‘Nostalgia for a Dating Experience They’ve Never Had’ (2024)

Say you’re in a bar. You see someone across the room who looks appealing. But do they think the same of you? You don’t want to stare for too long, so you turn back to your drink. No worries—the electronic tentacles attached to your shoulders give a wiggle, indicating that the hottie, mercifully, has glanced your way.

That’s the premise of a device called “Ripple,” named, I guess, for the undulating sensation triggered by a stranger’s horny gaze. Equipped with two cameras, it connects computer-vision technology with sensors to detect when someone is looking at you. (Unfortunately, it can’t really distinguish between the eyes of an admirer and someone noticing you because you’re wearing tentacles out to the bar.) Ripple’s creators pitched it as a way to help people meet in person—the old-fashioned way, with, um, one minor difference.

It was developed in 2017—five years after Tinder and Hinge launched, when people were getting nervous about the effects of dating apps. They’d created a society-wide experiment: “What if we stopped dating people we meet in our regular lives and started building some other system, where major corporations use algorithms to figure out how we meet?” Eli Finkel, who studies romantic relationships at Northwestern University, told me. What would it mean for technology to mediate romantic connection? Would it make us all irreparably incapable of courting on our own?

Read: The rise of dating-app fatigue

Ripple never got big, but it was only the most memeworthy in a long line of similar offerings made for people both sick of and dependent on dating apps. There’s the “pear ring,” designed to be worn by mingling singles to signal their eligibility. Or speed-dating events, an old concept that’s become newly popular. Some dating apps are, paradoxically, designed to combat your dating-app fatigue. Take Thursday, which unlocks swiping for one day a week—and then holds a real-life soiree for people to meet. Or Strike, which notifies you when someone you’ve matched with is nearby. Or Happn, which shows you users you’ve physically crossed paths with, and promises to “use technology to improve real life, not to replace it.”

If “real life” means finding love face-to-face, rather than through a screen, you can’t blame people for wanting to return to it—especially considering how many shows and movies involve soulmates connecting via fluke run-ins, reaching for the same pair of gloves or physically running into each other on the sidewalk. More than a decade after the dawn of dating apps, we’re seeing the emergence of a strain of meet-cute nostalgia. Perhaps more than ever, singles today idealize romance that doesn’t involve the internet—the kind that’s physical and visceral, and that finds you.

But people aren’t so used to waiting around for love to find them anymore, and they seem less willing to risk rejection by putting themselves out there in person. And anyway, the utopia of serendipitous encounters only exists in our imagination. Meet-cutes won’t fix modern dating.

For much of human history, single people couldn’t usually just decide to go on a date. Before the Industrial Revolution, your family or another trusted community member would likely set you up with the person you’d marry. Later, people commonly met through their social circles or at places of worship, school, or eventually work; you could try to be flirty and open to connection, or put yourself in situations to meet new people, but you could only control so much. You were under the heel of fate.

Dating apps radically upended that powerlessness. They created a practical kind of agency—the ability to “go out and make it happen,” Paul Eastwick, a UC Davis psychologist, told me. They also created another issue entirely: the burnout that comes from sorting through a deluge of options, many of them far from ideal. Still, that’s arguably preferable to having no options at all—which could happen pretty quickly if you’d exhausted your pool of friends-of-friends (and you weren’t going around spilling orange juice on charming strangers). “Yes, it’s a bummer, even today, to not have found somebody after working at it,” Finkel said. “But it’s certainly nice to know that those 100 dates were available, even though they weren’t great.” And online dating has led to a ton of successful relationships. In fact, it’s the most common way that American couples now meet. The people complaining about apps, Finkel said, “don’t know what it was like to be single in 1980.”

That’s just it—many of them literally don’t. Plenty of young people dating today have never done so offline. They’re used to having the agency that was so novel when apps first emerged. Now some of them, tired of the responsibility that comes with being in the driver’s seat, want to let go of the wheel. What they covet is just the opposite of pragmatic efficiency: serendipity.

Read: America is sick of swiping

Media outlets have proclaimed for a while now that young people are turning away from online dating—but it’s unclear to what degree that’s actually happening. One commonly cited study found that 79 percent of college students don’t use dating apps regularly. That makes sense, though: College students are meeting people on campus. Whether or not the apps are dying, they’re not dead yet—and definitely not for young people. In 2023, 60 percent of Tinder’s 75 million monthly active users were younger than 35.

But that doesn’t mean they’re enjoying it. In one 2022 survey, nearly 80 percent of 18-to-54-year-old respondents reported feeling emotional burnout or fatigue when online dating. Liesel Sharabi, a communications professor at Arizona State University, has found that meeting on an app still carries some stigma, despite how common it is. “I think people like the idea of having that love story to tell,” she told me. Perhaps young daters especially. They seem to be romantics: A 2024 Hinge report found that Gen Z participants were 30 percent more likely than Millenials to believe each person has one soulmate and 39 percent more likely to consider themselves romantically idealistic. For them, Sharabi told me, the old meet-cute ideal is particularly intriguing: “It’s almost like nostalgia for a dating experience that they’ve never had.”

It might also be harder for them to get that experience if they want it. Young Americans are hanging out less on average, so they have fewer opportunities to chat someone up in a social setting. And less practice might mean doing so feels more intimidating. Sharabi recalled one Gen Z research participant saying they probably would never approach someone intriguing at a party; instead, they told her, “I might see if they’re online.” Of course, if you slide into someone’s DMs or find them on an app, you could still get snubbed. But a nonresponse is harder to interpret than a verbal “no thank you” in a way that can be comforting: Perhaps the other person didn’t see the message, or they got too busy to respond. Even a clear no stings less through the distance afforded by a screen. The Hinge survey found that Gen Z daters fear rejection “most acutely”: More than half of them said that concern has kept them from pursuing a possible relationship, and they’re 10 percent more likely than Millennial respondents to say they’ve missed out on a romantic opportunity because of it.

