When Adreanna Pulliam signed up for the Christian dating app Upward over the summer, she was prepared to come across men who identified as hyperconservative.
So when she swiped on a guy’s profile that listed “a progressive donkey or a ‘Trump is King’ elephant” as his relationship deal-breaker, she was shocked. “I hadn’t expected to see a moderate libertarian” on the app, she says.
It only got more bizarre from there. There was the guy advertising his Snapchat with the username “Yaboi Blaze reallysexgod.” Another dater, for reasons she still can’t fathom, included a photo of him at a funeral, standing in front of a poster-size image of the deceased.
While Pulliam was apprehensive about the prospects, she wanted to see how different Upward, one of the lesser-known apps in Match Group’s sprawling portfolio of dating platforms, was from Hinge and Tinder. She hadn’t had much luck with either of them. Many of the profiles she encountered on Upward, she tells WIRED, were “MAGA types of men” who “fit more of that red-pill, trad wife, conservative values” category of dater.
A 25-year-old opera singer in Bloomington, Indiana, for whom marriage has always been “the end goal,” Pulliam is the kind of person Upward is trying to appeal to since relaunching last month.
The relaunch was redesigned around two key data points from Match Group’s 2026 Singles in America study: 72 percent of Gen Zs want to get married, and a quarter of singles aged 18 to 34 “identify with a combination of traditional values around family, faith, and community,” a news release about the survey noted.
The pivot away from an app exclusively for Christian daters was about opening up its doors for people “who share those same goals, but may not lead with a faith-first mindset,” says Lauren DeFord, director of brand marketing at Match, of the app’s new focus on Gen Z singles.
Upward’s expansion is representative of the ongoing change in the dating market. Dwindling engagement and the introduction of AI have pushed companies to reassess user growth. For some, that means abandoning their original mission.
Upward, which runs on a tiered subscription, works similarly to Tinder. You can swipe left or right on profiles, and users are encouraged to include a Faith Statement on their page, explaining what they value most about their relationship to God. Among its new features are Chivalry Mode, which, if you’re familiar with how Bumble used to operate, persuades men to message first, and Marriage Timeline, which lets daters share when they hope to get married with potential suitors.
But while a marriage-focused app like Upward may be tapping into a genuine desire for commitment, that doesn’t mean young people are returning to traditional relationship norms en masse, says Daniel Cox, author of Generation Uncoupled: America’s New Gender Divide and the Crisis of Human Connection. In fact, the opposite is happening.
In his book, Cox argues that Gen Z is entering adulthood with a less clear sense of their “relational priorities,” and a decline in social and civic life has given rise to a “hyperindividualistic culture” that doesn’t always prioritize things like marriage. As a result, fewer Gen Zs are coupling up today. An American Institute for Boys and Men survey found that 44 percent of Gen Z men have had no relationship experience at all during their teen years, double the rate for older men. “This movement makes it a lot harder to ... want to sacrifice and to be there for someone,” he says.
Upward’s relaunch framed the app as the “home of modern courtship,” including video testimonials of singles who’d found love on the app. But aesthetically, there wasn’t anything “modern” about its promotional rollout. In one video, newly married Zach donned a cowboy hat and blue jeans, doing all the things men should presumably do for their significant others: gift them flowers, carry her through a meadow, open the car door. A bold text overlay on the video read “chivalrymaxxing.” According to the company, branding was inspired by an “Americana” theme, and its “Wanted: For Life” campaign draws on Western-style imagery.
Cox, who is the director of the Survey Center on American Life, is convinced that the trad trend is “a reaction to the lack of cultural norms around courtship. People are wanting something over nothing,” he says, adding that daters are desperate for “a script” with direction and defined roles, given how nontraditional approaches to partnership, such as polyamory and relationship anarchy, are increasing among young people. “And something that’s nice about the trad script is it’s very clear. Though I don’t think it’s close to ideal for a lot of young people.”
A 2023 Pew Research survey found that only 23 percent of adults considered being married “extremely” or “very important” to living a fulfilling life, compared with 61 percent who said the same about having close friends. In the last 30 years, the percentage of high school seniors who said they were likely to marry someday had fallen from 80 percent in 1993 to 67 percent in 2023, according to Pew. The decline was driven mostly by changing views among young women who, despite the portion of married adults slightly increasing from 50 percent to 51 percent between 2019 to 2023, remain more likely than men to be unpartnered.
The trend is likely to continue in that direction. “There’s increasingly a belief among young women that marriage makes them less happy,” Cox says. “So it’s not only that they have less of a desire to get married. There’s a concern that if they get married, they won’t be as happy as if they are single. That seems like a view that is potentially not going to change.”
Upward, which declined to share information regarding the number of active users on the platform, is betting that it will.
When setting up her account, Pulliam was baffled to find out that Upward let users list their body type, ranging from “fit” and “curvy” to “chubby,” a feature typically reserved for hookup apps. She was also confused that Upward allows married people on the app. Some of the stranger options for relationship type included “it’s complicated” and “I’m not into labels.” “I’m not knocking open relationships or anything like that, but it was interesting to see such a progressive take from a more of a conservative demographic,” she says.
Tauti, a social work student who lives in California, lasted less than 48 hours on the app, disturbed by the overwhelming conservative majority looking for domesticated partners. Sometimes the hook with mission-specific apps like Upward is that the religious identity associated with the platform can create an assumption of compatibility before users have really gotten to know one another. “I did not know me being Christian and leaning liberal was a big ask,” she said on TikTok. “It’s turned me off from Christian dating altogether.”
Some users believe the recent pivot is diluting the experience for daters who joined seeking out people with purely Christian beliefs. “Why are you on there if you’re agnostic?” Heidi Marais, a teacher and single mom, asked on TikTok in September. “And Upward, why is it an option?”
DeFord, who maintains that Christian singles remain at the core of Upward’s mission despite describing the relaunch as a “brand shift,” pushes back against the assertion that the experience is worsening. “Those users can still interact and match with people who share the same denomination, the same religious views, the same cadence of how they like to practice.”
Since its debut in 2020, Upward has struggled with various hiccups that include everything from functionality issues to user perception. Many reviews in the Apple App Store complain of terrible user support, poor filtering features, and automatic bans, with one user calling the app “janky as hell.”
Cox notes there is ample reason to be wary of Match’s claim that a majority of Gen Z want to get married. Given that Gen Z is younger, it is likely that more people have never tied the knot. “So if they’re comparing Gen Z to millennials or Gen Xers in the survey, it could be that they have already been in relationships, maybe even divorced, so they are not as eager to get married again.” Match’s survey, which the company says is “demographically representative” of the US Census, sampled 5,000 US singles over the age of 18 who were not married, living with a partner, or in a committed relationship. In any case, Cox says, the “norm around what is the ideal age to get married” has vanished.
Pulliam still wants to get hitched but doesn’t consider it a priority right now. She attended a Christian college and recognizes the potential for Upward to be a hit “within communities of Christian private universities,” she says. “But I think the only way that the app works is for maybe someone who has a little bit more of a closed mind.”