Japan has figured out how to build a better dating app

Grace, a 29-year-old publicist in New York, has regularly used a slew of dating apps for more than four years, with little luck. Despite endless chatting, her matches rarely materialize into in-person dates. She's tried a paid version of Hinge ($100 for three months). She's tried the members-only app Raya, but after she spent $120 a year for the past three years, it's led her to only two first dates. At this point, Grace said, the apps have left her "burned out and exhausted."

In a recent Forbes survey of Americans who'd used dating apps in the past year, 78% of respondents said they felt some amount of burnout. A growing number of younger people are rejecting dating and sex altogether. Among millions, a consensus is forming: Dating apps suck so bad that they might even be deliberately keeping us from finding love.

Theories abound on what's behind the frustrating, sorry state of apps. Some point to how, as a way to compensate for stagnating user bases, many apps are increasingly becoming pay to play. Last fall, Tinder rolled out a $500 monthly subscription, in addition to two cheaper membership tiers. The League charges up to $1,000 a week or $2,500 a month. Hinge charges users for "roses" to send to their "standouts," which are trapped behind a paywall that critics have dubbed "rose jail." These days, "it's really a lot harder to be functional if you're not on some level of a paid membership," Damona Hoffman, a dating coach, said. While apps like Hinge insist they're "designed to be deleted," finding a partner on them increasingly seems reserved only for those who can afford it.

Some point to a fundamental misalignment between dating-app companies and their customers: The more successful the product is for the user, the worse it is for the bottom line. "They don't actually want you to be successful because that means they're losing a customer," said Bianca Stelian, a digital strategist who posted a viral TikTok positing her own theories about dating-app burnout. Others argue that the apps are intentionally gamified and addictive. The average American dating-app user spends 51 minutes a day swiping, more than double the time the average American spends exercising. Ryan Clarkson, a lawyer who recently brought a class-action lawsuit on behalf of Tinder and Hinge users, compared dating apps maximizing user engagement and "trapping users in a perpetual pay-to-play loop" to pharmaceutical companies selling addictive drugs to vulnerable patients. Match Group, which owns Tinder and Hinge, called Clarkson's lawsuit "ridiculous" and insisted that its business strategy didn't rely on advertising or engagement metrics.

Still, others blame the problem on the near monopoly a handful of companies — namely Match Group (which owns 45 dating brands worldwide) and Bumble — have on the market, which has led to years of complacency. "They've just been the same for so long," Ali Jackson, a New York City dating coach, said. "Somebody needs to do something drastically different."

So here's one idea: What if your local government played matchmaker?

Before you barf at the thought of your mayor setting you up on your next date, hear me out: The more expensive dating becomes, the less equitable it becomes. Meanwhile, the US government is increasingly recognizing social connection as a key element of public health, and increasingly investing in ways to combat our "loneliness epidemic." If romantic relationships are so important both for the individual and for society, it's not a stretch to consider them a public good worth investing in.

Some countries, including Japan and Australia, already do and have been experimenting with government-subsidized and even government-run alternatives to traditional, commercial dating apps. While these projects are still in their early days, they raise a once unthinkable, now compelling question for America: Could the government bring some much-needed innovation to dating?

For years, several East Asian countries have desperately sought to reverse their plummeting birth rates. They've rolled out subsidies for parents, salary increases for younger workers, and other family-friendly policies. Increasingly, they see the dating industry as a lever to pull.

The Japanese federal government's Children and Families Agency, for example, has set up marriage support centers in most of the country's 47 prefectures, providing services like dating coaches, in-person mixers, and at least one mixer in the metaverse. A center in Saitama prefecture (population 7.3 million) reported that since its center opened in October 2018, 12,517 couples had begun dating through the service and 472 couples had gotten married.

In Tokyo, the city government is even releasing its own dating app, part of a campaign called Tokyo Futari Story ("futari" means couple). The service, which the city has budgeted several million dollars to develop and promote, will require users to verify their income, prove they're unmarried, sit for an interview with the app's staff, and sign a statement saying they're intent on getting married.

Some experts are cautiously optimistic about the government playing cupid. Bouke de Vries, an associate professor of philosophy at Ghent University in Belgium who's studied dating apps, argues that state-run dating apps are at least in theory better positioned to help people find partners without spending too much money or time in the process. Many for-profit dating services are "gratuitously prolonging" users' search for love, he said. "The interests of governments are much better aligned with those of love-seeking users than those of private companies and love-seeking users," de Vries said.

Others say these projects will do little to change entrenched attitudes. Omar Minami, a former Tinder employee in Japan and cofounder of a Japanese dating app, said that low marriage and birth rates are the result of much-deeper economic and cultural issues, including the gender wage gap, intense work culture, and huge expenses of raising kids. Government-funded dating apps are a "shiny object" and short-term solution, he added.

