Are Online Dating Apps Still a Wasteland? We Reviewed 13.

Of the two exclusively queer apps I tried, Her felt more direct (it is for lesbians), albeit still not very horny. Again, ugh! The app was glitchy for me, and I found the UX pretty dreadful, but I loved the breadth of options you can include on your profile when it comes to your sexuality and the sort of relationship you’re looking for—be it monogamous, polyamorous, or something in between. There’s cute animated badges that include identifiers like FEMME and BODY POSITIVE and BISEXUAL, and I was able to indicate that I’m a “social drinker” and “pescatarian” who “want kids someday” and is interested in “creativity, witchy stuff, and kink.” Specific! Like Hinge, there are also prompts you can display on your profile including the crucial detail of whether you’re a top, bottom, or switch.

I wasn’t matching with too many folks (embarrassing!), but noticed there’s also an option to add users as “friends” as part of the app’s “community” function. Because a handful of women and femmes had sent me “friend requests,” I assume people use this as a hack to get around the pretty limiting free version of the app—its most jarring downside. Or maybe they just wanted to be friends, cute I guess??? I had a very small amount of likes I could give out each day, and found that made it significantly harder to facilitate conversations. The matches I did engage with were respectful—a concept that is entirely foreign to me. I feel like I’d probably have had a much better time if I’d upgraded to the Gold tier for $69.99 a month, but I am cheap and will suffer through the free version for eternity.

Things I’ve seen in men’s bios on Her: Again, nothing, because Her is for lesbians. A magical place, comparatively speaking.—EL

Before the Tinder age, there was Match dot com—ostensibly a website to find your mature, adult soulmate, and get married and have a family, or whatever your idea of a happy, fulfilled adult relationship trajectory looks like. Match is now also a dating app, deliberately premised around maturity, that allows you to both swipe around and/or send an intro message to prospective dates. They’ll see these messages regardless of whether you match.

Match doesn’t have my favorite user interface, and most of the men I screened on it don’t feel particularly more ~mature~ or husband-material than Tinder’s cesspool of booty calls. But it’s a workable app with some, err, characters on it, many of whom are very earnestly—arguably too earnestly, even—looking for love, if that’s your thing.

Things men have said to me on Match: Messages I’ve received on this app range from “Good evening Kylie” to “Good afternoon Kylie.” In other words, it’s not the place to go if you’re looking for cheeky banter or scintillating conversation.—KC

NUiT marks the dating app concept I was most excited about: astrology compatibility. You enter your birth time and place, and from there you can analyze your romantic compatibility with matches based on the stars! In theory, a very good time for people like me, who enjoy talking about how psychotic their Scorpio moon placement makes them. In practice? A real bummer: Don’t hold your breath for any star-crossed lovers here.

I’m not sure if the app just hasn’t rolled out its US-based marketing plan yet, but most of my matches were “free spirited thinker[s],” middle-aged men named Fabio, and expats in Germany, which makes me think this is not a great place to gather like-minded souls, but rather to cloak anti-vaxxers in flowery language. Though I dictated that I was open to matching with women, I encountered mostly straight older men looking for long-term monogamous relationships. The app even served me a dude who was also a Pisces sun—an astrological disaster waiting to happen. The Pisces Bro and I scored a 57 for romantic compatibility, which the app noted was above average, but also an 80 for business compatibility. Maybe he and I should give up on the whole dating thing and form a crypto startup, instead.

Things men have said to me on NUiT: When I listed, jokingly, on my profile that I could be someone’s manic pixie dream girl, a man responded, “sounds intriguing (fairy emojis) would you mind sharing the meaning behind it?” No :)—EL

Bumble is, like Hinge, another fairly mainstream alternative to Tinder that feels a bit less—for lack of better words—skeevy than the original. After Hinge, it’s probably the app that’s facilitated the most IRL dates for me, including with one white man who I recall really, really likes Michelle Obama, and a very sweet engineer. Like Hinge, Bumble makes it fairly easy to suss out and avoid off-putting individuals and uncover actual, decently compatible matches. My main gripe is its core feature for heterosexual matches that requires women to message men first, which is more taxing and burdensome than empowering.

