Plenty of Fish's Trend Glossary: Marketing Gimmick or Missed Insight?

Match Group's Plenty of Fish has published its 2025 dating trends glossary, coining eleven new terms based on a survey of 5,800 US members. The list includes 'Smutten' (romanticising relationships with fictional characters), 'Freak Matching' (seeking partners with similarly unconventional interests), and 'Yap Trapping' (being unable to stop talking on dates). It's the latest entry in what has become an annual ritual across the dating industry: platforms releasing trend reports that purport to decode how singles are behaving, whilst simultaneously generating headlines and email capture opportunities.

The question worth asking isn't whether these behaviours exist—some undoubtedly do—but whether packaging them into branded neologisms serves any purpose beyond the marketing department's content calendar.

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When marketing masquerades as research

Dating platforms have wholesale adopted the trend report format over the past five years, borrowing a playbook from fashion houses and technology conferences. Bumble releases annual trend reports. Hinge publishes dating behaviour analyses. Tinder produces yearly recaps.

Each platform positions itself as the authoritative decoder of modern romance, complete with survey data and quotable statistics. The commercial logic is sound. These reports generate coverage in lifestyle publications that would never write about dating app product updates.

They create owned terminology that executives can reference in earnings calls to demonstrate cultural relevance. They provide content marketing assets that drive email signups and app downloads. What they rarely do is inform product development or meaningfully improve the member experience.

If two in five women on your platform are developing relationship expectations shaped by algorithmically-served fictional narratives, that has implications for how they evaluate real humans in their inbox.

POF's data shows that 40 per cent of women surveyed admit to 'Smutten' behaviour—developing romantic feelings for fictional characters. That's potentially significant. Romance content on TikTok and BookTok has exploded, with the hashtag #BookTok accumulating over 40 billion views, heavily weighted towards romantasy and contemporary romance.

But POF doesn't explore those implications. The trend report doesn't ask whether members influenced by highly curated fictional relationships are experiencing higher rejection rates, longer time-to-match, or decreased satisfaction with eventual partnerships. It doesn't examine whether this cohort exhibits different monetisation patterns or requires different product features.

Sample size and selection bias

The methodological limitations matter here. POF surveyed 5,800 US members—a dataset that sounds substantial until you consider the platform serves millions globally and skews towards a specific demographic profile within Match Group's portfolio. These aren't representative findings about dating behaviour writ large.

They're insights into how a subset of POF's US userbase self-reports on a platform that has deliberately positioned itself as a free alternative to Match's premium properties. Asking current dating app members to describe dating app behaviours introduces obvious selection bias. The respondents are, by definition, people who haven't successfully exited the platform.

The survey also relies on self-reporting about behaviours like 'Yap Trapping' (talking excessively on dates) and 'Fiscal Attraction' (being drawn to financial stability)—descriptions where social desirability bias runs high. The gender splits POF disclosed hint at more interesting analysis than the trend labels suggest.

Women reported 'Smutten' behaviour at 40 per cent whilst men came in at 32 per cent. That eight-point gap is worth examining, particularly given the documented gender divide in romance content consumption. But the report doesn't connect this to member retention data, messaging patterns, or match success rates—the metrics that would actually inform product strategy.

What the terminology reveals about priorities

The terms themselves betray what dating platforms want to emphasise versus what members need. 'Freak Matching'—POF's label for seeking partners with unconventional shared interests—repackages a concept that niche dating sites have monetised for years. Platforms built around specific interests, from FarmersOnly to Datefit, exist precisely because mainstream apps have struggled to effectively match on genuine compatibility rather than proximity and photos.

What members get instead is a catchy term and no actionable product improvement.

Instead of acknowledging that product limitation, POF brands it as a trend. The company told press that these behaviours 'can actually be quite important' and 'prove that the dating pool is more diverse than it appears on the surface'. That's attribution-free marketing copy presented as insight.

'Fiscal Attraction' similarly reframes a longstanding reality—that financial stability factors into partner selection—as though it's emerged fresh in 2025. Survey data consistently shows economic compatibility matters to singles. What would be useful is analysis of how economic uncertainty, inflation, and cost-of-living pressures are changing those preferences, and whether platforms should surface financial compatibility markers more explicitly.

The competitive context here matters. Match Group has spent the past eighteen months attempting to demonstrate that its portfolio strategy—operating multiple dating brands targeting different demographics—creates defensible value. That requires showing that platforms like POF, Hinge, and Tinder serve genuinely distinct audiences with different needs.

Annual trend reports that position each brand as culturally fluent in its segment's unique behaviours support that narrative, whether or not the differentiation is meaningful.

What actually deserves attention

Strip away the branded terminology and a few genuine signals emerge. The reported prevalence of 'Smutten' behaviour and other TikTok-influenced dating patterns—if methodologically sound—suggests that algorithmically-curated romantic content is creating expectation gaps that dating platforms will need to address. Members conditioned by BookTok's emotionally heightened narratives may struggle with the mundane reality of app-based dating.

That's a user experience problem, not a trend to namecheck. The underlying behaviours POF identifies—talking excessively from nervousness, seeking unconventional compatibility, prioritising financial stability—point to persistent product gaps around communication coaching, interest-based matching, and compatibility signalling. Dating platforms have known about these needs for years.

They've largely chosen not to invest in solving them, focusing instead on engagement-maximising features like Stories and video profiles. Regulatory and trust & safety teams will find nothing actionable in these trend reports. Investors tracking MTCH might note that the company continues prioritising marketing theatre over product innovation, which aligns with the broader strategic drift visible in recent earnings.

For operators at competing platforms, the lesson is simple: if your primary contribution to dating discourse is inventing vocabulary, you're probably not solving actual problems. The 2025 trend reports will generate their headlines, populate a few content marketing workflows, and fade until next year's iteration. Whether any of them improve a single match remains the question nobody's bothering to answer.