When Adreanna Pulliam signed up for the Christian dating app Upward over the summer, she was prepared to come across men who identified as hyperconservative.
So when she swiped on a guy’s profile that listed “a progressive donkey or a ‘Trump is King’ elephant” as his relationship deal-breaker, she was shocked. “I hadn’t expected to see a moderate libertarian” on the app, she says.
It only got more bizarre from there. There was the guy advertising his Snapchat with the username “Yaboi Blaze reallysexgod.” Another dater, for reasons she still can’t fathom, included a photo of him at a funeral, standing in front of a poster-size image of the deceased.
While Pulliam was apprehensive about the prospects, she wanted to see how different Upward, one of the lesser-known apps in Match Group’s sprawling portfolio of dating platforms, was from Hinge and Tinder. She hadn’t had much luck with either of them. Many of the profiles she encountered on Upward, she tells WIRED, were “MAGA types of men” who “fit more of that red-pill, trad wife, conservative values” category of dater.
A 25-year-old opera singer in Bloomington, Indiana, for whom marriage has always been “the end goal,” Pulliam is the kind of person Upward is trying to appeal to since relaunching last month.
The relaunch was redesigned around two key data points from Match Group’s 2026 Singles in America study: 72 percent of Gen Zs want to get married, and a quarter of singles aged 18 to 34 “identify with a combination of traditional values around family, faith, and community,” a news release about the survey noted.
The pivot away from an app exclusively for Christian daters was about opening up its doors for people “who share those same goals, but may not lead with a faith-first mindset,” says Lauren DeFord, director of brand marketing at Match, of the app’s new focus on Gen Z singles.
Upward’s expansion is representative of the ongoing change in the dating market. Dwindling engagement and the introduction of AI have pushed companies to reassess user growth. For some, that means abandoning their original mission.
Upward, which runs on a tiered subscription, works similarly to Tinder. You can swipe left or right on profiles, and users are encouraged to include a Faith Statement on their page, explaining what they value most about their relationship to God. Among its new features are Chivalry Mode, which, if you’re familiar with how Bumble used to operate, persuades men to message first, and Marriage Timeline, which lets daters share when they hope to get married with potential suitors.
