrymple-Keast.
Dating apps are attention economy products. Like social media, they’re designed to keep you on the platform. Every mechanic is tuned for engagement: the scroll, the match notification, the nudge to keep going. A dating app that efficiently finds you a partner has lost a customer. So efficiency was never really the goal, despite what some like Hinge (as the app “designed to be deleted”) claim.
This means the thing most people blame (themselves, their city, their generation) isn’t actually the problem. The product was never optimised to get you into a relationship. It was optimised to keep you looking for one.
And this is where our survey data gets interesting. When we looked at what men and women are actually prioritising in a partner, the gap is clear. Nearly half of men ranked physical attraction in their top two. Among women, that figure was 26%. Women were 57% more likely to put emotional availability first.
Now look at what a dating app shows you: a photo and a first name.
The whole interface is built around the one variable that creates the biggest mismatch – men select on attraction, while women are trying to assess emotional depth – all from a grid of pictures. Both go on dates that go nowhere. Both start to wonder if the problem is them.
What our data also showed is that 77% of singles say their biggest challenge is not meeting the right people, not the absence of dates, but the absence of the right ones. That’s a targeting problem, not a volume problem. However the industry’s answer to a targeting problem has been more volume. More profiles, more swipes, more options.
This volume has in turn trained us on bad habits. Because dating apps give a perception of an abundance of options, we filter based on narrow (often arbitrary) parameters, and treat people with less care: ghosting or only giving it one date before moving on to the next option.
Through my work matchmaking I’ve seen what actually shifts things for people. It’s not more choice, but better choice. Someone who has thought carefully about two people and believes, for specific reasons, that they should meet. And then that same person encouraging you to give each person a minimum of three dates to see if it’s going to be a good fit, because typically a healthy connection doesn’t emerge until you’re a few interactions deep. That’s a different thing entirely from an algorithm serving you the next profile in the queue because you weren’t instantly swept off your feet on date one (which, by the way, is quite often a red flag rather than a green flag).
I think that distinction matters because loneliness in New Zealand is a real and growing problem. The World Health Organisation has declared it a global health threat. Local research from Age Concern found 59% of New Zealanders over 65 had recently felt lonely or isolated. That loneliness doesn’t arrive suddenly at retirement, it comes after years of near misses and diminishing hope.
The technology absolutely exists to do this better. Not necessarily with fancier algorithms, but with a fundamental rethink of what the process is for. Right now the apps are optimised for engagement. They should be optimised for relationships. Those are not the same objective, and until they are, the numbers will keep painting a depressing picture.
People aren’t failing at dating – they’ve just been handed a tool that was never really trying to help them succeed.
