Okay, that’s really just one-fold, isn’t it. Our logic is two-fold: men like beer, which therefore means that a beer festival will contain above-average quantities of said men, some of whom might be single. ‘Men like beer’, says my friend Katie, which feels like as logical a reason as any to rock up to the London Craft Beer Festival in my best ‘jeans and a nice top’ look. But I am a woman on a mission, and I will not fall for the first soldier I meet. We actually end up going out on five dates over the next few weeks. We have a fun-but-weird date, as both of us attempt to pretend we’re not distracted by the human meat market that’s swirling all around us. If Thursday is pushing merch, it’s the ‘joy’ and ‘spontaneity’ of singleness. It feels like those shops that hire models as shop assistants, encouraging you to buy more products so that you might possibly attain their heady levels of attractiveness. The bar staff are distractingly good-looking. Earlier in the day I’d been messaging a guy I met on the app, so as well as surveying my savannah, I’m scouting the door for his arrival. There are lots of girls in groups and quite a few blokes standing on their own. Thursday’s USP is immediacy – matches expire at midnight so, just like in a club, if you don’t close the number swap by EOP, they disappear into a puff of pumpkin-coloured smoke.Īfter an unsuccessful search for Hot Saturday Night Guy, I decide to try a Thursday event for myself. Since the app launched last summer, it’s hosted parties across London for app-users to come and meet people IRL. Thursday, the new-ish dating app currently disrupting the ‘stay at home and swipe’ market, understands this longing for human connection. When locking eyes with someone in a bar was a universally understood code for ‘please come over’. When the next day was spent hazily wondering if they’d text. When we would go out and come home with phone numbers scrawled on napkins or forearms. I’m old enough (36, now you mention it) to remember a time when we were better at this. But talking to strangers is a muscle that most of us have not flexed in so long, it has atrophied beyond repair. We can’t lay the blame solely at Covid’s door – we were like this before, as well. This is what life has become for most single people, a product of our reliance on apps and a pandemic that suddenly rendered us all housecats by default. We do what all self-respecting singles in their mid-thirties do – make eyes at each other all night, take out our phones to find out if our app’s distance settings are low enough that we come up on each other’s profiles, and then go home (separately), getting chips on the way, before swiping mindlessly into the early hours of the morning. Operation: find some fit men we can talk to without the use of an app. He smells so good, I actually consider letting him. It’s 11.30 pm on a Saturday night, and while she could be demandingI turn my attention to our post-night-out feast, the snack in question is actually the 6ft 2in cotton-clad hench man currently trying to push in front of us at the bar. ‘SNACK!’ shouts my friend, loudly in my ear. Sick of swiping to find men on apps – even when they were standing right in front of her – Amy Grier learned how to actually make moves herself.
As more of us than ever long for the old-fashioned romance of a spontaneous real-life connection, we challenged two writers to ditch their apps. you know, the ones you can meet in real life, rather than through a swipe on a phone screen.