Idea: you might have to leave your house to fall in love.
The best part of dating apps is getting off of them.
Feed Me is sponsored by Hinge today, which means there is no paywall.
Good morning everyone.
I said this during my guest appearance on
. I said this at the Feed Me All Fours Book Club. I’ve said this many times in Feed Me: if you do not leave your house, you will probably not have a great time dating.Earlier this year I asked Feed Me readers if they thought the state of dating was as bleak as the media is making it sound. Responses included:
“It’s soooo easy for us to blame the lack of opportunity vs. admitting the truth – that we won’t try talking to people because we're scared.”
“I think post pandemic, people don’t know how to carry a conversation IRL”
“It *is* that bad… but I think it’s mainly because people don’t “shoot their shot” in person anymore because it’s easier to just send a DM or message… which is fine in theory but it makes you judge someone off of a profile as opposed to assessing someone’s energy in person.. which I think makes people build up relationships in their heads so when things don’t work out it seems so much more dramatic than it was.”
“Random thought but maybe the methodology is skewing things too in these articles, since they are often not stats based? Asking single people who want a relationship how dating is going —you’ll hear mostly not well because they aren’t getting what they want (relationship). If someone says it IS going well because they’ve achieved the goal of a relationship, we don’t know the sample size that led to the relationship.”
Today’s newsletter is sponsored by Hinge, which seems to be the favorite dating app of Feed Me readers at the moment. If I hadn’t been to four weddings for couples who met on Hinge, I don’t know if I’d be writing this today.
The dating app recently launched a campaign called ‘No Ordinary Love’ and if you’ve been on the subway at all in New York this month, you might’ve seen the display ads. The writing and photography is better than it should be – romance writers like R. O. Kwon and Roxane Gay brought to life six real love stories of couples who met on Hinge. The whole thing feels like a zine should: scanned love notes, disposable film, dried bouquets, and photobooth strips. The execution is really youthful, and hopeful, and fun – I love it.
But let’s get to the lesson in every story that was included in the campaign: relationships rarely happen the way we think they will.
The wait for a table is longer than quoted. The train is delayed in-between stops. Someone’s phone dies, and someone’s grandma dies, and someone has to deal with a work emergency. Lights flicker on and off, but then what people don’t tell you is that sometimes they flicker back on again.
In the case of these particular (real, success) stories in Hinge’s campaign, leaving the house and meeting someone from a dating app comes with all of the unexpected moments I mentioned above (the cancellations, the months between seeing each other, bad timing) but it also comes with pink light in autumn evenings that turn into bottles of wine and ending up in each other’s beds. And waking up happy. In all the stories, Hinge was a small part of the story – the tool to light the spark.
“London is a city of eight million. It’s not an easy place to date, not an easy place to meet another person and to both, in unison, decide that this is the right time to take a leap towards each other. Many people’s dating lives are characterized by two interconnecting problems: too many options, too little time. London is expensive. Earning enough to pay rent and have an OK life takes time and emotion.
Many of us are reluctant to concede even a small clearing of time in order to pursue a relationship which may ultimately require us to reconfigure our desires, boundaries, or ideals, when there’s always the possibility of one day meeting someone who requires no such compromises, at precisely the right moment. Many of us have been on many completely lovely first dates, agreed to meet again in a week, but by then, have felt tired, and the glow of the initial spark would have receded in memory. One person cancels and the other is glad. They gesture towards rescheduling, but never speak again, and return to Hinge to look for nothing serious.” - Nothing Serious by Oisín McKenna
What I really liked about these stories is that the subjects didn’t just find love for a person. They discovered what kind of cocktails they liked ordering, and new neighborhoods, and experimented with the depths of their closet. I think when you’re dating and falling in love, you’re also experimenting with other parts of your body and environment than just your heart and your bedroom. Sometimes the right sweater to makeout in is the one you haven’t worn in a while.
I will not tell you all about my love life, because I didn’t get paid enough for that. But what I will tell you is that I’ve had very successful experiences with Hinge. I think dating apps go wrong when people seek turnoffs, spend too long chatting on the app (GO MEET SOMEONE!!!), hand their phone over to too many friends, or take it too seriously.
I’ve had relationships of many lengths, shapes and forms. Most people who know me (including observant Feed Me readers) know I love love. The kisses, the champagne, awkward aluminum foil-wrapped cookies for strangers who maybe will become something else, the blowouts, the playlist on the walk home, navigating the subway together for the first time, the time between one person and the other arriving – I want to tell you something. The in-person stuff, no matter how messy or temporary, is so much better than smiling at a text on your phone. I’m getting excited because I haven’t articulated these feelings in a long time.
If you’d like to talk about dating, I’ll be in the comments.
