To fix that, many startups are launching niche dating apps—some confusing, some completely predictable—designed to satisfy unique needs, many of which are built around the promise of AI. Flycreated by a former Snap product director, uses a chatbot to message back and forth with potential daters on your behalf. There is also Rizz, Irisand You are alivewhich all use AI to find your soulmate by helping users manipulate first impressions and awkward conversations. For singles interested in other, say, avant-garde forms of companionship, which completely remove people from the equation, there are apps like YOU ARE EVA and Lunawhich acts as your AI boyfriend.

It’s too soon to say how effective any of these AI-powered applications are at reducing the possibility of ghosting people, but a new one. report from Hopelab found that 40 percent of young people rely on chatbots to have ongoing conversations. The future of dating, the report concludes, promises to be chattier, and stranger, than ever before.

However, right-swiping fatigue remains a major concern among singles of every demographic. In the dating wild, app fatigue is contagious. No one knows that better than JB, the dating power from New York I spoke in September. At the time, she had gone on 200 post-breakup dates—most from Hinge and Raya—and expressed feelings of burnout, even though she couldn’t completely tear herself away from the addictive thrill of app dating.

I heard from JB in December. He reached out to let me know that he somehow forgot to share the “most useless” dating story from our first series of conversations. “I can’t believe I just thought about it,” he wrote via text message. “A girl on our third date who said, ‘If you marry me well tonight I’ll cancel my other dates this week.’”

Is he? I shot back.

“I’m angry. I almost finished the date,” he said. “He was winning until he hit me with toxic shit.”

JB told me he was tired of the apps but there were still too many. The week we talked, he was fresh out of another breakup. A recent courtship in Philadelphia, he said, failed after the woman lied about talking to other people. He made the first move to Raya and later they established more than a bond trading DM on Instagram. He chases after her, which is amazing and a refreshing change of pace. “I’m hurt,” he said. Which made it all the more difficult when the relationship ended. “He’s looking for me, just to lie about it?”

JB is currently on the rebound, or what he describes to me as a phase of “side quests”—sitting his neighbor’s cat, surfing TikTok, trying new restaurants. “I’m sad but we’re back,” he told me. He wonders if dating applications have a solution for singles like him. “It really looks great here.”