Match Group's Upward Relaunches With 'Chivalry Mode' and 'Marriage Timeline' in Bid to Get Gen Z to the Altar

Match Group is betting that Gen Z wants to get married, and it has rebuilt one of its lesser-known dating apps around that wager. Upward, originally launched in 2020 as a platform for Christian daters, relaunched last month with a broader focus on young singles who prioritize traditional values, whether or not they lead with faith.

The redesign was driven by two findings from Match Group's 2026 Singles in America study: 72 percent of Gen Z respondents said they 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," according to a news release about the survey.

Lauren DeFord, director of brand marketing at Match, said the pivot away from an app exclusively for Christian daters was about welcoming people "who share those same goals, but may not lead with a faith-first mindset." She maintains Christian singles remain at the core of Upward's mission, even while describing the relaunch as a "brand shift."

Upward operates on a tiered subscription and works much like Tinder, with left and right swipes, though users are encouraged to add a Faith Statement describing what they value most about their relationship to God. New features include Chivalry Mode, which nudges men to message first in a manner reminiscent of Bumble's old format, and Marriage Timeline, which lets daters tell potential matches when they hope to wed.

The relaunch was framed around the idea of Upward as the "home of modern courtship," but the promotional rollout leaned heavily on retro imagery. One video featured a newly married man named Zach in a cowboy hat and jeans, gifting flowers, carrying his partner through a meadow and opening her car door, under a bold overlay reading "chivalrymaxxing." The company said the branding draws on an "Americana" theme, with its "Wanted: For Life" campaign using Western-style imagery.

Not everyone buys the premise. Daniel Cox, director of the Survey Center on American Life and author of Generation Uncoupled, argues Gen Z is entering adulthood with a less clear sense of its "relational priorities," and that a decline in social and civic life has produced a "hyperindividualistic culture" that doesn't always prioritize marriage. An American Institute for Boys and Men survey found 44 percent of Gen Z men had no relationship experience at all during their teen years, double the rate of older men. Cox sees the trad trend as "a reaction to the lack of cultural norms around courtship" daters are desperate for "a script," he says, though he doesn't think the trad version "is close to ideal for a lot of young people."

Survey data complicates the picture further. A 2023 Pew Research study found only 23 percent of adults considered being married "extremely" or "very important" to a fulfilling life, versus 61 percent who said that about close friendships, and the share of high school seniors who expected to marry someday fell from 80 percent in 1993 to 67 percent in 2023. "There's increasingly a belief among young women that marriage makes them less happy," Cox says. He also cautions that Match's marriage statistic may be skewed by age, older generations may simply have already married or divorced. Match says its survey of 5,000 unmarried US singles is "demographically representative" of the Census.

Early user experiences have been mixed. Adreanna Pulliam, a 25-year-old opera singer in Bloomington, Indiana, for whom marriage has always been "the end goal," encountered what she described as "MAGA types of men" in the "red-pill, trad wife, conservative values" mold, alongside oddities like a profile photo taken at a funeral. She was baffled that the app lets users list body types like "chubby," allows married people to join, and offers relationship options such as "it's complicated." Tauti, a social work student in California, quit within 48 hours, saying on TikTok the experience "turned me off from Christian dating altogether," while teacher and single mom Heidi Marais questioned why agnostics are allowed on the platform at all.

Upward, which declined to share active user numbers, has faced complaints since its debut about functionality, filtering, user support and automatic bans, with one App Store reviewer calling it "janky as hell." Pulliam, who attended a Christian college, thinks the app could find an audience "within communities of Christian private universities" but, she adds, "the only way that the app works is for maybe someone who has a little bit more of a closed mind."