Key Takeaways

The Story: A National Platform Names the Problem Precisely

On September 27, 2026, J.P. De Gance published an op-ed in the Washington Examiner titled “Dating apps aren’t built to find you love — they’re built to keep you single.” It is one of the most precise and widely read articulations of the dating app problem that Communio’s founder has published, and it arrives at a moment when the cultural conversation around apps, loneliness, and the marriage decline has never been more urgent.

De Gance opens with a fact that should give every reader pause. Never in history have single people had access to so many potential romantic partners. A single person in 2026 can open an app and, within minutes, encounter more potential dates than either set of grandparents would have encountered in their entire lifetimes.

And marriage has become rarer. The annual marriage rate has fallen 31% since 2000 and 65% since 1970.

More options. Fewer commitments. The apps did not cause that collapse. But the question De Gance asks is the right one: could technology designed to make finding someone easier also be creating habits that make it harder?

The Core Finding: The Business Model Is the Problem

The most clarifying insight in De Gance’s op-ed is not about psychology or sociology. It is about incentives.

A dating app succeeds when people keep using it. A marriage succeeds when two people never need the app again. Success for the couple is the permanent loss of two customers for the company.

That does not mean dating companies are conspiring to keep people single, De Gance writes. Many Americans have genuinely met their spouses through apps. But there is an obvious and structurally significant tension between a business that benefits from continued engagement and a customer whose ultimate goal is to stop using the product forever.

The result of that tension plays out in the experience of every app user who has spent more time scrolling than committing. The apps are optimized to keep people searching, because searching is what generates revenue. Commitment is an exit from the product. Every feature designed to surface another possibility, every algorithm tuned to maximize time-in-app, is a feature that makes the next swipe feel like the responsible thing to do.

That is the trap. And De Gance gives it a name borrowed from online shopping: you find something you like, but before buying it, you check another page. Perhaps there is something better. More choice was supposed to make choosing easier, yet suddenly you are less certain about the choice in front of you. That instinct, harmless when applied to a product, becomes destructive when applied to a person.

The Counterintuitive Angle: The Problem Is Not That People Are Too Selective. It Is That They Can Never Stop Being Selective.

Here is the reframe at the heart of De Gance’s argument, and it is the most important one for any pastor or parent thinking about the young adults in their lives.

The conventional critique of app-based dating focuses on shallow criteria: people are too focused on looks, too quick to reject, too fixated on the perfect profile. That critique is not wrong, but it misses the deeper structural problem.

Every potential partner on a dating app is evaluated not against the person themselves but against someone who might be better but has not yet appeared. The question is never simply “Is this person someone I could love and build a life with?” It is always “Is this person the best available option, given that another swipe could reveal someone more attractive, more compatible, someone without this person’s irritating habits?”

Marriage asks something completely different. At some point, De Gance writes, dating has to stop being about evaluating possibilities and become a decision about a person. Marriage means saying, “I have chosen.” The app is structurally designed to prevent that moment from arriving. There is always another possibility coming.

Young adults are sensing this themselves. A new trend called SABSing, See And Be Seen, has emerged among college-aged people as a description of life before the apps. It is not nostalgia for 1955. It is a growing recognition that meeting someone in a coffee shop, a class, a community, or a church, seeing them across time and in ordinary circumstances, produces something that a curated profile simply cannot replicate.

What This Means for Your Church

At Communio, De Gance’s Washington Examiner op-ed names something that has been happening in the culture for years and now has language to describe it. The habits that apps cultivate, the expectation that another option is always available, the evaluation of people against an infinite comparison set, the atrophying of the capacity to simply choose, are not habits that disappear when the phone is put down. They shape how young adults approach every potential relationship, including the ones that could actually lead somewhere.

The local church is the most natural counterformation environment available. Not because it should become a matchmaking service, but because it already is the kind of community that offers what De Gance identifies as what the apps cannot: the knowledge of someone’s character over time, the sense that relationships have actual stakes, the experience of seeing a person when they are not on their best behavior and learning whether they keep their word.

De Gance’s call to action at the end of the op-ed is direct and practical: parents should not be embarrassed about introducing young adults to people they might actually like. Friends should revive the once-ordinary practice of setting two people up. And churches should become places where organic relationships develop naturally, instead of leaving Christian singles to navigate the dating market alone.

These are not complicated strategies. They are the ordinary social practices of communities that take their members’ lives seriously. The church that builds the kind of genuine, engaged, relationship-rich community where these things happen naturally is doing something the algorithm structurally cannot do.

We solved the problem of scarcity, De Gance writes. Now we have a problem of abundance. Finding another possibility has never been easier. Choosing one person may never have felt harder. America does not need technology that keeps people searching. It needs a culture and community that helps them commit. The local church is where that culture is built.

Take the Next Step

Communio partners with churches to build the relational culture where young adults find genuine community, develop real relationships, and move toward the commitment the culture keeps making harder.

► Read J.P. De Gance’s full Washington Examiner op-ed → washingtonexaminer.com

► Explore Communio’s resources for churches → communio.org

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the business model problem with dating apps? J.P. De Gance argues that dating apps have a structural conflict of interest: the app succeeds when people keep using it, but a marriage succeeds when two people stop using it permanently. Features designed to maximize engagement, such as surfacing more potential matches, keeping users scrolling, and optimizing for time-in-app, are features that work against the user’s ultimate goal of committing to one person. The app benefits from searching; the couple benefits from choosing.

How do dating apps change the way people evaluate potential partners? De Gance identifies the core problem not as excessive selectivity but as the inability to stop being selective. Every person on a dating app is evaluated not on their own terms but against a comparison set that never closes: there is always the possibility that someone more attractive or more compatible will appear on the next swipe. That habit of perpetual evaluation is destructive when applied to human relationships, because marriage requires the opposite: the decision to stop evaluating and choose.

What is SABSing and why does it matter? SABSing, which stands for See And Be Seen, is a trend among college-aged people that has emerged as a way to describe and reclaim the experience of meeting someone in ordinary, real-life settings before dating apps existed. De Gance cites it as evidence that young adults are themselves sensing what the data confirms: that organic, community-embedded introductions produce something an algorithm cannot replicate, namely the knowledge of someone’s character over time and the sense that a relationship has actual social stakes.

What can parents and friends do to help young adults find relationships? De Gance argues that parents should not be embarrassed about introducing young adults to people they think might connect, and that friends should revive the once-ordinary practice of setting two people up. Neither requires recreating 1955 dating culture. It simply requires recognizing that real-life, community-embedded introductions are more likely to produce lasting relationships than algorithmic matching, and acting on that recognition.

How can the local church respond to the dating app problem? The church is the most natural counterformation environment for the habits that dating apps cultivate. It offers knowledge of someone’s character developed over time, relationships with genuine social stakes, and the experience of community that makes organic introductions possible. De Gance calls on churches to become places where relationships develop naturally rather than leaving Christian singles to navigate the dating market alone. Communio helps churches build the relational culture and programming to make that happen.

Credit: This post draws on J.P. De Gance’s op-ed “Dating apps aren’t built to find you love — they’re built to keep you single,” published in the Washington Examiner on September 27, 2026. Read the full op-ed here.