It can be easy, after you've been married a few years, to forget how brutal it can be out there as a single person, always looking for love and coming up short.
Thankfully, the Millennial generation has found a hot, hip new way to find a potential romantic partner; it's something they're calling—in typical incomprehensible Millennial jargon—a "date."
Last Thursday night, 10 people were lined up for admission to Hair of the Dog, a sports bar on the Lower East Side that usually draws crowds for Sunday football viewing and day drinking. When they reached the bouncer, each was asked to provide documentation for entry: government-issued ID, proof of vaccination and a dating app profile, not that any of them were there to swipe.
Rather, a company called Thursday was hosting a singles' mixer — an antidote to online dating fatigue. Attendees expressed all kinds of frustrations with modern romance: matches that seldom lead to more than small talk; the time-suck of parsing profiles for redeeming qualities and red flags; a documented pattern of racial discrimination on dating apps; and a general sense of hopelessness...
To encourage those [in-real-life] meetings, Thursday hosts events in London and New York, the two cities where it is up and running; the mixer at Hair of the Dog was its eighth in this city and drew a crowd of about 450.
I think it's clear that this sort of arrangement—this "in-real-life meeting"—has the potential to utterly transform dating forever.
I mean, sure, it may seem kinda lame to have some "dating app" do all your logistics for you—an app that sets up dates on the same day every week while still, incredibly, billing itself as the embodiment of "spontaneity."
Like, sure, Millennials could just go for the more traditional routes that have worked for people for hundreds if not thousands of years—meeting someone at church, say, or getting set up by a friend, or talking to the cute girl at the pharmacy, or striking up a conversation with the handsome guy walking his dog in the park.
Nahhh...better just stick with the same old app-based paradigm that's served Millennials so well so far.
And don't get me started on the even younger folks:
