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[title]On a Thursday night in London, 600 keen partygoers have gathered at the Steel Yard, a massive venue under the railway arches near Monument. Even though it’s a weeknight, the event is a sell-out. In the toilets, squads of girls gather to gossip, readjust their crop tops and fix their makeup. The night is sponsored by Magnum condoms, and boxes full of their eponymous product line the walls. It’s not long before they’re all gone. Single men skulk in corners, eyeing up women as they arrive. Couples gaze gooily into each other's eyes, before aggressively making out on the dance floor. The streetwear sporting DJ spins ravey remixes of pop songs, while a posse of posing groupies enthusiastically jumps around behind him.
Here’s the thing, everyone at this event is un-cuffed. And it's not a coincidence: this is the singles event of the century, put on by the dating app Thursday, where every person you might fancy is conveniently, totally available. Gone are the days of awkward blind dinner dates, or stale speed dating events with cringey prompt questions, this is a singles event with a 2022 twist. While dating apps have become the norm for meeting people nowadays, 600 horny, drunk and unattached people have foregone the low risk swipe swipe swiping for the chance to dance, talk and drink with strangers, all with the hope of bagging a number or two.
But are nights like these here to stay? Is shunning apps in favour of face to face events the future of dating in London?
Dating apps enter their flop era
If you’re single in London and looking for love, or at least a good shag, the likelihood is you have a profile on at least one app. But dating in the city is hard. Harder than ever, in fact. Apps have us in their thrall, and escaping the icy grip of algorithm love seems impossible.
Despite the fact that 74 percent of Gen Z and Millennials use dating apps, it’s safe to say we’re tired AF of them. According to research by platform Tylt, 84 percent of millennials would rather find love ‘in real life’ than online. We asked every person we interviewed for the article to sum up the London dating scene in one word and these were some of the responses: tough, brutal, unpredictable, messy, minefield, even cess pit.
‘I’m actually over dating apps,’ says 20-year-old student Madeline Katta-Worae. ‘The UK dating scene is dead.’
‘Being on a dating app made me a really superficial person, in a big way,’ she recalls. ‘I didn’t think I’d be shallow.’ Katta-Worae is one of the young people who’s done away with Hinge, Tinder and Bumble. But unlike the keen Thursday attendees, she’s ditching dating altogether and is enjoying the freedom of an unshackled life, not dating, and definitely not swiping. ‘I’m finding it great,’ she says. ‘I'm just going with the flow. I'm just here.’
And she’s not the only Gen Zer who’s embracing the single life. ‘I'm worried about who's going to get married in our generation, everyone's a bit unserious,’ she jokes. She’s noticed that her age group has some serious apathy when it comes to cuffing. ‘The majority of my friends are single. It’s either casual dating, or casual sex, or just being single,’ she says.
Alan O'Donoghue, 29, recently moved to London from Ireland. He goes to face-to-face dating events to meet new people in a new city, and is happy to just make friends if the chemistry isn’t there. ‘It doesn't have to be romantic,’ he says. ‘I came here with three other guys. I'm not sure if I'd had the confidence come here on my own, to be honest.
‘I like the music. I think it's a great idea to bring 300 guys and 300 girls that are all single together. And rather than spending time chatting to someone, and them being like, ‘Oh, I've got a boyfriend’, you know everyone here is single.’
It's way more human to meet someone in person and be like, “I get your vibe"
The retro element is also fairly romantic to young folk who’ve grown up as part of a digital generation. ‘It’s the way our parents did it,’ O’Donohugh says. ‘I go through phases [with apps]. Sometimes I'm like, this is toxic, and then I delete them all.
‘It's way more human to meet someone in person and be like, “I get your vibe, I get your personality, I trust you in some way, do you want to go on a date?”’.
Gavin Jones, 27, is also somewhat of a dating event regular. ‘It feels natural and organic,’ he says. Jones finds online dates often stagnate and fail to get past the talking stage, whereas by meeting people at events, it’s easier for the relationship to progress.
‘Singles in big cosmopolitan cities only use dating apps because there are no other options,’ says Matt McNeill Love (yes, that is his real name), co-founder of Thursday. ‘But there's such an abundance of choice, you're almost paralyzed by the number of options out there. And it results in not an awful lot of action.’ This gets tiring, and it’s messing with our self-esteem. ‘It's really ruined the way people date and also view themselves.’
Apps are rotting our brains
Apps haven’t only made people flakier, lazier, and getting a date harder, they’re also demonstrably bad for us. By effectively encouraging us to ‘catalogue shop for humans’, as McNeil Love puts it, they’re damaging the way we see other people, and it's messing with our brains.
‘We all became reliant on this new way of doing things,’ says Vogue dating columnist, Annie Lord. ‘And now because everyone on the apps has gotten fatigued and it's really hard to find a date, even when people try to go back to how it was before, we don't know how to do that.’
The insidious nature of apps means that even when we meet people IRL, dating has become gamified. ‘Even when I meet guys in real life, it normally now plays out as if I met them on an app,’ says Lord.
No matter how ‘liberating’ dating apps can be, they also cause users a significant amount of ‘suffering’.
