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Last Thursday night, 10 people lined up to enter Hair of the Dog, a sports bar on the Lower East Side that usually draws crowds to watch Sunday football and have a drink. When they reached the bouncer, they were each asked to provide documentation for entry: government-issued ID, proof of vaccination, and a dating app profile, not to mention that none of them were there to swipe.
Instead, a company named Thursday was a singles home – the antidote to online dating fatigue. Participants expressed all sorts of disappointments with modern romance: matches that rarely led to more than small talk; time consuming parsing profiles to use attributes and red flags; a documented pattern of racial discrimination in dating practices; and a general feeling of hopelessness.
“Nobody matches me,” said 27-year-old Harrison Gottfried shortly after walking into the bar. When someone comes out of woodworking on Tinder or Hinge, they usually aren’t legal, he said.
Thursday tries to differentiate itself with artificial scarcity: The app is only accessible one day a week. (You can’t guess which!) When the clock strikes midnight, users change an icon to indicate they’re ready to go out with that day. Then they can swipe and chat for 24 hours just like any other dating site. But when Thursday becomes Friday, their matches are deleted and the app crashes. This means that there is no time to waste on babbling; Making a date is now or never.
To encourage these IRL meetings, Thursday hosts events in its two operating cities, London and New York; The mixer in Hair of the Dog finished eighth in that city and drew a crowd of about 450.
Antony Fulmes, 24, heard about the incident via a promotional email. When asked about her stance on online dating, she said, “I don’t want to meet the love of my life through a dating app.” “No one in the apps wants to talk. Maybe it’s personal. Maybe I’m ugly.”
Even those who had a better chance of getting matches seemed to turn off the apps. “Swiping too much isn’t necessarily going to get you a date,” said Andrew Tchekalenkov, a 31-year-old drug rehabilitation therapist who participated in three mixers. “It may feel good, but it doesn’t matter.”
Matthew McNeill Love, 31-year-old co-founder and chief operating officer on Thursday, wanted to create a product that would help people move beyond the initial “ego boost” of a match and towards a real connection. “Getting likes on Hinge is like getting likes on Instagram,” he said in a phone interview in mid-January.
“We realized that by limiting it to one day a week, people had to make a decision.”
After launching in July 2021, Mr. Love said Thursday the app had been downloaded 340,000 times before the company introduced its offline event series called AfterParty. The first mixer took place in a London bar three months ago.
“All we did was put it into practice,” said Mr. Love. “We didn’t advertise, no branding, no reps in pink shirts, no ice-breaking activities. It’s just a regular bar.”
Other dating apps have also turned to analog. For example, Bumble opened a cafe and wine bar in NoLIta this winter. The company’s head of brand partnerships, Julia Smith-Caulfield, said in an email to Bumble Brew, with the organization’s name, “it’s designed not just for new connections to be made, but for everyone to come together and interact.” “Real-life events have long been a focus for us.”
Despite their growing distaste for digital dating, most respondents seemed to use the same handful of apps. They described Tinder as a more casual hookup app and Hinge as a marketplace for relationship seekers. Hanna Choi, 28, said she uses Bumble to “talk to handsome men.”
A few guests said they only use Thursday specifically for singles events. Moses McFly, 39, attended three of the events. “All other apps are available seven days a week,” he said, and that can be overwhelming.
So how well do these mixers work for singles? “I’m not impressed yet, but it’s a good idea,” event planner Becky Kaploun, 24, said, leaving “all of them” unanswered when asked what dating apps she uses. She was sent to a table with a friend and waited for someone she cared to approach. “This is the closest you can get to meeting someone normally in real life,” Kaploun said.
The mixer seems to be going well for Mr. Fulmes, who at one point shouted to his roommate: “I’ve talked to six girls already! You have to catch it.” A man nearby led a dancing woman through the crowd to Sean Kingston’s song “Beautiful Girls” and barked, “Let’s go to the corner. That’s when I can get along with you.”
26-year-old industrial designer Celeste Ortega, who attended the event with Ms. Choi, said that they approached them as “zero people”. “I’m between disappointed and ‘meh,'” he said of the crowd, which he claimed was “desperate”.
When asked if she would be attending another event, Ms. Ortega did not hesitate. “Oh my God,” she said. “Probably every Thursday for the rest of my life.”
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