Your Dating App Might Be Missing Its Most Important Feature

We hear a lot about the death of dating. Young people aren’t getting married. They don’t know how to communicate. They’re afraid of commitment. They’re too distracted by careers, social media, or endless entertainment to build families.

Some of this is true, certainly. But after years of talking with young adults about dating — and after building a dating platform ourselves — my wife and I have come to believe that the deeper problem is something else.

People haven’t stopped wanting love and marriage. They haven’t stopped hoping to find someone with whom they can build a beautiful life. Many have simply forgotten how to date.

We started SacredSpark because we saw this disconnect across the board with young adults. At conferences, events, and retreats, Christian singles would tell us they desired marriage and family but when it came to actually meeting someone and building a long-term relationship, many felt stuck. They didn’t necessarily need more advice about why marriage matters. They needed more opportunities to meet people who shared their values, and more encouragement to pursue a lasting relationship. 

As we’ve built SacredSpark, we’ve realized that this isn’t a uniquely Christian problem. It is a cultural one.

For most of human history, dating wasn’t something you did alone, staring at a screen, evaluating strangers one at a time. Relationships emerged from communities. Friends introduced friends. Families knew who was single and set people up on blind dates. People met through church, school, work, neighborhoods, and shared interests. There were people around singles who would say, “I know someone you should meet.”

Today, we’ve outsourced much of that process to technology, which has made the process of dating far less personal. 

But technology itself isn’t the enemy.

In fact, technology can solve a real problem. It can help two people who otherwise might never have crossed paths discover each other. It can connect people across cities, communities, and circumstances who would have been eternal strangers in another generation. It’s amazing. 

One of the problems, however, lies in the fact that apps can train singles to think like consumers. People in the dating pool filter, compare, optimize, and move on. A person becomes a profile, and a potential relationship can be rejected in less than a second because someone doesn’t fit a particular preference. In days past, people were given much more of a “chance” in person to make a great first impression because they had more than a few seconds to do it.

But that doesn’t mean we need to throw technology away. We simply need to put it back in its proper place and orchestrate it accordingly.

We need other people again

One of the most overlooked casualties of modern dating is community.

Decades ago, a romantic relationship didn’t exist in isolation. If people were dating, more often than not, other people knew about it — or they were the ones who made the introduction in the first place. People could tell others when they were being foolish. That kind of accountability matters.

A dating culture built entirely around private interactions can make every relationship feel like a high-stakes individual decision. If something goes wrong, there’s no community to help someone process it. If someone is unsure whether someone else is worth pursuing, there may be no trusted friend who knows both people well enough to offer perspective. And if someone is lonely, there may be no obvious place to meet another person in the first place.

We’ve seen this repeatedly through our work with SacredSpark. What began as an attempt to build a better way for Christian singles to meet has increasingly become an experiment in something bigger: What happens when you give people more opportunities to connect, both online and in person?

We’ve also learned that the people who know us best put a human element into dating that an algorithm never could.

That’s why we built personal matchmaking into SacredSpark, inspired in part by the success my wife, Emily, has had with matchmaking posts online. If you’re a single, we invite the people who know you — your friends, family, mentors, and the people who know your character and your heart — to become part of the process. Sure, a technological algorithm can learn that two people have similar interests, preferences, or answers to a questionnaire. But it can’t replace the friend who says, “I know you,” and I think you’d really appreciate this person, and you two should connect.”

That kind of introduction carries a wonderfully different weight. It’s not based only on compatibility but based on true care for someone. The person making the introduction has something at stake because they know you and want what’s best for you.

For generations, this was simply part of how people met. We had people around us who knew us well enough to notice when someone might be a good fit. We’ve lost some of that, and technology, ironically, can give us an opportunity to bring it back in a new way.

We’ve watched people discover each other through the app and then meet in real life. We host in-person events where people who might never have crossed paths now come in contact with one another, have conversations, laugh, and discover that dating doesn’t have to feel like a transaction.

Sometimes an event creates the introduction. Sometimes an app does. Sometimes it’s a friend or a shared community. We believe all these avenues work to bring people together in different ways. These aren’t competing ways of dating, but complementary ones for all singles desiring marriage.

The healthiest dating culture may be one where we use every good tool available to help people connect and then give those relationships the real-world communities they need to grow.

