63% of women prefer a supportive partner to an alpha male, says an app built on female-led dating

63% of women surveyed by the dating app Chyrpe prefer a supportive, emotionally available partner to an alpha male, according to findings AOL reported on October 29, 2026. The research firm 3Gem questioned 2,000 US adults in October, and Chyrpe, the company that commissioned it, promotes female-led relationships.

What the survey counted

Chyrpe surveyed men and women, and the part that travelled furthest is the gap between the two groups. While 62% of women said they value a supportive partner, only 48% of men recognized how much that quality counts. Loyalty split 61% against 46%, good listening 52% against 41%, and kindness showed the widest distance, 58% of women against 40% of men.

The traits tied to the alpha image drew little. Just 3% of women said they look for a controlling partner, 9% wanted dominance and 16% put assertiveness first. A further 44% said they would not actively look for an alpha male at all.

Respondents kept fiction and real life apart. Among women, 45% agreed that alpha males are attractive only on the page or screen, and 54% said dating one offline often produces a lopsided relationship in which the man's needs come first.

Pressure runs the other way too. In AOL's account, 35% of respondents said male friends mocked them for skipping the alpha role, and 37% said social media pushed them toward it. Vice adds that nearly four in ten worried that opening up emotionally would not go over well with their partners.

Generations differ. 52% of Gen Z respondents called traditional relationship roles outdated, against 35% of Gen X. Among men, 20% said they would be happy in a female-led relationship in principle, and 13% said they would avoid discussing it with friends.

One answer that holds two wishes

The headline figure bundles two things. According to AOL, 63% of women preferred supportive, emotionally available partners who let them take the lead, over men who embodied traditional masculine values. A woman who wants a kind partner and an equal one, not one who steps back, has no obvious box to tick, and the reports do not print the question wording or say how many of the 2,000 respondents were women.

The seller is also the pollster's client. Vice notes that Chyrpe has a vested interest in the findings, given that it promotes female-led relationships, and that in February it published a press release telling self-described alpha males to stay off its app. Gigi Engle, the company's relationship expert, read the result this way: “traditional ideas about attraction are shifting.” She also said the data suggest many women look for partners who communicate openly, respect their needs and build a relationship on mutual fulfillment.

The tease writes itself: a company that sells a particular dynamic has found that its customers' preferred dynamic is popular. The numbers can still be read for what they say about kindness, and kindness is cheap to offer and, by these figures, underrated by the people who could offer it.

A second set of numbers from the UK

On October 28, 2026, AOL UK ran a version of the same Chyrpe research with higher figures: 70% of women preferring a supportive, emotionally available partner happy to let them take the lead, and 53% saying they would not actively seek an alpha male. In that version 66% of women valued a supportive partner, against 53% of men who recognised it, and kindness stood at 65% against 47%.

Only 6% of women sought dominance and 14% put assertiveness first, with control unchanged at 3%. Of the women, 55% agreed that alpha males are attractive only in fiction, and 64% thought dating one often leads to a one-sided relationship.

Verge Magazine, which ran the same figures, adds that 76% of women say they would rather keep control of their own lives than be told what to do, and that 41% of men do not believe their partner would respond positively if they showed emotional vulnerability. It also reports that 34% of UK adults think female-led relationships are underrepresented in film and television.

AOL UK states no sample size, no survey firm and no field dates. The two sets of numbers differ by seven points on the headline, and neither report explains why. Readers should treat them as two Chyrpe releases, not as one result confirmed twice.

Where the alpha came from

The word itself has a history that the survey does not touch. L. David Mech, a senior research scientist at the US Geological Survey, used alpha and beta in his 1970 book The Wolf: Ecology and Behavior of an Endangered Species. Scientific American reported on February 28, 2023 that he spent years pushing back against the term and finally got the book taken out of print in 2022.

