Hannah Liao (廖宸萱) recalls the harassment she experienced on dating apps, an experience that left her frightened and disgusted.
“I’ve tried some voice-based dating apps,” the 30-year-old says. “Right away, some guys would say things like, ‘Wanna talk dirty?’ or ‘Wanna suck my d**k?’” she says.
Liao’s story is not unique. Ministry of Health and Welfare statistics show a more than 50 percent rise in sexual assault cases related to online encounters over the past five years. In 2023 alone, women comprised 7,698 of the 9,413 reported victims.
Photo: Billy Wu
Faced with a dating landscape that can feel more predatory than promising, many in Taiwan are turning to alternatives. One of them is Timeleft, a social dining app that flips the typical dating script.
A TABLE, NOT A PROFILE
The app works on a simple premise: no bios, no profile photos and no pre-set expectations. Six strangers are matched for dinner at a restaurant revealed the night before. Attendees only find out who they’ll be dining with upon arrival.
Photo: Billy Wu
For users like Cassie Liu (劉瑋), the design makes a world of difference. Unlike traditional dating apps that create one-on-one pressure, its six-person format provides what users call “safety in numbers.”
“If someone makes me uncomfortable, I can just talk to the other four people,” Liu says.
The contrast with traditional app dating is stark. Most apps create what sociologists call “emotional optimization traps”: endless swiping that commodifies personality and raises efficiency expectations. That’s completely absent with the dinners.
Each table is balanced by age, gender and personality type. There are always at least two women per table. Dinners are held at vetted, publicly accessible restaurants near metro stations. The algorithm caps age differences at 10 years and excludes sexual orientation or relationship goals from its calculations.
“Our goal is to help people find friends and sometimes more,” says Tu-Han Vincent-Sultan, Timeleft’s Asia-Pacific regional manager.
Users flagged as “bad matches” are never paired again, and repeat offenders are filtered out of future events. There’s no requirement to exchange contact details.
AFTER DINNER: THE DOUBLE-EDGED MAGIC
Whereas the dinner offers a controlled environment where boundaries are visible and respected, the afterparty is a different vibe.
In Taipei, nearly half of participants show up for this second act. But it’s also where some begin weighing risk again.
“Whether I go to the afterparty really depends on what kind of trust I build during dinner,” Liao says.
In one afterparty with over a hundred people in Xinyi District (信義), she became separated from her dinner companions and found herself alone in a crowd of aggressive strangers.
“Guys kept pushing drinks [on me] and making sexual jokes to test boundaries,” she says. “They came to hunt.”
In contrast, a group in Zhongshan District (中山) walked to the bar together. “It was like a moving little community,” she says.
This sense of safety is conditional and easily disrupted. Liao recalls a disturbing case: a heavily intoxicated woman was surrounded by three men who hadn’t been at her dinner. Only the intervention of other diners stopped them from leading her away.
Some women have developed their own strategies such as sharing blacklists of problematic individuals, traveling in packs, leaving early if something feels off and checking in with trusted diners throughout the night.
Yet it’s in these dimly lit hours that emotional connections sometimes deepen.
A DIFFERENT KIND OF INTIMACY?
For Generation Z, intimacy increasingly means being understood rather than being romantically pursued. Many twenty and thirty-somethings today seek emotionally supportive, low-pressure interactions that prioritize “boundaries” and “self-care.”
The word “safety” has evolved accordingly. It’s no longer just about avoiding physical harm or protecting personal data, but about emotional pacing, personal autonomy and the ability to choose when and whether to connect at all.
“This is why today’s dating culture places particular importance on the notion of personal boundaries,” says Associate Professor Chen Wei-ping (陳維平), who studies technology-mediated intimacy at National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University.
This redefinition helps explain why the dinners feel safer for users like Liao and Liu, even when risks clearly remain.
What drew people to the platform wasn’t the promise of perfect safety. Rather, the restaurant setting, structured timing and group dynamics create natural conversation topics and observation opportunities that feel less forced than traditional dating protocols.
However, Chen warns, the dinner platforms might actually make people less vigilant about dating risks “because the ‘sharing a meal’ framework feels so normal and safe that users don’t maintain appropriate caution about power imbalances or boundary violations.”
Still, it is a new model of safety in relationships: one built not on profiles or pretence, but on shared presence and the ongoing negotiation of boundaries.
Safety comes not from guarantees, but from maintaining the agency to engage or withdraw as situations evolve. It’s connection with an exit strategy, intimacy with autonomy intact.
Hannah says she no longer feels anxiety over dating app failures. These days, she’s doing pub crawls in Taipei and planning a camping trip with friends she met through the app and another platform called The Weekend Club.
“Timeleft may feel safer, but I think both sides carry their own risks,” she says.” Whether it’s dating apps or whatever, safety is always a complex issue.”
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