For the Bumble virgins: Women also have to receive a response from their male match within another 24 hours in order for the match to not expire. I get the premise of this, since conversations tend to stall and be fruitless on other apps. But it’s still an extra inconvenience tacked onto something as innately inconvenient as finding love on the internet.

Things men have said to me on Bumble: Messages I’ve received on this app range from “once you’re covid negative what’re your thoughts on hanging out with a sun-deprived doofus” (I had covid at the time) to “hello we meet again” (we’d previously matched on Tinder and Hinge).—KC

Sadly—or perhaps as evidence of healthy boundary setting, if we’re being generous—Feeld is the only app I had installed on my phone prior to this investigation. It had been recommended to me by a number of friends as one of the most widely accepted hookups apps that features minimal interactions with total creepers. For those of you with unique sexual appetites, you can list exactly what your kinks and desires are, from BDSM, GGG (good, giving, and game), FWB (friends with benefits), threesomes down to how many men or women you’d like involved, group play, and so on. Admittedly, the conversations that I’ve engaged in have mostly been late night, alcohol-fueled encounters that never amounted to much. And while it was easy to find potential partners from a technical standpoint, I don’t want to fuck if we can’t banter for 20 minutes on an app! I don’t know if this makes me a sapiosexual or just someone with standards. Anyways, a lovely place to, uh, attend a hoedown.

Things men have said to me on Feeld: Messages range from “hey em what’s up” to “love that the nights are getting warmer.” Please gouge my eyes out!!!—EL

Like Match, eHarmony presents as a similarly “serious” dating app, and boy does it take itself seriously. Before you can even begin using the app, it forces you to endure a winding, labyrinth-like personality survey that involves selecting random shapes and designs that supposedly embody your essence. Then, the app bars you from seeing prospective dates’ photos—you essentially just scroll through an endless sea of blurred images or read inane/bizarre messages from these blurry strangers. I can respect the bold attempt to make dating apps less about hookups, but this isn’t some ancient fairytale world of frog princes and beasts who are secretly gallant knights. I’d argue it’s pretty fair to want to know what someone looks like before choosing to engage with them.

Things men have said to me on eHarmony: Messages I’ve received on this app range from “I think we should get married next weekend. I know this guy who’s a justice of the peace and he can get this done for us if you don’t mind getting married in a liquor store, do you? ; )” to “Hello, I am seeking a long term relationship. How was your day?” and “i would love it if we could get to know each other even if its juat as friend s.”—KC

Ah, Raya: They get you with viral social media posts featuring everyday people’s encounters with the likes of Ben Affleck, and then—with the exception of the rare Netflix YA heartthrob and D-list Brooklyn Nets star—primarily just disturb your peace with a pool of yacht-hopping investment bankers and hobbyist DJs with generational wealth. But to Raya’s credit, there are certainly some interesting people who are neither Affleck nor hobbyist DJs, as well as plenty of filmmakers, producers, artists, and very cool creatives in general, which is great if you’re into that whole scene.

When you’re actually on the app (which can be a bit of a process, as it prides itself on exclusivity), it has some fairly notable housekeeping rules and quirks: Screenshotting is banned, and you’re capped at a certain number of profiles you can like per day. But because connecting with fellow creatives or influencer-types is ostensibly the crux of the app, it also has features that allow you to explore and network with other users anywhere in the world beyond just arbitrarily swiping left or right on romantic/sexual prospects, which is actually pretty cool.

Things men have said to me on Raya: Messages I’ve received on this app range from ”So what happens when I text you and you don’t believe that it’s me” to “I feel like my flaws make me the man I am. And I’ve sold a million books.” (punctuation included).—KC

Since turning 30 this year, I’ve been non stop complaining about my untreated scoliosis, the plantar fasciitis coursing through my heels, and my body’s rapidly declining ability to heal itself despite taking two fistfuls of vitamins each morning. So, I figured, why not lean fully into my identity as a single “elderly” woman on the prowl? It’s time to catch some prey.

