The inventive rise of anti-algorithm dating

Cosmopolitan

5 hours ago

It was Wednesday when one of 27-year-old Siren Dahlsveen's friends texted their group chat to suggest a 'Tinder dinner' on the Saturday. The rule was: each of their single girlfriends had to invite a stranger from a dating app for a group first date.
'We had to move quickly,' Siren recalls. 'We only had a few days to pull it off.' The first task: find a date. 'I jumped straight on to Hinge — ironically, since we'd called it a Tinder dinner — and replied to an old message from a guy who'd asked what kind of adventure I would like to go on. I said his first adventure could be joining me and a group of strangers for dinner on Saturday. He thought the idea was hilarious.'
Dates secured, the girls had to move on to the scariest part: cooking for 14 people. 'We weren't nervous [about meeting the guys],' declares Siren. 'Our main concern was whether we'd made enough food to feed seven hungry men!'
Inviting seven hungry men into your home might feel like the act of a sadist, but, for Siren and her friends, it was a moonshot attempt to spice up their dating lives. The group's spur-of-the-moment singles dinner was born out of a longer-term dissatisfaction with the dating status quo: swipe, match, chat, first date, repeat. This humdrum routine — and the few rewards it reaps — has, according to Forbes, led to 79% of Gen Z feeling burned out by dating apps. In fact, between 2023 and 2024, 1.4 million people in the UK gave up on them completely, according to figures from Ofcom.
With people leaving the apps in droves, a plethora of singles events have sprung up in their place — or, more accurately, alongside them (plenty of us are still valiantly swiping away). There's traditional mixers and speed dating, wackier concepts such as Pitch-A-Friend (pitching your single friend via PowerPoint presentation, duh!) and even app-branded run clubs.
Other daters, though, are taking matters into their own hands. Like Siren and co, instead of dwelling on depressing stats about dating or relying on third parties to set them up, more and more people are becoming their own anti-algorithm matchmakers. From singles dinners and DIY lonely hearts ads to making friendship bracelets with phone numbers on, we're in a new era of pushing ourselves out of our dating comfort zones in an attempt to find love offline.
But will it work? And is success even the point, or is rediscovering the fun in dating enough to make this kind of nerve-racking, potentially awkward risk-taking worth it?
'Full disclosure: I hate dating,' says 23-year-old Sage Kang. 'With dating moving online, going on dates has become so much more of a choice you have to go out of your way to make, rather than romance finding you in your day-to-day life.'
So, Sage decided that if romance won't find her, she'd try to find it. 'We saw the idea of making phone number friendship bracelets on TikTok,' she tells Cosmopolitan UK. 'We thought it would be a fun idea, as a way to flirt when we're out. Guy looks cute? Hand him a bracelet, no explanation. Enjoying a chat but wanna bar hop? Bracelet! As an introverted extrovert with crippling social anxiety, handing out bracelets was just the right balance of risky and safe.'
That's not to say Sage didn't find the whole thing, well, panic-inducing. '[Outdated as it is], it's the social norm for guys to make the first move, so handing someone your phone number — bluntly saying you're interested — was terrifying,' she says. 'But it was also fun!'
Ironically, lots of these IRL dating trends seem to originate and then spread via social media. Both Sage and Siren shared (now-viral) videos of their own efforts, which sit among creators documenting pub trips with friends where they each have to approach someone they think is hot, and others advertising themselves or their mates as available to date via Instagram Stories or even X, listing various qualities and interests.
These methods could be seen as stepping stones of sorts — a bridge between totally online and totally offline dating. A new normal for a generation who grew up traversing these two worlds, but for whom dating without a screen as a mediator doesn't come as naturally. Case in point: although Siren and her friends still sourced their dates from dating apps, she says the prospect of a group setting made the whole thing feel exciting again. 'Traditional one-on-one dates can often feel forced, like you're meeting up to immediately assess romantic potential with a complete stranger,' she adds. 'In a group setting, it's more casual, and there's no pressure.'
'It's encouraging to see people seizing the initiative,' says Anna Machin, an evolutionary anthropologist at Oxford University, and the author of Why We Love: The New Science Behind Our Closest Relationships. 'Because in a way, we stopped using apps as a tool that was supposed to help us, and they started controlling us a bit.'
Still, Machin believes there's balance to be found — and these offline dating trends could be tipping the scales in the right direction. 'Being social and putting yourself out there is scary,' she says. '[Especially for a generation who weren't necessarily] born into a world where approaching someone in a bar is something you do. It's going to take confidence and time to change the idea about [how dating works]. The evolution of the apps has to be driven by the consumer saying, 'Actually, this doesn't work for anyone; I want to meet people in the room'.'
On dating apps, you want to be a winner. You want to match, date and, if it comes to it, be the person who does the rejecting. Dating IRL is less, shall we say, goal- orientated. It's more about the experience — the thrill of asking someone out; the rush of throwing a bracelet with your number at someone and then running away; the pleasures of conversing with a stranger, whether anything comes of it or not.
With that in mind, though neither Sage nor Siren found love through their respective adventures, they had a bloody good time on the journey. 'I'd call it a big success,' says Siren, reflecting on the 'Tinder dinner'. 'The atmosphere was super relaxed, everyone was open and talkative, and the guys had a great sense of humour, which made the vibe very playful and lighthearted. Some were a little shy at first, but they opened up more in one-to-one conversations. There was no expectation to stick with the person you brought, so people naturally moved around and chatted with different people.'
Only one couple from the dinner continued seeing each other in a romantic way, but many of the others have kept in touch as friends. 'When you meet in real life, chemistry can build over time without pressure,' adds Siren. 'A friendship can turn into attraction, or you can simply enjoy getting to know someone without the expectation that it has to lead somewhere. The dinner was just as much about expanding our social circle as it was about dating.'
At a time when many of us are feeling nostalgic for a past that, whether accurately or not, felt more stable, slow-paced, and uncomplicated, it's easy to see the appeal of back-to-basics dating (with a 2025 twist, ofc). As Sage puts it: 'You're crafting your own romcom. And what better adventure than going out in the real world?'