Readers who know me even only quite well will not be surprised to learn that I have spent no time on dating apps… This is an alien world to me, but it looks like others too are turning their backs on online dating, and this may point to something more profound.

A rather unseasonal FT Big Read article last Christmas Eve highlighted the challenges being faced by the likes of Match Group (the world’s largest dating app business), and Bumble Inc. It flagged falling active user numbers and declining revenues.

Stock prices have reacted accordingly. Bumble had a market value of approximately $13 billion on the 12th February 2021, the day after it listed on NASDAQ. Just over four years later it is worth a shade over $600 million. Match Group has fared a little better, but over the same period its value has fallen from $45 billion to $8.4 billion.

It is as though people have fallen out of love with dating apps. After the first heady days of using these platforms to find true romance, the novelty has worn off and the thrill has gone.

Perhaps – as the companies themselves are hoping – AI will serve to arrest the decline and rekindle a passion for their product. Could more ‘intelligent’ matching be online dating’s aphrodisiac?

Or is there something more profound going on here?

I think it could be the latter and that this could have implications well beyond the world of swiping left or right.

Another FT article published in January under the headline, “A relationship recession is going global”, highlighted the issue. Around the world there has been a marked increase in singledom.

The piece pointed out that a focus on falling birth rates and, in some countries, incentives to arrest this by encouraging couples to have children, has missed the point… “The central demographic story of modern times is not just declining rates of childbearing, but rising rates of singledom”. In other words, those incentives are seeking to address the symptoms not the cause.

An irony here for the dating apps is that there appears to be a correlation between smartphone penetration and non-coupled people.

I draw two conclusions from these trends…

First, it is dangerous to assume that technological innovation will always provide positive and profitable solutions to human problems. This is an old lesson relearnt by the shareholders of those dating apps. They have struggled as people have rediscovered the superior thrills of physical interaction and emotional jeopardy, compared to the repetitious process of swiping at home alone.

Secondly, if the blame for higher singledom and falling birth rates can in part be attributed to technology in general and smartphones more specifically, it has by implication to be responsible for the demographic challenges faced by economies where the principal raw material is intellectual capital, based on an economic model predicated on inexorable growth.

Technology becomes part of the problem not the panacea we might have hoped it would be.