Single 20-somethings lack the confidence of older generations and need artificial intelligence to start conversations on dating apps, the boss of Hinge has told the BBC.
Jackie Jantos, Hinge’s chief executive, said Gen Z daters “absolutely want love” but were “struggling to have the confidence to put themselves out there” as they socialise less in person. She defended Hinge’s AI feature, which creates prompts to start chatting with a match, as “not about writing words for you” but “helping you express who you are”.
“Hinge boss says Gen Z lacks confidence to start conversations on dating apps, defends AI feature as helping them express who they are.”
The comments come as data shows Gen Z spending around 1,000 fewer hours a year in person with other people than the same age group two decades ago, according to Jantos. She said this equates to more than two hours per day “spent not in the company of another human, but most likely going deep in some sort of experience engaged in your phone”.
“This prevents people from having the experience of being around others and that is quite a lonely experience,” she added. Almost half of Gen Z people in the UK now feel lonely “often or always”, Jantos said.
She pointed to the Covid pandemic as a factor, saying many young adults missed out on formative years of social interaction. “Those years when you’re sort of experimenting with how you show up in person with another person, how you flirt, how you think about intimacy, that was interrupted for many people,” she told the BBC’s Big Boss Interview podcast.
Dr Carolina Bandinelli, an associate professor at the University of Warwick who researches dating, relationships and communication, agreed that the pandemic changed dating for Gen Z. “There was the sense that dating apps are [now] the only way to meet people,” she said.
Despite warnings of “dating app burnout” from some relationship experts and a return to more organic in-person meetings, Hinge has continued to grow its UK users. Some 1.5 million adults used Hinge in the year up to May 2025, up from 1.4 million a year earlier, according to Ipsos iris data. Over the same period, Tinder’s audience fell from 1.9 million to 1.5 million.
Hinge, founded in 2012 and owned by Match Group (which also owns Tinder and Match.com), has built its brand around the slogan “designed to be deleted”. Jantos dismissed accusations that this is “just a marketing line”, saying it wants to help users find long-term relationships rather than stay on the platform indefinitely.
But with Gen Z spending fewer hours socialising in person and turning to AI to break the ice, the question remains whether technology is solving a confidence crisis or deepening it.