A Dating App for ‘Next-Gen Traditionalists’

If a dating app had existed in the 1950s, you might have expected it to look like Upward.

On “chivalry mode,” users can establish that the man in a straight pairing will message the woman first.

With “marriage timeline,” they can specify how soon they’d like to marry.

In one promotional image, a man leans against a car; below him is the caption: “Known to change a tire, not his feelings for you.” In another, a man smiles, coffee cup in hand: “Known to cover the reservation and the check.” A woman in a cowboy hat is “often described as wifey material.” This is not, in fact, a glitch in the time-space continuum, the 20th century folding in on the 21st.

It’s the newest big project for Match Group, the company that owns an abundance of dating apps, including Hinge and Tinder.

Today, Match relaunched Upward, formerly a Christian dating app but now a home for anybody who wants to settle down—the old-fashioned way.

“This is modern courtship in action,” the company’s press release reads.

“Women are clear about their standards, men pursue with purpose, and both move toward marriage together.” [ Read: The great romance slump ] Any number of other platforms let you date with the purpose of getting hitched, of course.

On Hinge or Tinder or Bumble, you can indicate what type of relationship you’re looking for and whether you want children.

I see plenty of people on dating apps openly calling for a soulmate, a spouse, a co-parent—and I’m in New York City, not Tuscaloosa.

What Match is capitalizing on, though, isn’t simply a yearning for matrimony or parenthood.

It’s leveraging what’s arguably a regressive streak in the culture: a tendency to romanticize the scripts that more Americans used to follow, which told them how men and women should behave and what they should value.

Internally, Match calls Upward’s audience the “next-gen traditionalists.” Now the company is betting on them.

About 10 months ago, Match pulled together some data on its apps’ audiences.