Can Gen Z Ditch Tinder for IRL Love?
Got real Carrie Bradshaw with it this week in my second collaboration for Rewire News Group, a national, nonprofit media organization exclusively dedicated to reporting on reproductive and sexual health, rights and justice.
Ah, Thanksgiving: the annual American tradition in which we sanitize the violent colonization used to found our country and travel home to dine with drunk parents, aunts, uncles, and all the other riffraff.
But before Thanksgiving comes another sacred tradition: Blackout Wednesday—when Americans return to their hometown bars to catch up with old friends, mingle with other singles, and maybe even reconnect with a high school flame.
At least, so I’ve heard. I’m not culturally heterosexual enough to have participated in that tradition. And my family left Las Vegas, where I grew up, half a decade ago.
Still, I’m fascinated with the rituals we have around relationships and sex, especially those that predate smartphones and dating apps. It seems like everyone I know in a relationship met their significant other on Tinder or Hinge.
According to Pew Research, 10 percent of partnered adults met on an app, and that number is even higher for younger and queer people. Twenty percent of partnered adults under 30 years old and 24 percent of lesbian, gay, and bisexual partnered adults met their significant other on an app.
The messy, sexy, IRL ways we meet people, like Blackout Wednesday, are increasingly becoming a thing of the past. And if the classic traditions of going out to dance, being set up by a friend-of-a-friend, or attending a house party are over, what dating traditions have replaced them?
Love in the chronically-online era
While a significant portion of young adults and queer adults seem to be finding each other on apps like Tinder and Hinge, it seems like public opinion on the apps might be souring.
A class-action lawsuit filed in 2024 even alleges that the dating apps produced by Match Group are not designed to help you find love, as advertised. Instead, the complaint claims, apps like Tinder and OKCupid are designed to “erode users' ability to disengage from the Platforms” so that they will “purchase ever-more expensive subscriptions to unlock unlimited and other 'special' features” that merely serve to “forever entrench users in the app."
But if the dating apps are on their way out, what is replacing them?
I asked my friends what they consider to be contemporary dating traditions, and it seems like we still haven’t broken up with our phones.
Shana—one of my best friends and my 25-year-old Gen Z correspondent—says the only real tradition she can think of is the “group chat review.” Whereas the women on Sex and The City discussed their dating lives over brunch, the two of us share a text thread with two other femmes that we have ironically named Toxic Male Groupchat.
The group chat review is where we suss out the character of whatever stranger we recently matched with on Hinge. We screenshot profiles and message exchanges, and share them—yes, without the consent of the other person—with our friends to be critiqued, analyzed, and judged for their dating potential.
I’m definitely guilty of indulging in sharing Tinder profiles with friends. “Is this person cute enough to go on a date with?” I might ask. Or, “is it a red-flag that their passion in life is pogo sticking?”
And there’s another new contemporary dating tradition: the DM slide.
When I asked my slutty Millennial and Gen X friends about navigating dating in 2025, they both mentioned that they liked seeing sexy friends-of-friends online and sending a harmless DM.
Swiping up on someone’s Instagram story to direct-message them can be read as platonic or flirty. It carries a bit of cultural baggage—sliding into someone’s DMs can be associated with creepy, pervy, or unwanted advances by strange men on the internet—but done right, it feels a lot like the internet equivalent of striking up a conversation with someone at a house party.
And it can really work: The relationship I was in for seven years started with a DM slide on Twitter (RIP)!
Long live the run club?
The positive feelings I personally have about forging relationships online contrasts with a broad opinion that the Dating App is kind of dying.
My friend Avery, 27, one of the aforementioned Toxic Male Groupchat members, suffers from Tinder burnout. After a summer of dating around, she recently got off “the apps” because she found that across all the genders and ages that she dated, there was a disparity between the types of relationships people said they wanted and what they actually wanted.
Another pal Ben, 55, is taking a break from the apps, too. Ben, like me, considers dating almost a hobby; it’s a fun way to learn more about the world and the people in it. So when he said that even he is feeling a little exhausted by constantly being on the hunt and the dopamine casino of swiping, I felt a bit shocked.
Perhaps burnout on the apps helps explain why adults are more celibate than ever. Nearly one-quarter of people aged 18 to 29 had no sex in the past year, according to the General Social Survey, a federally-funded national opinion poll.
That’s double the rate of sexlessness a decade ago.
But if Tinder is dying, are we building new ways to meet our soulmates?
The good news is: yes. We haven’t given up on love just yet.
Where I live, several new spaces and groups have popped up for meeting people in person, both platonically and romantically. Chicago Girls Who Walk and Chicago Gents Who Stroll popped up to bring lonely people in the city together and create real-life friendships.
And if you’re less interested in a friends-to-lovers connection, you can turn up the heat at a run club, the sweaty, endorphin-laden jogging alternative to the sterility of swiping through Tinder profiles on your phone. While some veterans resented the horny newcomers joining the fray, other run clubs leaned into the vibe, explicitly billing themselves as a place for singles to mingle.
There are many other fora for meeting people IRL, and not all of them are so curated.
In the last couple of years, my friends and I have attended the monthly “celebrity lookalike” contests. Beside the fact that at least a dozen people there will look like bizarro versions of Jeremy Allen White, Timothée Chalamet, and other honorees from the “White Boy of the Month” meme, plenty more strangers who don’t look like these men will appear to watch them compete. And they will probably be hot, young, single, and eager to talk to other hot, young singles.
Seeking: Wild, random, exciting connections
To me, all of these supposed real-world alternatives to dating apps indicate that we’re not done with the internet; we just need to use it differently.
The reason why lookalike contests are huge events is the same reason why the octogenarian influencer Olivia Salomone advises young people to participate in Sit-At-A-Bar September and NeverHomeNovember (her own inventions). And the reason is because these ideas resonate with people who spend plenty of time connecting with others on the internet and are eager to connect in the fleshy meatspace.
Wild, random, exciting connections happen in places where social boundaries between strangers are a bit more porous and these viral memes can attract a big enough pool for you to shoot your shot once or twice with a couple of sexy strangers.
If dating apps are casinos designed to keep you spinning, advertising these events—these parties, really—where the goal is to meet new people is like shuffling the deck. It’s a bit more random. IRL mingling takes some control away from our tech overlords and gives it back to the people.
The answer is not a complete abandonment of the internet and of the apps, but perhaps a recalibration. We need to find the right combination of analog and digital methods of connection—that is, use the internet to bring people together in the meatspace.
The internet is a beautiful tool for connecting people across time and space, and hopefully, for Gen Z, to have much, much more sex—including on Blackout Wednesday.