The Biggest Dating App Faux Pas for Gen Z? Being CringeNEWS | 12 May 2025When it comes to online dating, Giovanni Wolfram, a 25-year-old living in Santa Fe, New Mexico, isn’t all too worried about whether his fellow dating app users will find him attractive. Rather, his biggest fear is that he might come off as “cringey.”
“You can get away with being ugly,” Wolfram says. “But being cringey is just like—that's a character that's imprinted on you.” Since he first joined Hinge at 18, he has worked hard to scrub his profile of sincerity. He’s kept his responses to Hinge’s prompts sarcastic and ironic, sort of as a litmus test. Some people take his snark seriously, but those people don’t get a response from him.
“Intellectually, I’m really all about sincerity and earnestness,” says Wolfram, but he worries about “being perceived as one of those guys who is too earnest and too sincere.”
Sincerity, earnestness, irony-free declarations of contentment—these are all things many young adults edit out of their online personas. Much of what Gen Z considers “cringe” might strike others simply as directness and honesty, but one generation’s authenticity is another’s red flag. Young adults’ tendencies toward lightheartedness and jokes in their online self-presentation may point to the way many of them are dealing with feelings of vulnerability and disillusionment.
Jordan Meisel, a New York psychologist whose clientele includes college students and twentysomethings, has noticed the demographic’s reluctance toward sincerity. “I think there's just an awareness that it's far more vulnerable to create a persona that feels accurate to who you are as opposed to who you think you're supposed to be or who you'd like to be,” she says.
It’s easier to make a joke, Meisel says, because when you present yourself seriously, you run the risk of there being laughter anyway—at your expense. “Emotionally speaking, you can't hurt me if I never show myself to you,” she says.
Be Not Cringe
When Wolfram is messaging potential matches in the dating apps, it’s humor or nothing. “A lot of times I will just not be able to think of something funny enough. And the idea of being sincere is so repulsive that I just won't answer,” he says.
Wolfram says he rarely matches with people whose profiles are “too earnest”—for example, if they share that they enjoy “lazy days in bed with a joint.”
I ask Lila Goodwillie, a 25-year-old New Yorker, whether “cringeyness” would repel her from someone’s profile. “Unfortunately, yes,” she says. “I'm not proud of that, because I feel like when I meet people in person, I kind of like nerdy guys. I kind of like guys who are a little dorky and maybe a little bit cringe,” she says.
But on the apps, her taste is distorted. “People are getting more picky,” she says. “People are getting turned off by the cringe factor.”
To illustrate this, she points out some of the famously clichéd, tired tropes she sees in dating app profiles: the guy holding a fish he caught, the “military guy,” the guy who posts shirtless selfies from the gym. Over time, she has identified more archetypes she finds cringe: the guy who writes “ask me about the time I went motor biking across Vietnam,” the guy who uses the “two truths and a lie” prompt, the voice note guy, the guy whose profile includes videos of himself playing guitar. At this point, it’s difficult to escape the fate of being slotted into one of many cringey categories.Author: Steven Levy. Elana Klein. Boone Ashworth. Jason Parham. Lauren Goode. Martin Reeves. Reece Rogers. Manisha Krishnan. Brian Barrett. Source