Carolina Bandinelli and Alessandro Gandini write about the ‘market of romance ’ that has been created by dating apps in their paper ‘Dating Apps: The Uncertainty of Marketised Love’. They explain that no matter how ‘liberating’ dating apps can be, they also create a significant amount of ‘suffering’ for their users. And it’s not just suffering through ghosting, dates who are rude to waiters and subpar sex, there’s also the psychological suffering of being forced to choose your own perfect partner, based only on a few highly curated pictures. ‘[The dating app user] is burdened with the responsibility of picking the best possible partner, and has only his or herself to blame if this endeavour fails,’ Bandinelli and Gandini write.
Apps are also ‘subduing the mystery of romantic alchemy to the scientific work of data’, so instead of going home with the cute person we met in a bar, we’re now having stale dates with people a scientific algorithm picked out for us, based on our own poor judgement.
Returning to retro
While some of us are still wistfully hoping for that meet-cute in a bookshop, others are more pragmatic. Shunning dating apps doesn’t mean having to forlornly sit at the bar alone hoping for a handsome man in a Carhartt jacket to come up to you, there are now an abundance of events specifically engineered for meeting people, like the Thursday rave, speed dating, and even singles supper clubs.
Data from Eventbrite shows that face-to-face dating events have grown by 400 percent on the event listings website over the past four years. And while the thought of having forced conversation with 30 strangers as others watch might make you want to crawl into a dark hole and shrivel up, there are people trying to liven up the scene. London has birthed a new variant of modern, inclusive and fun speed dating events. There’s Link ting, a popular queer speed dating event, and Speedy Dating. Bumble has jumped on the bandwagon and launched IRL dating events, and even Tinder has introduced a blind date feature so true romantics can forego swiping altogether and meet someone off the bat.
‘It's weird how people are much more forthcoming and wanting to go meet a stranger on a dating app, than going to a speed dating event, which is a more safe space,’ says Gemma Courtney-Davies, founder of Speedy Dating.
Courtney-Davies wants to rid speed dating of all its clichéd preconceptions about sad singletons sitting around drinking watered-down cocktails in a dinghy pub basement. Her events are like parties; she even invites non-single friends along to watch from the sidelines, and people all mingle together at the end. ‘I'm trying to promote the idea that it's not scary. One of my friends DJs. It's more relaxed,’ she says.
‘I think everyone has that perception of speed dating that it's in a big hall, and there's gonna be 20 women and three men and one of them has like, got a broken leg, and it's just awkward vibes. But by making it fun and young we’re changing how it’s perceived.’
She points out how bizarre it is that internet dates are so normal, compared to the stigma of dating events: ‘It's more acceptable to go to the pub with a stranger, and have a pint with someone alone, rather than going to an event.
Aside from speed dating, there’s also been a fun insurgence of old school match-making, but with a 2022 glow up. Festival Field Maneuvers recently manufactured a set-up between two punters who serendipitously found each other on the site, and comedian Grace Campbell often does open calls on her Instagram stories for people who want to be set up at her gigs, and we’ve brought back the Time Out lonely hearts ads. People are also going back to the good old fashioned set-ups. ‘Me and my friends are hatching plans,’ says Annie Lord. ‘We’re just having to think about it so f*cking strategically.’
‘You have to think about it in a much more determined and active way. Recently i’ve been saying to friends “Do you have anyone you can set me up with?”’ she says.
‘I'm definitely gonna try and put myself out there more,’ Lord adds. ‘I don't have a single guy friend who hasn't said to me, "I wish girls moved to men more and chatted them up." They've all said it's so hot.’
Not all hope is lost
Ditching the apps is about more than just getting dates from people you’ve met in real life, it’s also helping people understand how to have a well-rounded, happy, single life. For Abbey Robb, 43, taking her love life offline was just the ticket. ‘I've really worked to make sure that my physical and emotional needs are met,’ Robb says.
‘I have really good friends. I've invested a lot of time and energy into having deep, emotionally intimate connections with my friends. I go to cuddle workshops, I go to dance classes where there's physical contact,’ she says. ‘I don't end up feeling needy and lonely and angsty.’
After all, if you feel good about yourself, others will start to gravitate towards you, too. And when you’re not looking at the screen, there’s much more time to soak up ‘chemistry’ and ‘pheromones’, as Robb points out are the most important things.
'Dating apps are often a sea of the same faces, we’ve all seen the soft boi, graphic designer, tote bag stereotype flying around on Tinder. I think people just want to meet someone pretty normal, nice and not play games,' says Gemma Courtney-Davies.
'With face to face events you don’t have to commit a whole evening to one person, you can date multiple people, which is great because you can tell pretty quickly if there’s a spark, you don’t owe them anything, there’s no awkward let down.' And let's not forget the most important thing of all, dating is supposed to be fun. 'You can go with your friends and laugh about it afterwards!' Courtney-Davies adds.
So take this as our blessing to go forth, soak up the pheromones, shag the wrong people, as long as you meet them IRL. It’s time to delete the apps. You owe it to yourself.