IntheNews.tv What's Trending in the news today
Six years after launching Christian dating app Upward, the conglomerate Match Group is relaunching it as a marriage-focused app for young singles. Upward is now centered around “modern courtship.”
“For a generation told to keep things casual and see where they go, saying you want marriage can almost feel countercultural,” said Lauren DeFord, director of brand marketing at Match Group, in a press release shared with Mashable. “Built for people dating with marriage in mind, Upward is a home for singles who know what they want, hold strong standards and believe dating should lead somewhere.”
The shift comes amid a deluge of “tradwife” content on social media, of young women rejecting (or claiming to reject) modern attitudes for more traditional gender roles in their relationships. The trend has reached a new peak in 2026 with Yesteryear, a novel about a tradwife influencer who wakes up in 1855, which has been on the New York Times bestsellers list for 23 weeks.
For several years, young adults have also been decrying hookup culture and casual sex, while also reportedly having less sex than in generations past.
Politics also reflects this cultural moment: The Trump administration is encouraging women to have more children while restricting reproductive rights.
And, according to data, young adults want to tie the knot. Match’s recent Singles in America survey found that 72 percent of Gen Z want to get married. Match Group research also found that around one in four U.S. singles between 18 and 34 strongly identify with traditional values around family, faith, and community.
“Many countries in the world have matrimony apps, and for whatever reason, the U.S. has never really had one,” Match Group’s global chief marketing officer, Stephanie Danzi, told Mashable in a Zoom interview. “Upward was almost naturally emerging as a bit of a matrimonial app by the way that people were using it.”
Danzi works specifically with the Everyone Everywhere portfolio, which includes affinity dating apps like Upward, Salams (for Muslim users), and HER (for Sapphic users).
At a time when Gen Z is frustrated by the dating scene — particularly dating apps — Match is betting on Upward to fill a gap.
Hinge vs. Upward
Hinge, another app in Match Group’s portfolio, is “designed to be deleted.” Both apps are relationship-focused, Danzi said, but what makes Upward different is its focus on marriage specifically and the timeline for marriage users are looking for.
“Whereas people on Hinge are there with certainly high intent and positive intent, on Upward, it’s nearly…99 percent of people want kids,” she said. “Essentially, all people are looking for marriage specifically, and for them, marriage is not an if, it’s a when.”
The average time from match to marriage for an anecdotal sample of couples who met on Upward (and wrote to Match about their relationship) was under one year.
“We hear from our users that they actually feel like they’re coming on too strong on an app like Hinge because they are so marriage and kid-oriented,” she said. But on Upward, it’s the price of entry.
New features for the dating app ‘with marriage in mind’
While Upward’s users are predominantly Christian (given that it was a Christian dating app), Match found that the defining factor was less about religiosity and more about what family looks like and being goal-oriented towards marriage and family.
“On Upward, what we saw is that actually a lot of our prompts that were around, for example, ‘what’s your favorite Bible verse,’ were actually not that popular, and people were spending a lot more time talking about what they wanted out of a family and out of the future,” Danzi explained. People of all faiths are welcome on the app, and it’s a young crowd: Match told Mashable that the majority of users are under 35.
In addition to refocusing Upward towards marriage, Match has also refreshed the app experience. It now includes “Chivalry Mode,” an opt-in experience for users who prefer a more “traditional” first-move dynamic.
When both users in a match opt-in, the man is encouraged to send the first message (and a “high-quality” one, not just “Hey, what’s up?”), and his match chooses whether to respond or unmatch. (Gay users are also welcome on Upward, and there are gay users on the app, Danzi said.) The second user then has 72 hours to respond.
As Danzi told Mashable, a man sending the first message isn’t compulsory in Chivalry Mode, but the team has seen that the opt-in feature leads to more conversations.
Recently, the dating app Bumble changed its rules so that male users can message female ones first, after launching in 2014 as a “feminist” dating app where “women make the first move.”
Also new is the Marriage Timeline feature, which lets users share when they hope to get married — and they can see other users’ timelines, as well.
Users can also pick their “Core Values” on the app so potential matches can see their priorities, such as honor, wisdom, integrity, hard work, community, and friendship. According to Match, nearly every Upward member between 18 and 30 surveyed said they want a family, and “family” is the most-selected Core Value on the app. (On other Match Group apps, like Tinder and Hinge, you can signal lifestyle traits and what you’re looking for.)
“The old checklist was height and income,” Danzi said. “And the new checklist is about values.”
Click here to read more >> https://mashable.com/life/match-upward-app-relaunch-tradwife-gen-z