Jilted on dating apps but undeterred in the quest for romance, 20 young singles gathered in Madrid to share activities and flirtatious smiles in a rediscovery of real-life love.
The 10 men and 10 women, aged between 25 and 35, had eyed up each other nervously barely an hour before their first plunge into the “slow dating club.”
The concept is gaining popularity in Europe as youngsters fall out of love with apps and try to find their potential soul mate through serendipitous face-to-face encounters.
Photo: AFP
Eva Sanchez, 28, launched the club in the Spanish capital to rekindle her romantic flame after a potential suitor she met online “ghosted” her — suddenly cutting off all communication — with no explanation.
“My generation wants healthy relationships, but applications have created pessimism in love. We find it hard to believe in it,” the creative director said.
Once a month, the Spanish-Peruvian organizes a cocktail with a different venue and theme where participants pay around 30 euros (US$31) to mingle around games and manual activities.
Photo: AFP
The singles “don’t feel like they are on a date” and “everything is a reason to bring out their cutest side,” said Sanchez, who plasters the walls of Madrid with posters promoting her club.
Dating app giants Tinder, Bumble, Meetic and Grindr have seen their downloads tumble by almost 20 percent since 2020, according to Sensor Tower, an agency that analyses digital data.
The stock market valuation of Match Group, the parent company of Tinder, Hinge and Meetic, has slumped from its peak of 47 billion euros in 2021 to 7.7 billion euros more recently.
‘WEIRD OR INTRUSIVE’
The younger generation increasingly “prefers to meet people in person rather than online,” said Sensor Tower’s Seema Shah.
One of the participants at Sanchez’s event, Damian, knows the “murky underside” of dating apps all too well after working on their algorithms as an IT developer.
“I decided to meet people in real life, by going out and socializing. It’s harder,” the 33-year-old Franco-Spaniard said.
Isabel, a 28-year-old Chilean jurist, agreed that people “are almost scared to come up to your table” for fear of seeming “a bit weird or intrusive.”
“We have become so used to the screen that we have lost this attraction for direct interaction with people as our parents used to do,” she said.
With their revenues falling, online dating companies have been forced to diversify their offering with group activities or informal meetings.
An expat group run by Briton Tom Hopcroft has also prioritized in-person meetings, targeting new arrivals in Madrid and Barcelona on his Instagram page with sessions that are fully booked.
‘CHANGES THE PARADIGM’
Psychologist Esther Jimenez has seen at first hand how the young patients she receives in her Madrid practice are growing “disenchanted.”
Online dates are “consumed, but without an intention to really connect with the other person, more as entertainment,” said the couples specialist.
“For that reason lots of despair is showing up among the young who would like to meet someone to share their life with. Their self-esteem is affected.”
Jimenez believes “slow dating is working because it changes the paradigm... you assume you will meet other people keen on the same thing as you, connecting with others.”
The expert said that the method prospective daters use matters less than how they use it.
“Are we consuming people or seeking connections?”
In a hyper-connected society where “the widespread feeling of loneliness is scary,” we must remember that “ultimately we are gregarious and we need others, that’s why we seek connections,” Jimenez said.
June 2 to June 8 Taiwan’s woodcutters believe that if they see even one speck of red in their cooked rice, no matter how small, an accident is going to happen. Peng Chin-tian (彭錦田) swears that this has proven to be true at every stop during his decades-long career in the logging industry. Along with mining, timber harvesting was once considered the most dangerous profession in Taiwan. Not only were mishaps common during all stages of processing, it was difficult to transport the injured to get medical treatment. Many died during the arduous journey. Peng recounts some of his accidents in
“Why does Taiwan identity decline?”a group of researchers lead by University of Nevada political scientist Austin Wang (王宏恩) asked in a recent paper. After all, it is not difficult to explain the rise in Taiwanese identity after the early 1990s. But no model predicted its decline during the 2016-2018 period, they say. After testing various alternative explanations, Wang et al argue that the fall-off in Taiwanese identity during that period is related to voter hedging based on the performance of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). Since the DPP is perceived as the guardian of Taiwan identity, when it performs well,
A short walk beneath the dense Amazon canopy, the forest abruptly opens up. Fallen logs are rotting, the trees grow sparser and the temperature rises in places sunlight hits the ground. This is what 24 years of severe drought looks like in the world’s largest rainforest. But this patch of degraded forest, about the size of a soccer field, is a scientific experiment. Launched in 2000 by Brazilian and British scientists, Esecaflor — short for “Forest Drought Study Project” in Portuguese — set out to simulate a future in which the changing climate could deplete the Amazon of rainfall. It is
Artifacts found at archeological sites in France and Spain along the Bay of Biscay shoreline show that humans have been crafting tools from whale bones since more than 20,000 years ago, illustrating anew the resourcefulness of prehistoric people. The tools, primarily hunting implements such as projectile points, were fashioned from the bones of at least five species of large whales, the researchers said. Bones from sperm whales were the most abundant, followed by fin whales, gray whales, right or bowhead whales — two species indistinguishable with the analytical method used in the study — and blue whales. With seafaring capabilities by humans
RSS