Back To Reality

Is dating going from 4G back to the four walls of a room?

- Namrata Kedar

Picture this – a hip space in trendy Soho where singles can interact amidst free-flowing rosé, get a blowout together, while a DJ spins tunes to set the mood. It’s old school, but it’s 2018. You realise there’s someone in here – or several someones – who can hold a decent conversation with you, not in the anonymity of a chat room, but IRL. Yup, that strange place – real life.

It turns out that recently, female friendly dating app Bumble launched The Hive, a pop-up where daters can meet prospective suitors. The temporary space featured all of the above along with panel talks from influencers and entrepreneurs, where people could interact with one another and form real-life connections. And they had my attention.

You see, even though the advent of the Internet has changed not just the way we shop but also the way we shop for the perfect partner, I always found it unsettling to carry on long conversations over an app that mostly led to nothing. While everyone around me was Tinder-ing, Hinge-ing, Bumble-ing and umm, Grindr-ing their way through relationships, I was questioning: Are they even relationships? And if the virtual dating universe and the buffet of platforms available for hookups fatigues users, how does one find love?

But plagued by the difficulties of modern dating, I did succumb to downloading Hinge a few months ago. “It’s for people looking for something serious,” I was told, as opposed to Tinder, which is classified as a ‘hookup app’. Sigh. I’ve never quite been one for hookups, believing in that one ‘ridiculous, inconvenient, consuming, can’t-live-without-each-other love’ as Carrie Bradshaw put it. But it turns out that old-school romance believers like me now have better options that entail dates in flesh-and-blood, rather than simply swiping right.