Cyrus Yongbanthom has the aura single moms seem to love.
A 29-year-old teacher and musician from Richmond, Virginia, Yongbanthom didn’t know much about Facebook Dating before creating a profile in 2023. Still, his matches sort of made sense. “It’s just a mom thing to be on Facebook, I guess,” he says of the perception around the social network. What Yongbanthom couldn’t figure out was why he also kept matching with people who were so far away. “No one is ever near me, which is interesting given there are so many users on Facebook Dating.”
Twenty-one million users, actually. In November, for the first time since its launch in 2019, Meta shared with WIRED user information about Facebook Dating, and the figures landed to the sound of collective astonishment. Suddenly, the platform was a secret hit—and bigger than Hinge, its closest rival. Even more bewildering was how Facebook Dating seems to be slowly catching on among young people, with 1.77 million daily active US users between ages 18 and 29, a stat that challenges the idea that only boomers use Facebook. According to a Pew survey from last year, 32 percent of teen respondents said they use Facebook compared to 71 percent in 2015, though Facebook Dating notes that daily conversations among its 18-to-29 demographic increased by 24 percent in 2024.
Facebook Dating is not like any other dating app on the market. It’s technically not even an app. Like Marketplace or Groups, it’s a service within the Facebook app. It also doesn’t depend on a subscription model like Bumble or Tinder, a major advantage when onboarding new users. That’s what Olivia Nwokoma, a 24-year-old hospitality worker in Maryland, likes about it the most. “It doesn’t block the better features behind a paywall,” she says. Nwokoma, who is always on the lookout for a good deal on Facebook Marketplace, prefers men over 6 feet, so when a dating app allows for it—and Facebook Dating does—she will often filter by height.
AI-Based Vibe Checks
What Facebook Dating lacks in cool, it more than makes up for in efficiency. Like every other dating app this year, Facebook went all in on AI. Unlike every other dating app, it has the most complete dating assistant I’ve seen. Which is to say it very much resembles ChatGPT in its speed, functionality, and reasoning.
The goal is to build functionality that helps you “skip the swipe,” says Facebook Dating product manager Neha Kumar. “You can say ‘I want to find someone who loves going to music festivals and would be down to explore the Brooklyn food scene with me,’ and it will find a match for you.” It also has preselected prompts—from “find me someone who loves baking” to “show me the top match in my city.” “We’re first to market with a full-fledged assistant that you can chat with that gives you advice and recommendations across your entire journey,” Kumar says. There will be no paywalls or tiered services, she adds, reasoning, “I think people are just fed up with their core human desire of finding connection and finding love being monetized.”
During Kumar’s demo over Zoom, she asks the assistant to find someone her mom might like for her, and after a brief glitch, it recommends Dwight, a 39-year-old New York City–based entrepreneur who “values loyalty and trust” and is a “big foodie.”
“So this is someone the assistant thinks I should bring home to my mom,” Kumar says.