Of all things about dating that people got wrong in 2024, one remains the standout: that old people don’t have a lot of sex.

In fact, on several dating platforms, boomers (individuals aged 59 to 72) were the fastest growing userbase. Aging singles were having the most orgasmic sex of their lives, according to data from Match.com, where 50-plus daters are joining at a higher rate than every other demographic. Since 2022, the kink-positive app Feeld has experienced a 340 percent surge in users who are 60-plus. “Feeld has definitely introduced me to new desires and made me 100 percent more aware of my body and what I enjoy,” Wendy, 72, said when we spoke in April. “It’s been liberating.”

Many other apps also reported a record 2024. Tinder, setting a new benchmark, reached 50 million users. Hinge’s global downloads topped an all-time high, ranking it as the second most downloaded dating app in the markets it serves, the company reported in a November shareholder letter. Sniffies, the platform for queer cruisers that uses map technology, saw a 26 percent increase in straight singles. A total of 130 billion chats—yes, billion—were sent between gay men on Grindr. On Bumble, where women make the first move, paid users increased by 10 percent, topping 3 million.

So why, in spite of that growth, was 2024’s unifying hypothesis that dating apps failed?

Modern dating is broken. If you caught any whiff of the cultural metanarrative around love and sex this year, that’s probably the story you heard. Many traditional relationship structures loosened as a result—polyamory was on everyone’s mind, for one—and many people turned to TikTok for dating advice from armchair therapists. A study released by Flirtini found that one in four people rely on TikTok to figure out how to navigate their relationship, despite a clear rise in misinformation.

Singles were also caught in an “assumptions epidemic,” according to Tinder’s annual trends survey, where many users said they regularly misinterpreted green flags for red ones. The study found that “65 percent of women thought men were mostly after casual flings, but only 29 percent of men actually said that was what they wanted.” In more ways than one, it was a year of mixed signals.

To fix that, several startups launched niche dating apps—some puzzling, others entirely predictable—designed to satisfy unique needs, with many of them built around the promise of AI. Volar, created by a former product director at Snap, uses a chatbot to message back and forth with potential daters on your behalf. There’s also Rizz, Iris, and Elate, all of which leverage AI to find your soulmate by helping users maneuver first impressions and awkward conversations. For singles interested in other, let’s say, avant-garde forms of companionship, ones that completely remove humans from the equation, there are apps like EVA AI and Luna, who act as your AI girlfriend.

It’s still too soon to say how effective any of these AI-powered apps are in lessening the possibility of people being ghosted, but a recent report from Hopelab found that 40 percent of young people rely on chatbots to have ongoing conversations. Dating’s future, the report concluded, promises to be chattier, and stranger, than ever.

Still, the exhaustion of swiping right remains a major concern among singles of every demographic. In the dating wilds, app fatigue is contagious. No one knows that better than JB, the power dater from New York I spoke with in September. At the time, he’d been on 200 dates following a breakup—the majority sourced from Hinge and Raya—and expressed a feeling of burnout, even as he couldn’t fully pull himself away from its addictive thrill.

I heard from JB in December. He reached out to let me know that he’d somehow forgotten to share the “most unhinged” dating story from our initial series of conversations. “I can’t believe I only thought of it recently,” he wrote via text message. “A girl on our third date saying, ‘If you fuck me really good tonight I’ll cancel my other dates this week.’”

Did she? I shot back.

“I was pissed. I almost ended the date,” he said. “She was winning until she hit me with that toxic shit.”

JB told me he is still exhausted by the apps but hasn’t stopped using them. The week we talk, he is fresh off another breakup. A recent courtship in Philadelphia, he said, fizzled after the woman lied about talking to other people. She made the first move on Raya and they later established more of a bond trading DMs on Instagram. She had pursued him, which was rare and a refreshing change of pace. “I was smitten,” he says. Which made it all the more difficult when the relationship ended. “She sought me out, only to lie about it?”

JB is currently on the rebound, or what he describes to me as a period of “side quests”—pet-sitting his neighbor’s cat, surfing TikTok, trying new restaurants. “I was down bad but we back up,” he told me. He wonders if dating apps will ever have a solution for singles like him. “It’s truly rotten out here.”