When Adreanna Pulliam signed up for the Christian dating app Upward over the summer, she was prepared to come across men who identified as hyperconservative.

So when she swiped on a guy’s profile that listed “a progressive donkey or a ‘Trump is King’ elephant” as his relationship deal-breaker, she was shocked. “I hadn’t expected to see a moderate libertarian” on the app, she says.

It only got more bizarre from there. There was the guy advertising his Snapchat with the username “Yaboi Blaze reallysexgod.” Another dater, for reasons she still can’t fathom, included a photo of him at a funeral, standing in front of a poster-size image of the deceased.

While Pulliam was apprehensive about the prospects, she wanted to see how different Upward, one of the lesser-known apps in Match Group’s sprawling portfolio of dating platforms, was from Hinge and Tinder. She hadn’t had much luck with either of them. Many of the profiles she encountered on Upward, she tells WIRED, were “MAGA types of men” who “fit more of that red-pill, trad wife, conservative values” category of dater.

A 25-year-old opera singer in Bloomington, Indiana, for whom marriage has always been “the end goal,” Pulliam is the kind of person Upward is trying to appeal to since relaunching last month.

The relaunch was redesigned around two key data points from Match Group’s 2026 Singles in America study: 72 percent of Gen Zs 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,” a news release about the survey noted.

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