That helps explain the meet-cute-nostalgia industry offering to make in-person encounters easier. Yet most of those efforts, frankly, are flops—ineffective, impractical, even bizarre ways to force romance to unfold in a manner that isn’t natural to modern courtship. Happn, designed for finding “your crush in the places you love,” presented me with a bevy of people who lived around me—which is pretty much what every other dating app does. It kept proclaiming that a user “lives in New York City too,” as if that was a profound, romantic coincidence. The app Strike hypothetically lets you buy a “wearable” (a little rectangular device that fits in your pocket) to notify you when a match is nearby—in real time, so you can actually approach them—but I couldn’t set up an account, nor could I reach anyone at the company to help me. The major online-dating companies are trying to join the trend too; Hinge is offering tens of thousands of dollars in grants to any organization that can help “Gen Z find belonging and community in person,” and Bumble is hosting “IRL” dating events. But when I searched for one in New York—the Big Apple!—I was told, “No results match your search.” I would have tried speed-dating, but I couldn’t swallow paying $30 just to sit through two hours of awkward conversations. (I would, however, be willing to bet $30 that I’ll never see anyone wearing a pear ring.)

On TikTok, real-life-chat gurus promise lessons like teaching “the most natural, non-awkward way to approach that cute stranger.” (The channel “How to Talk to Strangers” had 61.6 million views at the time of my writing this.) Common advice is to ask for directions, make eye contact, give a compliment, or pose a specific question—like what someone’s favorite nearby coffee shop is. But it seemed to me that this might have a higher success rate for a notably hot person than for most everyone else. “It literally doesn’t matter what you look like” as long as you’re confident, one TikToker proclaimed before adding, “I mean, obviously you have to look, like, somewhat pretty.” Eastwick also pointed out that this brand of how-to romantic instruction is “tailored to pick up certain kinds of people attending certain kinds of establishments at a particular period of time.” It might have worked for someone else, but that doesn’t mean it’ll work for you.

People aren’t wrong to crave in-person connection. The shortcomings of dating apps have been, at this point, well covered: They can encourage shallowness, for one thing. They’re rife with harassment, for another. And they often set you up with people whom you share no context with beyond geographical proximity. Sharabi has found that on average, relationships that start on dating apps are slightly less stable than those that begin in person, and partners are slightly less satisfied. Her explanation: “You’re meeting people who you have no prior connection with. That can have long-term effects when you try to integrate them into your network.” That is to say, you’re dating strangers.

The solution to those problems is probably not finding strangers to date in person rather than online. Doing so would still mean going for someone who remains mostly mysterious except for their appearance, and you still might not share anything beyond proximity. Besides, random meet-cutes were never the “natural” way to find a partner, or even the most common way. Before apps, most couples met through friends or family. When Eastwick hears that people feel guilty for not wanting to chat someone up in public, he tells them: “That’s okay. That’s a skill that you can learn if you want, but it’s really not central to the way that we meet each other.” On the phone with me, he laughed about the idea of, say, striking up conversation with a lone bombshell at the end of the bar. “Is this bar in an airport? Like, where is this happening? This is very odd to me.”

Read: The golden age of dating doesn’t exist

Now the airport-bar kind of encounter is probably even less likely to happen than in the past—not just because dating apps have made people unaccustomed to taking romantic risks, but also because they’ve (fortunately) let us prioritize consent, at least in the realm of early propositions. Society has largely become more attuned to the discomfort that unwanted advances can cause, Finkel told me. The notion of a loose, spontaneous culture of in-person flirting sounds nice—except that it would entail some interactions you never wanted.

Of course, it is possible to approach a stranger of interest respectfully. Several dating coaches told me they work with clients who are hungry for real-life romance to teach them how to do so. Jayda Shuavarnnasri, a sex and relationship educator, suggests that people always give the other person an out—for instance: “If you want to sit in silence to eat your meal, please let me know.” It’s tricky, though, because some people will have a harder time landing all of this smoothly, not necessarily because they’re pushier but because they struggle more with social cues. “Is it okay with us if a guy who’s kind of on the autism spectrum” gets called out for hitting on someone, Finkel asked me, “but people who are Brad Pitt don’t get sanctioned for the same behavior?”

None of this means that you should never talk to strangers. It just means that doing so is a delicate way to find love, and it’s certainly not the only way that can lead to something genuine. We shouldn’t put it on a pedestal—especially if we’re not ready to accept what it would really mean for society to embrace it. If you do want to seek connection with the people you see out and about, Shuavarnnasri advised taking some pressure off by not expecting the interaction to be necessarily romantic. Maybe you’ll have a pleasant conversation and then never see each other again. But you’ll still have opened yourself up to a bit of playful uncertainty—the kind that comes when you have no agenda and no idea how things might play out.

Meet-cute nostalgia raises the question of how much ambiguity we can tolerate—whether a serendipitous spark with a stranger is worth the potential for awkwardness and misinterpretation, or whether boundaries and clarity are worth some lost opportunities for connection. “Do we want a society where there’s an excess number of people being hit on and having to say no … or do we want a society where there’s an excess amount of people not initiating relationships that would have been desirable?” Finkel asked. We can’t have it both ways—not perfectly.

Either way, mystery and doubt will always be part of romance. You could follow a TikToker’s advice to a T, march proudly into a café, and ask the person next to you about their oatmeal—just to get a short response and a turn away. You could also get ghosted by someone whose app profile says they’re looking for a life partner. In love, however you meet, you’re always risking something—and even a set of fancy flirting tentacles can’t change that.