The most encouraging thing we’ve discovered isn’t that people don’t want marriage. It’s that they truly do. Young adults tell us they want a spouse, they have a desire to raise children. They want the deep companionship that marriage offers. And in this moment, they want a relationship that is deeper than casual dating and more meaningful than an endless series of first dates.

But wanting marriage and knowing how to pursue marriage are two different things.

Dating requires skills that must be learned, skills that go so much further than sending a clever opening message or curating a great profile. And one of the things we’ve noticed is just how much people need those fundamentals. That’s part of why we created Dating101, a free formational resource designed to help people get back to the basics of dating: how to approach relationships with intention, communicate well, discern wisely, and actually know what healthy dating looks like.

Sometimes, getting people ready for marriage doesn’t require another feature or optimization. It requires going back to the basics and giving people the wisdom, formation, and confidence to date well.

Our own relationship wasn’t built on convenience

My own relationship with my wife reinforced this lesson for us.

We began dating across an international long-distance relationship — 6,000 miles apart and on an eight-hour time difference, which meant we couldn’t rely on the convenience that often makes modern dating possible. We couldn’t simply spend every evening together or casually fold one another into our daily routines. Instead, we had to communicate and continually prioritize. 

We had to make time for one another and decide that the inconvenience was worth it because we believed the relationship was worth pursuing. Thousands of miles of distance forced us to confront something that proximity can sometimes hide; relationships require extremely deliberate investment. It also taught us that dating with marriage in mind doesn’t mean treating every date like a job interview for your future spouse. It means knowing what you’re ultimately looking for while allowing a real relationship to develop naturally.

We don’t need less technology. We need more humanity.

Technology will continue to change how people meet. It is not going away, and with young people who have never known anything other than an app-centered world coming into their dating years, it will only pick up speed. 

The answer isn’t to go back to a world without smartphones or dating apps. Nor is it to pretend that every person should somehow meet their future spouse spontaneously at the grocery store. We need more ways for people to meet, and technology can be one of those ways.

So can a dinner with friends. A parish. A college campus. A neighborhood. A volunteer organization. A young adult group. A wedding. A mutual friend. An event where you walk into a room knowing almost no one and leave having met someone you might want to know better.

The problem isn’t that we have too many ways to meet. It’s that we have too few places where relationships can actually be cultivated for long-term success. No algorithm can teach someone how to sacrifice for another person. No matching system can create the virtue, patience, communication, forgiveness, and generosity required for a lifelong marriage. Those things come from people and communities.

That’s why the work we’re doing with SacredSpark has become bigger in our minds than building an app. We’re trying to help people meet. But we’re also trying to help create a culture of self-awareness, skills, joy, and hope around those meetings. 

Sometimes that means building technology that helps someone discover a person they never would have found otherwise. Sometimes it means putting hundreds of singles in a room and giving them permission to talk to each other. Sometimes it means encouraging someone who has spent years waiting for the perfect circumstances to simply take a chance.

The medium matters less than the mission: We believe in helping people move toward meaningful connections, relationships, and ultimately marriages.

We need to remember what dating is for

The answer to the dating crisis isn’t simply another dating app. But it isn’t the elimination of dating apps, either. It’s a culture that remembers what dating is for. Dating is not about finding someone who checks every box. It’s about discovering whether two imperfect people can build something good together. It is about learning to love well, to make sacrifices, and to build something beautiful. 

And that is something we can begin building right now. We can introduce our single friends instead of assuming they’ll figure it out themselves. We can create more spaces where young adults can form real friendships. We can encourage people to date instead of endlessly talking about dating. We can teach our sons and daughters how to communicate, pursue, discern, apologize, forgive, and commit: the skills needed for a lifetime of love.

We can stop treating marriage as an unrealistic relic of another generation and start treating it as a worthy vocation that requires preparation.

The desire is still there. The challenge isn’t convincing people to want love. It’s helping them believe that love is still possible, and giving them the community, confidence, wisdom, and courage to pursue it.

Maybe the dating crisis isn’t that young people don’t want marriage after all. Maybe we’ve just forgotten how to date. And maybe it’s time we remembered.

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Daniel Hussem is co-founder and CEO of SacredSpark.

This article is part of Upstream, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.