If you’re a participant in the modern dating market—or know anyone who is—you’re likely familiar with the complaints. Many of them revolve around dating apps, which have become an unavoidable part of contemporary courtship. Men usually complain, accurately, that matches are harder to come by for them than for women. Women, equally accurately, bemoan being inundated with overtures from aggressive men, and thus unable to find a kernel of good-guy wheat in a vast field of bad-guy chaff.
Back in 2014, a solution to this problem occurred to Whitney Wolfe Herd. So she created the app Bumble with a simple rule: Women message first. This contravened traditional dating norms, in which men make the first move, and was designed to mitigate harassment, give women more agency, and lower traditional sources of dating anxiety.
