For most of the last decade, "dating app fatigue" was something Phoenix singles said to each other over happy hour in Roosevelt Row — a vibe, impossible to verify, easy to write off as one bad string of matches. That's no longer true. It's now sitting in national earnings reports, in a downtown Phoenix venue that's spent the past year building an entire business around getting singles off their phones, and in an ASU researcher's own explanation of exactly why that business is working.
Nationally, the numbers back up what Phoenix has been feeling for a while. Match Group, which owns Tinder and Hinge, reported paying users down roughly 5% year-over-year to 13.8 million in the fourth quarter of 2025, and Bumble's paying users dropped 16% year-over-year over a comparable stretch. A Forbes Health survey found that 78-79% of daters report app burnout. Locally, AZFamily reported this February that a platform called Thursday Dating had spent a full year running in-person singles events at The Pemberton in downtown Phoenix, drawing a growing crowd of daters specifically looking for the kind of serendipity that swiping had stopped providing.
Why the timing of this data point matters
That report ran the week of Valentine's Day — which, in Phoenix's specific dating calendar, lands squarely in the middle of the city's peak season. Phoenix's market famously slows to a crawl every summer once temperatures clear 115 degrees, then reboots each October when snowbirds return and the local dating pool becomes active again. A downtown event series building sustained momentum through the heart of that peak season, rather than a single flash of interest, is a meaningfully stronger signal than the same growth would be in a market without Phoenix's specific seasonal rhythm.
Arizona State University professor Liesel Sharabi, who studies the effects of technology on relationships, has pointed to a specific reason serendipity has become harder to manufacture through an app and easier to find in person: a curated set of photos and captions, however carefully assembled, reveals very little about who someone actually is once you're sitting across from them. Her advice isn't to abandon the apps entirely — she recommends treating them as one channel rather than the only one, alongside more structured alternatives like a friend's introduction or a recreational group such as a running club. Event organizer Maddie Forshee, who runs the Phoenix installment of Thursday Dating, described building the format specifically around lightweight icebreakers and games designed to remove the two biggest sources of friction in approaching a stranger: not knowing whether someone's actually available, and not knowing what to say if they are.
What Phoenix's own transplant culture adds to the picture
Phoenix's dating pool skews unusually heavily toward recent transplants, many of whom arrived specifically chasing a different pace of life, and local matchmakers serving the market have pointed to a related pattern: singles who came to Phoenix for stability and space are increasingly reporting that endless swiping feels repetitive and hollow compared to what they actually moved here for. That's a distinct flavor of app fatigue from the version showing up in denser East Coast markets — less about volume overwhelming the search, more about a format that feels fundamentally mismatched with a city whose appeal was never about infinite options in the first place.
The industry's own response confirms the broader pattern
If the apps themselves believed this was a temporary dip, they wouldn't be spending the way they currently are. Match Group has committed roughly $60 million to AI and product development at Tinder alone, aimed explicitly at slowing users down rather than maximizing swipe volume, and Hinge has launched a $1 million fund supporting in-person social groups. Nationally, Eventbrite reported a 42% increase in attendees at singles mixers and dating events between 2023 and 2024 alone — a trend a market like downtown Phoenix, with a full year of sustained, seasonally-timed momentum behind its own event scene, appears to be tracking closely rather than lagging behind.
What this means for a city that reboots every fall
Phoenix's version of this national story carries a specific implication the data elsewhere doesn't quite capture: because the local dating market already resets on a predictable annual schedule, the city has an unusually clean natural test of whether in-person formats actually stick, rather than spiking briefly around a single holiday news cycle. A downtown singles series that built real momentum straight through the heart of peak season, rather than fading after one good Valentine's weekend, suggests the shift is closer to a durable local habit than a passing trend piece.
We've hosted structured social evenings across Phoenix and Scottsdale as part of more than 19,000 evenings run in 50+ cities since 2014, and the correction the national data is now confirming is one this city's own seasonal rhythm makes unusually easy to measure: when singles come back online — literally, every October — the data increasingly shows them choosing a room over a swipe, and staying with it long after the initial Valentine's Day headlines fade.
Relish hosts structured social evenings for driven professionals across Phoenix and Scottsdale, and in 50+ cities in the US, UK, Canada and Australia, since 2014. Find an evening in Phoenix →