If we had a water cooler, I’d talk to you about:
- wrote about young people who don’t like drinking, but spend time at wine bars because they like the vibes. “To be completely honest with you, that’s how my brother and I initially got into it. We were like, ‘Oh, these labels are so cute and fun.’”
Earlier this year, Axios reported that The New York Times’ subscription revenue increased nearly 10% to $418.6mm in the third quarter of 2023 — with digital product (Cooking, Games) earnings rising nearly 16%, to $282.2mm, driven in part by bundles. This morning, Semafor reported that The Times is doubling down on games with a new game called Zorse. The report also covers the impressive staff growth of the Games team, “Over the last 10 years, the Games department has grown from a staff of just over a dozen employees working on the crossword into a 100-person operation.”
Wishbone Kitchen’s Meredith Hayden bought a house in the Hamptons, which means she’s now neighbors with the people who used to hire her to grill them steak and cook their kids pancakes.
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Backpack bans have made it miserable to be a teenage girl. As gun violence surges in schools, some administrators have turned to backpack bans as a solution. But backpacks have also been where many girls keep their hygiene products, so they don’t have to pull one out in the middle of class while walking to the bathroom. “On a Facebook page where one mother raised the issue of backpack bans, more than 200 comments offer suggestions from period underwear and menstrual cups to pouches that can be hidden in a bra or attached to a leg. A few people mentioned zippered scrunchies that could hold small tampons or scrunched-up pads inside.”
Obviously, I’m going to inject this into my veins and report back to all of you.
TikTok has been obsessed with Gracie Abrams’ abs since her tour began. The singer is ripped. This week, she told WSJ that she’s really into lifting weights. “I love lifting weights. I love watching survival shows. “Alone” is my favorite show of all time. So maybe the lifting weights is subconsciously prep to end up living in the woods.”
Friend of the letter Joe Weisenthal is turning his Odd Lots newsletter (which he writes with Tracy Alloway) from weekly to daily. You can subscribe over at Bloomberg. Huge news for the Daily Newsletter Mafia.
Drama of the day that doesn’t concern me: Ron Burkle, a 71-year-old Californian businessman who is the boss of Soho House, has been accused of attempting to build a Disneyland-style mansion in a small village in the Cotswolds, with the plans being described by residents as “grotesque”. The house will have a gun room (wouldn’t want to mess with him), stables, and an elevator. The mock-ups of the new house pretty brutal. Sad.
“All my homies hate him.” Hell Gate (which you should absolutely subscribe to) did the hard work of interviewing people going in and out of Zero Bond and Casa Cipriani about their former class clown, Eric Adams. Someone at Casa Cipriani said, "The reputation—you see him out and about places that typically you don't see politicians out. It's the frequency that's the problem." So funny. This is an A+ assignment.
In June, it was reported by Diageo that Casamigos sales were down 20%. I heard a rumor this week that they recently cut many of the leadership team’s jobs including the brand’s president, Lee Einsidler (the press spin was that he retired). According to my source, “George is furious.”
Chef Max Rocha (brother of Simone) agrees with many of us — the restaurants in major cities are becoming too similar. “I think there’s a formula to a lot of these places, the sharing style, small-plate thing with natural wine. All these major cities have those restaurants, and I think [they can be] really special. But I think there are a lot of really similar ones, and then it becomes difficult to stand out. My favorite kind of restaurant is: starters, mains, dessert… When there’s loads of small plates and stuff, I get a bit overwhelmed.”
I didn’t find my current (or any) serious relationship on a dating app, but I got a ton of utility out of my decade using them, along with the attendant frustration. I moved to New York at 25 and knew like two people, and for years I went on multiple dates most weeks. (This was the early 2010s, so they were from OkCupid.) I met some cool people and a ton of less-cool people, but more than anything I built my mental map of the city and figured out what I liked to do in it. I went to a zillion bars and restaurants and events that I probably wouldn’t have otherwise, and I figured out what I wanted my social life to be like and what neighborhood I wanted to live in and what kind of people I wanted to be around, as friends and more. I had a genuinely cinematic half-decade or so before I was ready to settle down a little bit toward the end—exciting, unpredictable, sometimes maddening. Dating apps are imperfect and weren’t the thing that ever got me into serious relationships, but they were a useful tool for plenty of other valuable things for me.
Dating feels bad in any era and might genuinely be worse in some ways now, but I think happiness in any circumstance is going to be in part dependent on your willingness to use the tools available to you and your creativity in using them. Deciding that dating apps are de facto bad or useless seems like cutting off a lot of opportunity out of fear, I think.
There are few instances in life where it's totally appropriate to sit opposite a total stranger sipping cocktails and ask them a string of intimate questions - maybe I'm just chronically curious, but this strikes me as pretty wonderful indeed <3