"Hinge but in Real Life"

The good, the bad & the ugly of singles events in the city.

“Are you on the apps” has to be one of the ickiest questions going around and easily one of the worst to reply to in the affirmative. By “on the apps”, the questioner is referring to the online hellscape of digital dating, i.e. Hinge, Tinder, Raya, Bumble, and so on. Previously, my de facto response to this question has been a simple “yes, sadly” but as of late its been a confident, gloating, and exaggerated “no, not for while”.

While I’d love to say that this is because I’ve met the love of my life and am floating far above the menial world of dating apps on a cloud of love-bombed bliss, the reality is that I got completely and utterly fed-up with it. The whole shebang. The first dates, the weird text exchanges, the bubbles of hope and anticipation, and the sinking disappointment of not getting a text back from a guy you were never even interested in in the first place.

So in a true Power to the People move, I deleted Hinge and have now been clean for a proud two months.

In the absence of an online dating presence, I’ve been dipping my toes into the disconcerting world of meeting boys in the wild. How quaint! As a girl in her early 20s living in New York City, this has meant opening myself up to new experiences.

So last Wednesday there I was, marching my way through SoHo to Washington Square park for the first of said adventures. The experience in question was the viral Lunge run club, a self-proclaimed middle ground between dating apps and real life where you wear black if you’re single and colour if you’re spoken for.

I’m not going to lie, you have to be pretty brave to enter these things. Walking up to a mass of ‘singles’ is daunting and inspires the kind of panic that harkens back to the days of middle school dances. Going with a girlfriend made the whole ordeal far more bearable and gave us both the smug illusion that we were there ironically. A quick note for any aspiring Lunge run club attendees: it seems that the unspoken bring-a-friend rule is widely understood and generally enforced.

As the time to begin the run drew closer, the founders, Rachael Lansing and Steven Cole, corralled everyone with megaphones, introducing themselves and the run club before inviting us all to turn to someone we didn’t know, introduce ourselves, and share our favourite date spot in the city. We all cringed on cue, shifted nervously, made fleeting eye contact with the nearest stranger of the opposite gender, and finally worked up the courage to initiate conversation. With that, the first painfully-unnatural obstacle was overcome.

Perhaps unsurprising to note is that this somewhat clinical conversation had all the hallmarks of the first dating app text exchange: kind of awkward and unclear on how much information to divulge after the salutations are over. Should we discuss what pace group we’re planning on joining? How we know each other? Whether this is our first time at the run club? Or respond to the original prompt (being our favourite date spots in the city)?

Alas, it was time to get going and join the sweaty horde charging through West Village in all-black. An undoubtedly sexy look. In hindsight, it’s truly shocking that I didn’t meet my forever person.

It was only once the run had begun that we understood the true barriers we were up against in the pursuit of the plot. Generalising, it seemed that there was a huge range of different kinds of girls at the run club- runner girls, cool girls, awkward girls, shy girls, girls looking for boyfriends, and girls looking for fun. In stark contrast, and with all due respect, the boys present felt like the kind you would expect to be at an event marketed primarily to ‘singles’. The best way I can describe them is eager. Maybe earnest, too.

Thus, in a not-entirely-unpredictable turn of events, I left the run club with two new girlfriends who my friend and I had run with and talked to exclusively.

Reflecting on the experience, I couldn’t help but wonder if these events actually have any successes? Quantifying success in this context as enduring romantic relationships (not fleeting physical ones).

To me, the concept of Lunge as a ‘real life dating app’ is symptomatic of a collective fed-up-ness with dating apps, and indicative of an imminent new wave of third spaces between dating apps and facilitated romantic environments. In the city, there has been a huge uptick in supper clubs where you get matched up with other dinner guests, singles events at bars, speed dating run clubs, and so on and so forth.

Talking to girlfriends about this phenomenon only affirmed my reservations. One of my friends, for example, went to a single’s bingo night at her local bar and left the event two hours later having not spoken to a single person. In her words, this was because everyone either seemed to be part of a larger friend group, making it fairly terrifying to approach, or fell into the previously discussed category of men going to singles events on the sole and zealous quest of acquiring a female companion.

I was recently down a rabbit hole on Reddit (after reading The Atlantic’s ‘The People who Quit Dating'), where a user suggested that the best chance you have of meeting a romantic partner is by spending time doing the things you enjoy with groups of people you might not know, ie. going to [non dating-associated] run clubs, cooking classes, pottery workshops, etc. The user described this practice as a ‘natural values filter’ which especially resonated with me and spoke to some of the qualms I have with dating apps or dating environments, like Lunge run club, where the core commonality amongst attendees is an intention to date, which feels like a weird and wobbly leg to stand on and ensures that the first interaction feels unavoidably like an interview. 

So, if the apps are a no-go and the in-person events are equally off-putting, what is the solution? Meeting boys in the actual wild?

Send thoughts and prayers.