Enter CougarD: a dating app for cougars. This is not to be confused with Cougar Life, a very similar app with far less downloads (capitalism at its finest is producing competing entities catering to older women and the 18+ targets looking for their Mommy). This app is not at all queer friendly, giving only “male” and “female” identifier options, with no options to display pronouns on your profile. However, I did love that I could set my relationship status to “waiting for a miracle.” And on CougarD, it appears the little miracles waiting for me are a plethora of misguided 23-year-old dudes.

In a surprise to no one, most of the men (boys?) on this app failed miserably at marketing themselves, with blurry and/or dark photos, and none of them really looked like they’d get on their knees, kiss my feet, and feed me grapes while anointing me their one and only Mother. I mean, if you’d like to be innocently gassed up by a 19-year-old, perhaps CougarD is for you. But I felt like a predator, and not in any powerful sense, so for the reason I’m OUT.

Things men/boys put in their bios on CougarD: A 34-year-old man wrote, “any cougars around MD want to find out what this tongue do?” He did not include a photo of said tongue. Another person who goes by the username “horny youngster” said poetically, “message me if u got a package on the way in la quinta ca or if not i can drop a package off (winky face).” Another man’s poetry: “I don’t need the force to choke you.” Lastly, shoutout to the 18-year-old throwing up partially formed gang signs while wearing a buttoned up polo (yes, buttoned all the way to the top) with spiky tips, á la Jersey Shore’s Pauly D.—EL

I will start this with the disclaimer that, on first impression, what I’d heard about The League sounded like my personal hell—a secluded, faux-exclusive space for Ivy Leaguers, investment bankers, and likely nepo babies to network and probably talk about their high-powered jobs during sex. That first impression didn’t much improve when, for the purpose of this journalistic endeavor, I actually installed the app, and it required me to connect my LinkedIn profile—then informed me I was on a waitlist behind tens of thousands to get on the actual app. Miraculously, a couple days after making my profile, I was informed I’d been selected off the waitlist, and my browsing of the app has surprisingly been pleasant enough. The League’s interface is vaguely reminiscent of Raya and fairly intuitive, which, as you’ve probably gathered by now, is important to me!

And as for the people you encounter on it, I haven’t yet glimpsed anyone especially obnoxious. People on here love their jobs, and it seems like everyone is a senior vice president of something (which really makes me wonder how esteemed that position really is). But there are plenty of people who went to non-Ivy League schools and individuals who seem earnest enough and merely ventured on here because they’re particularly attracted to career-oriented individuals, or whatever. So, if that’s you, take a run at getting off their waitlist, I guess.

Things men have said to me on The League: Messages I’ve received on this app range from “Hey Rockstar!” to “I’m a face to face kind of guy” from a self-ID’ed “NFT Guru.”—KC

Boy, do I have a story for you! BiCupid, which is an app for bisexual people, felt pretty transactional right off the bat, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. I was served mostly couples featuring a straight man and a bisexual women who seemed to be looking for a very specific arrangement to spice up their partnership. No shame there, do your thing! My biggest point of contention, however, is that users could message me without having matched first…which leads me to our very unsexy climax.

I was casually perusing my messages—at my workplace, mind you—when I opened a message from a couple that I had not matched with. They both claimed to be 42. They had first sent me a wink (essentially the app’s version of a like or heart), then immediately followed that up with two unsolicited nudes, purportedly of the woman, and a mirror pic of a heavily manscaped husband in nothing but a banana hammock. I nearly spit out my cold brew all over my desk. When I did not answer their messages, hours later, they followed up with “yumm.” Though the app masquerades as sex forward and surely does facilitate some great sex-capades, I will never recover from the tits I did not consent to see at my office!!! Boner kill. Deleting.

Things men have said to me on BiCupid: One man’s opener included asking what my “wildest experience on or off the app” was. Like I’d tell you! Another profile featured only a photo of a man’s arm, and to him, I ask, “What that arm do?”—EL