As Gen Z and Millennial daters flee the apps and look for love in the wild, many have no idea where to start.
Maxine Williams’s company, We Met IRL, hosts mixers and speed-dating events for young singles looking to find love without using the dating apps they’ve practically been raised on. Finding a partner offline feels like a “fantasy” that exists only in movies to many of her peers, Ms. Williams, 29, said.
“People are wanting a meet-cute,” she added, though the first minutes of the dating events are hardly the stuff of great rom-coms. Attendees come hungry for in-person connection, Ms. Williams noted, but many are surprised by how awkward they feel.
“It’s rough,” she stressed. “Like, guys on one side, girls on the other side. It’s very much middle-school vibes.”
There’s plenty of evidence that singles are looking for love offline, the way people dated until the last few decades. Dating app burnout has become rampant, and platforms are struggling to attract and retain users, particularly younger ones. Match Group and Bumble have lost more than $40 billion in market value since 2021. Dating apps are in trouble, the headlines tell us; actually, they’re dead. Mindless swiping is out, and “intentional dating” with a plan and a clear goal is in.
The problem? Finding love in person has never been easy. And it can be particularly tricky for daters who are accustomed to having an endless stream of potential romantic prospects right at their fingertips.
“They’re sort of trapped between these two worlds,” said Melissa Divaris Thompson, a marriage and family therapist in New York City. “The online space doesn’t feel great, and meeting somebody out in the world feels very vulnerable.”
We spoke to Ms. Divaris Thompson and other relationship experts about some of the advantages and challenges of analog dating, and strategies to keep in mind when looking for love offline.
Finding Your Community
Alyssa Rodriguez, 27, from Brooklyn, admitted that it was easier to get dates on the apps, and she did so pretty consistently for five years. But she was also aware of how “gamified” the dating sites felt, how they were designed to keep her hooked. After a breakup, Ms. Rodriguez took a six-month hiatus from dating. She refocused her energy on spending time with friends and on hobbies like salsa dancing.
She also started a meet-up group called Queer Latines. Since deleting all of her dating apps but one (a kink-positive app), “the amount of space that dating takes up in my brain is a lot smaller,” she said.
A self-described “outgoing introvert,” Ms. Rodriguez has become pretty “shameless” about approaching people she’s interested in, she said.
“It’s super hit or miss,” she admitted with a laugh. “I’ve been rejected many times. It’s also a form of rejection therapy; like, the more you get rejected, the less you take it personally.”
Indeed, approaching a romantic prospect is a skill, and much has been made of the idea that younger generations have lost the ability to flirt. But really, the pandemic led people of all ages to lose a bit of social finesse. When people don’t practice putting themselves out in public, Ms. Divaris Thompson cautioned, retreating can become their default mode.
That’s not to say that the challenges many daters face in finding love offline reflect a lack of effort or social awkwardness, experts said. On the contrary, much of what makes analog dating particularly challenging in 2025 is structural: People simply hang out in person a lot less than they used to.
That’s why Maria Avgitidis, a New York-based matchmaker and the author of “Ask a Matchmaker,” said the first thing she tends ask her clients is, “Tell me about your community.”
“That community is how we used to date,” Ms. Avgitidis said. People met through their neighbors, in houses of worship, through parents and relatives and via helpful “meddling” from friends in couples who introduced them.
“I think married people and couples are failing their friends,” she said, adding, “The thing I’m always telling people that are married is, ‘Have the barbecue, and invite your friends.’”
Welcoming a Variety of Relationships
The simple, unavoidable truth of finding love in person is that “you’ve got to put yourself out there,” Ms. Divaris Thompson said, advice that she acknowledged makes a lot of people squirm. Participating in an activity you really enjoy in a group setting tends to be a palatable first step, she said, even if it seems unlikely to bear romantic fruit.
A woman who joins a knitting club may not be overwhelmed by attention from male suitors there, for example, but she could meet a new friend who eventually connects her with a romantic prospect.
“It’s less about meeting your ‘person,’” Ms. Divaris Thompson said, “and more about, let me expose myself to more people, let me have different conversations, let me have different experiences.”
The most effective strategy is often a hybrid approach, said Jacqueline Schatz, a marriage and family therapist and dating coach in New York City. She advises clients who are fed up with the apps not to delete them altogether, but to be strategic about how they use them. That might entail spending less time swiping, Ms. Schatz said, and more time working on presenting themselves so that they attract the exact kind of person they are interested in meeting.
Effective analog dating demands a similar commitment to strategizing, she said, and “if you have your phone in your face, or earbuds in your ears, you’re not going to meet anyone.”
Chijindu Obiofuma, 32, an attorney, and Obinne Onyeador, 28, an actress and entertainment coordinator, went to a We Met IRL speed-dating event in New York City last summer. Dating apps offered an “illusion of never-ending viable options,” Ms. Onyeador said, but she found them draining and overwhelming, and did not like the idea that she was handing control of her love life over to an algorithm.
Most of the women’s four-minute-long dates that evening had been uninspiring, but they struck up a conversation with each other and became fast friends, chatting about the event and commiserating over the challenges of dating as Black women. They were the last guests to leave, and as they headed home, they realized they lived only five blocks apart.
“From then on, we literally have talked every single day,” Ms. Obiofuma said.
Platonic friendship wasn’t necessarily what either had in mind when they paid $30 or so for a ticket. But that’s the beauty of putting yourself out there, and looking for connection in the real world, they said. You never know who the universe is going to send your way.