The older studies behind it looked at captive wolves, typically unrelated adults thrown together. Mech told the magazine that the resulting hierarchy was the animal equivalent of what might happen in a human prison. Wild packs are usually a breeding pair and their offspring. “What would be the value of calling a human father the alpha male?” he asked. “He’s just the father of the family. And that’s exactly the way it is with wolves.”

His own study of a pack on Ellesmere Island in northeastern Canada, published in 1999 in the Canadian Journal of Zoology, was among the first multiyear studies of a single pack.

The picture has a footnote. David Ausband, a wolf researcher at the US Geological Survey and the University of Idaho, told Scientific American that in rare packs with more than one breeding pair, as can happen in Yellowstone National Park, “I personally think the alpha term applies because there is still a dominant female calling the shots in that pack.” Multiple breeders are now uncommon.

What a 1995 experiment found about kindness

The idea that women prefer niceness to dominance is older than Chyrpe. In March 1995 the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology published a study by Lauri Jensen-Campbell and Bill Graziano of Texas A&M University. The Philadelphia Inquirer, in a piece the Spokesman-Review carried in April 1995, described the design: 115 female volunteers rated two men who had been scripted and coached to look either dominant or passive.

On videotape, each man was offered a choice between a newly released comedy and a tedious old film about insect-control problems in the cotton industry. In one version he grabbed the comedy and left the dull film to a woman who had not yet arrived; in the other he took the cotton film and left her the treat. The men's faces were blurred, and make-up artists then either enhanced or dulled their appearance.

The authors wrote that altruistic men were rated more physically attractive, more sexually attractive, more socially desirable and more desirable as a date than non-altruistic ones. Dominance counted, but less than altruism and a pleasant personality. “Nice guys finish first,” Graziano said.

The evolutionary psychologist David Buss, whose 1994 book The Evolution of Desire had put dominance at the top, said of his own book: “I didn’t stress kindness as much as I should have.” Michael Cunningham of the University of Louisville offered a lighter reading: “women may be attracted to Arnold Schwarzenegger, but when Arnold doesn’t smile, they don’t like him as much.”

Vice cites the same line of work, three studies involving 348 people published in 1995, and a 2011 study of 124 people in which those with more agreeable partners were generally happier in their relationships. Agreeableness was the only personality trait that helped predict whether a couple would eventually break up.

Saying and choosing

The limits are plain.

The 1995 experiment used 115 volunteers rating scripted men on tape, and a survey records what people say. Theresa DiDonato, a psychologist writing in Psychology Today in 2014, noted that women say they want nice partners, but their choices can send a different message.

She cites a 2003 study by Urbaniak and Kilmann in which women picked a “Nice Todd” profile twice as often as a neutral one and more than eight times as often as a “Jerky Todd” profile, even when the insensitive men were more physically attractive. But Nice Todd was not significantly preferred for short-term relationships, and a 2006 study by Li and Kenrick found that women put physical attractiveness ahead of kindness when describing a short-term partner.

Her conclusion was measured: is nice enough? “Not quite.” Describing the experiment by Jensen-Campbell, Graziano and West, she writes that dominance alone had no effect on ratings, while nice men who also showed social dominance were rated higher still. In her words, dominance only makes a difference if a man has already shown that he is nice.

On that reading, confidence survives, but kindness comes first, which is a narrower claim than the app's headline.

What it means for readers in the United States and the United Kingdom

The US figures come from 2,000 adults polled in October, the UK figures from a release that names no sample, and both come from a company with a product to sell. What they can carry is narrow: a stated preference, in a commissioned survey, for kindness over control.

The gap between what women say they value and what men think women value is the part worth keeping. A kindness gap of 58% against 40% is a gap in noticing, and noticing costs nothing at a dinner table. A similar theme turned up in a recent Psychology Today column, where, as 108 women asked what they need from men spoke of listening, respect and trust and rarely of wealth or status, though the columnist herself says the respondents are not a scientific sample.

In February, Chyrpe told self-described alpha males to stay off its app.