"It will take decades of work in order to change the mindset of Japanese people in regards to marriage," he said. "Unfortunately, government officials are only looking for investments that will pay off in their lifetime."

On the other hand, governments can be given so much power to play matchmaker they damage all of society. In the 1980s, Singapore pursued a racist, eugenics-based policy by offering discounted dating services exclusively to college-educated citizens, who were disproportionately ethnically Chinese, excluding members of marginalized minorities. The government also funded voluntary sterilization for lower-income parents.

Other countries, however, have stepped in to make dating less dangerous for its most vulnerable citizens. People with disabilities in Australia can now use the cash benefits they get from the country's National Disability Insurance Scheme to pay for a dating app designed for people with disabilities, called the Cliq Connection. Cheryl Drury, the app's founder, said many of her customers previously had trouble dating, fell prey to scams, or were sexually assaulted. "They're just being eaten up on mainstream dating apps because they're just so vulnerable through physical assault as well as scams," she said. But she doubts the government will offer direct support for her services anytime soon, given the persistent "taboo" surrounding sexuality, relationships, and disability.

A more realistic model for America may be a public-private partnership model. Last year, Japan's most popular dating app, the Match Group-owned Pairs, began collaborating with several prefectures and cities. The governments have employed researchers to devise questionnaires for users and have hosted dating seminars and other events, and they're covering the costs of their constituents' memberships to the app. The company, which isn't taking direct government funding, says it hopes these partnerships will help alleviate the "worsening population decline in rural areas and the resulting low birth rate and unmarried population."

Francesca Katayama met her husband on Pairs in Tokyo in 2021 (they now have 2-year-old twins). The 31-year-old said she's in favor of more government support for dating — especially for an app like Pairs, which has already catered to people seeking committed relationships — but blames the country's high cost of living and intense work culture for low marriage and birth rates.

Junko Yamada, a psychology professor at Rissho University who has worked with Pairs, thinks governments have a key role to play in breaking down barriers in the world of romance. "Although romantic relationships are often perceived as an individual problem," Yamada said, "the problem is actually largely due to social structures." She blamed a decline in dating on workplace sexual harassment, an insular social scene, and concerns about safety and security. Yamada said that government-subsidized dating services could appeal particularly to those who are skeptical of private-sector apps by offering extra security and ensuring users are serious about finding romantic connection.

But could any of this happen in America? As of today, an engineer hoping to build the next OKCupid from inside the Department of Health and Human Services would face some steep hurdles.

For one thing, there's a lack of bipartisan support. Beyond defending reproductive rights, liberals and progressives have largely shied away from promoting courtship and family creation. Meanwhile, small-government conservatives are unlikely to pass a Make America Date Again bill. Although! Conservatives have long been fixated on boosting the birth rate, and Elon Musk, who is now donating $45 million a month to a Trump super PAC and has long warned against "population collapse," trumpeted the announcement of Tokyo's dating app. "I'm glad the Japanese government recognizes the importance of this matter. If radical action isn't taken, Japan (and many other countries) will disappear!" he wrote on X.

But perhaps a bigger impediment than political will is cultural taboo. "There's something almost salacious about finding love and dating," said Justin Garcia, a sex researcher and professor of gender studies at Indiana University. If society viewed sex and relationships as a health issue, there would already be government funding to study it and independent commissions to address it, he added. But Garcia, who runs the university's sexual-behavior research center, Kinsey Institute, has found it nearly impossible to get the government to fund research related to sex and romance unless it's specific to a very particular, marginalized group, like those suffering from epilepsy or Alzheimer's.

Instead, academics have to partner with industry or philanthropic organizations. Garcia serves as a scientific advisor to Match Group, which funds some of his research. Meanwhile, his work is under attack by Republican lawmakers, who last year ended state funding for the Kinsey Institute, prompting the university's board of trustees to consider turning it into an independent nonprofit.

To Garcia, funding research on romantic and sexual relationships is a no-brainer. "These are some of the most important relationships in our lives," he said. "They impact our psychological health. They impact our physical health. They impact our financial and economic prospects. They impact our family dynamics and future generations."

When it comes to dating apps, he supports rigorous research on what's working and what's not. He sees a role for the government, though, he said, there's a vaguely ominous threat of the government intervening in people's personal lives. "We don't want government telling us who we should partner with, and how to partner, and when to partner, but rather giving people more resources to have successful relationships," he said.

No American government has yet helped its constituents date. But it might not be hard to imagine a local official like Mayor Eric Adams of New York City — who once spun his outdoor-dining policy as a way to promote flirting — getting behind a state-supported dating service. One could hear him announcing at a press conference: "We are extremely proud to introduce a new dating experience from America's mayor, called Adams & Eve."

Eliza Relman is a policy correspondent focused on housing, transportation, and infrastructure on Insider's economy team.