Bring Back Meeting In Real Life

Dating wasn't always so complicated. We don't need new apps or start-ups to fix it — we just need friends of friends.

My parents met at a bar. She went with a group of her girl friends, who knew a guy that brought along his group of guy friends. My father, one of these extended friends, posted up at a Ms. Pac-Man machine by the ladies room knowing my mother would have to make her way in that direction eventually. At very least, I’m here now. People don’t often meet this way today. That bar doesn’t exist anymore and neither do many Ms. Pac-Mans.

But other bars, even dives with pin-ball machines, are still running just fine. Most people still have friends, and those friends have friends, meaning most of us should have people that qualify as friends of friends. And yet, the internet is overwhelmed with stories of women who can’t find a date. They’re complaining about it on Twitter. They’re crying about it on TikTok. I don’t blame them. They’re so burnt by the flaky dynamics and mistreatment they find on dating apps that they’ve given up on them entirely, but to do so is to functionally relegate oneself to barely dating at all.

Young people should not struggle to find someone — anyone! — to date. It truly is not rocket science. It shouldn’t require AI, or a new app, or government interference, or state-sponsored matchmakers, or any further technological advancements. Coupling up may not be easy, but it is simple. Two people meet, and they either like each other or they don’t. We don’t need to invent anything new to accomplish that. Rather, we just need to go back to what we did before.

We need to start meeting in person again. We need to start asking them out, face-to-face.

Like the push to get off our phones, revitalizing a culture of in-person courtship has several structural hurdles. Many of these hurdles are, in fact, the same as the ones keeping us on our phones. There are fewer places to be, fewer opportunities to make conversation with strangers, fewer people friendly to the prospect of being approached. None of these factors are any one individual’s fault or responsibility. That someone would be hesitant to try and find a date in the real world under these conditions is beyond understandable.

The thing is, it’s not even like we have to start walking up to people in book shops. While this meet-cute sort of thing seems like it was once ultra-common thanks to rom-coms and Sex and the City, it isn’t all that representative of how people met pre-apps.

This graph comes from a paper by Michael J. Rosenfeld, a sociologist at Stanford University. I’ve surely mentioned the paper before, and have maybe even included this exact graph in previous newsletters. I find it to be one of the most damning images of precisely how technologically mediated our romantic lives have become, and that’s even with the graph only going up to 2017. All the trends shown here have surely worsened in the last seven years. In the report, Rosenfeld further clarifies that that little uptick in meeting at a bar or a restaurant is actually only the result of couples who met on apps reporting their place of meeting as the location where they first met in real life. “If we exclude the couples who first met online from the bar/restaurant category, the bar/restaurant category was significantly declining after 1995 as a venue for heterosexual couples to meet,” he wrote.

Obviously, there are other social changes that are responsible for the decline in several of these meeting methods. We’re marrying older, so we’re less likely to meet our partners in high school. We’re not attending church as regularly, so ditto there. But what, exactly, is stopping us from meeting through friends or coworkers? What’s so scary about having bonds with family and neighbors that could lend to them introducing us to new people? Why aren’t we meeting up with friends of friends at bars or cafes or rock-climbing gyms?

“Meeting online could have grown without displacing the intermediation of friends (as previous literature and Hypothesis 2 would lead one to expect). Fig. 1 shows, however, that the growth of meeting online has strongly displaced meeting through friends,” the report continues. “The apparent displacement of meeting through friends by meeting online suggests a process of technology-driven disintermediation. Individuals used to need personal intermediaries, usually friends or family members, to introduce them to new people. Now that the Internet makes a large choice set of potential partners available, the intermediation of friends and family is relied upon less.”

This is the most straightforward answer — we no longer rely on personal intermediaries. The problem, though, is that as all the crying TikToks and tweets highlight, we aren’t content with this technology-driven disintermediation. We ought to still have those friends and family members around to re-intermediate, and yet we’re not using them. That itself may point to another straightforward answer, that maybe a lot of us don’t have friends and family members to help us anymore after all.

But something else is holding us back from meeting in natural, uncomplicated ways. This dating problem doesn’t merely extend to those without social ties. These complaints are coming from people with friends, family, careers. There are a lot of potential reasons, many of which are surely true in some cases and not in others. In no particular order, those reasons (which are also just theories) might be:

• We’re afraid. We no longer know how to communicate organically, and can’t imagine approaching someone in the event we even find them attractive at all.

• We have grown accustomed to digitally vetting people before we go out with them, and we either fear saying “yes” to a date without said vetting or perhaps are even unable to form an attraction to someone without a profile attached to their image detailing their career, political affiliation and broad list of hobbies.

• We have a form of choice paralysis wherein we’ve become so accustomed to swiping through what seems to be an unlimited pool of options that we no longer perceive the people in the real world around us as potential mates. We can only imagine someone as a future partner through digital mediation, in the context of this unlimited pool.

• There is a crisis of prospects. Women outnumber men in the college-educated workforce, and yet earn less. Meanwhile, labor force participation in men is declining. In 1970, 98 percent of high school educated men were in the labor force, while today that figure is 87 percent. There are more and more highly educated women seeking men in similar positions or better, and fewer of said men actually exist.

• Gender norms are at once rigid and nonexistent. Men are expected to be the pursuers, yet must be mindful of their masculinity. Women are encouraged to feel liberated from conventions of sexuality while still being shamed by them. Nobody knows precisely how they’re “supposed” to act.

• Men, in particular, are afraid of approaching women out of fear of being perceived as creepy. Some fear making women uncomfortable, others fear the social consequences (i.e. “cancellation”) of their alleged creepiness being made public on social media or by word of mouth through friend groups.

• Women, similarly, have internalized a narrative that men are creepy and dangerous, and that those who do approach them have ill-intent. Some of this is, of course, warranted, but the last several years of true crime content and MeToo have inflated these concerns.

• Alternatively, women see men who are brave enough to approach women in public as being overly confident, or otherwise only wanting to sleep with them. Because the behavior is uncommon, it’s become something of a red flag.

• We generally think the worst of each other. We’re distrustful and suspicious. We’re inundated with gender war vitriol that tells us that women are only interested in the rich and tall or that men are fundamentally incapable of empathy. We’re cynical about everyone’s intentions, and meeting online feels like the easiest way to keep them all at an emotional distance.

I’d like to just say we all need to get a bit over ourselves. We need to get over our social anxieties, our phone addictions, our desire to curate our lives technologically. We need to learn how to talk to one another again, how to take rejection and how to deliver it. You shouldn’t be scared of being considered weird for asking a friend of a friend if they’d like to go out for dinner sometime unless you make it weird. You also shouldn’t take it personally or think too long about it if they say no. None of us as individuals can improve the economy or prohibit dating apps or dictate our collective gender norms. But like choosing to de-center smartphones from our lives, we can also choose to have a different attitude toward dating.

I know it’s not that easy. It might sound like I’m saying the only thing we all need to do here is change our perspectives. Well, to an extent, I am. The conversation at present is driven only by reflections on how bad things have gotten, what sorts of start ups and apps and digital members-only clubs could be the cure. People are even talking about arranged marriages. But none of this needs to be so complicated or terrifying. We need to build our lives to look something more like what they would have before our phones got in the way. We need to see our friends and families and extended human networks as our intermediaries, instead. Get your friends and their friends over to a dive bar.

What if that doesn’t work? What if I’m totally wrong and naive and childishly optimistic? What if you still haven’t met anyone after you’ve rekindled friendships, started calling your mom more, taken up a new hobby, joined a new group? Well, then I’m sorry. But I think you’ll be better off than you were before.