Lilian no longer knows how many times she’s deleted all the dating apps from her phone. Somehow, she always reinstalls them.
While she says she hates “the apps”, as they are now known (begrudgingly or affectionately, depending on your success), going clubbing or hanging around at a pub is “not where you meet people”.
Lilian says dating apps have made romance feel like another chore to manage. In place of locked eyes and butterflies there’s monotonous swiping, weighing up someone’s potential from a few judiciously selected snapshots.
Calculate wrong and you risk wasting another night figuring out how to leave a date politely. Get too invested in a sure-seeming bet and risk falling into a pit of despair when they ghost.
“I had been single for quite a while and was at a point in my life where I really wanted to meet someone,” the 32-year-old says. But this time, instead of initiating another reinstall-delete cycle, she found an alternative: speed dating.
Lilian is far from alone in her app-apathy, and this combined with the difficulty of finding dates by other means appears to be giving speed dating its moment.
The number of speed dating events across Australia has increased over the past decade. Figures shared with Guardian Australia from ticketing platform Eventbrite show there have been 114,000 tickets sold to 4,000 events nationally. But almost half of those events were in the past two years, and from 2022 to 2023 the number grew by 35%.
Shaking off the stigma
When people think of speed dating, Lilian says, they probably think of the TV stereotype that it’s a last desperate bid for love. She knew it wouldn’t quite be like that, but still she was nervous.
Her nerves quickly dissipated at the speed dating event she attended. It felt relaxed, she says, and somewhat like an in-person dating app experience. The event was run by Dear Pluto, a group that regularly stage queer and straight dating events across Melbourne and Sydney, mostly for people aged 25-35. Instead of swiping through profiles, Lilian rotated from table to table, spending the allotted five minutes – timed by an upbeat MC – with 18 people.
Attendees are asked to write the names of people they would like to see again down on a sheet of paper. If the feeling was mutual, they get an email from the event organisers saying they are a match.
Lilian wrote down four names and was matched with three people.
Two of her matches were called Jess. She organised a date with one, then got a surprise when the other Jess turned up instead.
“I did tell her I got confused and we both thought it was really funny,” she says. “We ended up dating for three months.”
‘A well set-up environment’
Harriet Cronley has worked as an MC at Dear Pluto’s events, which are marketed towards people disaffected by the apps. She says that when dating apps shook the stigma off online dating, speed dating also lost its not “super cool” perception.
Cronley says her job at the events – which can attract up to 90 people – is enabling a fun, social experience. To stave off awkward silences, question cards are placed on each table, with prompts such as: “If you could eat a burger with meat synthesised from yourself, would you?” and “When was the last time you did something for the first time?”
“It’s a well set-up environment to stimulate future love,” she says.
Like Lilian, 26-year-old Lukas*, plunged into speed dating as an alternative to the apps. He struggles with social anxiety. It’s a challenge to approach people, let alone strike up a flirty chat, he says.
Using dating apps “feels like you’re selling yourself in a way,” he says. “You have to be this very photogenic and witty person, and write a bio … I don’t know how to describe myself in one sentence.”
At a speed dating event, he felt he could really get his personality across. He got two matches that didn’t lead anywhere, but he wasn’t too disappointed, he says. Instead he was riding a confidence high: dating didn’t seem so bad after all.
“Actually going there and speaking to 20 people was a massive achievement for me and I left feeling a lot better, even just being able to make conversation.”
‘A connection is really hard to miss’
For 32-year-old Ben, apps long ago sucked the “fun out of dating”, but he felt they were a “necessary evil”.
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They can be validating when you get attention, he says, but he found flirty texts rarely translated into real-life meetings. When potential dates stopped responding, he says, he would be left wondering: Were they busy? Did they meet someone else? Or were they just not that interested?
On apps, people could “just barely miss their soulmate … whereas if you met in person then a connection is really hard to miss,” he says.
He says speed dating is “a thousand times better”. Even if there isn’t a connection, he gets a kick from conversations with strangers.
“No one wants to have the same conversation five times in a row, so you end up getting into some really unknown territory and it’s a lot of fun,” he says.
He still thinks the industry has a long way to go.
“I definitely don’t have confidence that all the speed dating events out there would be for me. You’ve got to pick one that seems like it would have like-minded people,” he says. “It still needs to shake off the stigma … and emerge as something that revolves around just having a really fun night out.”
‘It completely flipped my mindset’
More than one in 10 Australians use online dating services, with users spending six hours a week, on average on the platforms, according to one recent survey.
Brady Robards, an expert in dating culture at Monash University, says apps will be around for the foreseeable future. But he says it makes sense that people are increasingly open to speed dating.
Online dating services created a designated space to meet people, he says, but they have also taken the comfort out of doing so in real life.
Many people also feel “overwhelmed by choice”, he says.
“Research participants that we talk to say, ‘Well if I find that this person that I’m dating doesn’t tick all the boxes then I can easily re-roll the dice and find someone new,’” he says. “This has created a kind of marketplace … where there’s always another option, or someone better out there.”
He says speed dating is interesting because like a dating app it’s “a constructed scenario” but, “it reintroduces a physical space to meet potential partners, and there’s something a bit more organic and natural about that”.
Going to a speed dating event made Lilian see the apps in a new light.
“It completely flipped my mindset on dating,” she says. “It was such a good experience, so it gave me the confidence to get back on, and have the right intention.”
Lilian matched with a woman who started sending her voice messages, instead of run of the mill texts.
“So it very quickly became a conversation. It was a real person. It was kind of like a hybrid of being on the apps and speed dating.”
That was one year ago, and they are still in a relationship now. Lilian believes her success was “finding a needle in a haystack” and says dating, however you do it, “is a numbers game”.
“I think everyone should go and do speed dating if they want to get back into dating,” she says. “Go and talk to strangers, it’s very fun.”
