Speed dating, run clubs, meetups — why IRL events are everywhere yet apps still dominate

By Faisal Qureshi · October 20, 2025 · Dating culture

Something strange is happening.

Run clubs are selling out. Pickleball leagues have waitlists. Singles hiking groups book up weeks in advance. Cooking classes, pottery nights, book clubs — all of it, packed.

People are clearly craving in-person connection. They're going out of their way to find it.

And yet Tinder, Hinge, and Bumble collectively have hundreds of millions of active users.

How do both things coexist?

The IRL renaissance is real

The numbers don't lie. "Run club" searches on Google have more than doubled since 2020. Meetup.com reported a surge in new group creation post-pandemic that hasn't slowed down. Cities that were ghost towns in 2020 now have thriving social calendars built entirely around in-pson events.

People aren't just going outside more. They're specifically seeking structured ways to meet other people in real life. They're paying for it. Scheduling around it. Building communities around it.

The demand for IRL connection has never been clearer.

So why do apps still dominate?

Three reasons — and none of them are flattering to the apps.

1. Habit. Dating apps have been the default for a decade. Opening Hinge when you're bored is as automatic as opening Instagram. The behavior is deeply conditioned, even when it doesn't produce results.

2. Perceived efficiency. Apps give you the illusion of productivity. You can "meet" 50 people in an evening while sitting on your couch. Never mind that none of those interactions lead anywhere — the activity feels like progress.

3. The friction problem. In-person events require showing up. A specific time, a specific place, often a ticket purchase. Apps require nothing. And when the bar to try something is zero, people default to it when something better exists.

What IRL events get right

Here's what all those run clubs and pottery nights have in common: they put people in a shared physical space, doing something together, without the pressure of it being explicitly about dating.

The connection emerges as a byproduct of the experience. You bond over the shared suffering of a hill sprint. You laugh about your lopsided bowl. You meet organically — without a profile, without a match, without a carefully crafted opening line.

That's not an accident. That's chemistry working the way it's supposed to.

What they're still missing

Run clubs are great for making friends. They're not designed for dating. There's no mechanism to say: "I met someone tonight and I'd like to see them again."

Speed dating has the mechanism — but strips out everything that makes organic connection possible. You're left with a structured transaction instead of a real moment.

Meetups bring people together, but without curation. Anyone can show up. The ris random. The odds are low.

Each format solves part of the problem. None of them solve all of it.

The convenience trap

Dating apps win on one dimension: convenience. Swipe from your couch. Message while waiting for coffee. The friction is near zero.

But convenience has a cost. The very ease that makes apps attractive also makes the connections feel disposable. When matching requires no effort, matches carry no weight.

The opportunity isn't to replace apps entirely — it's to offer something apps fundamentally cannot: real chemistry, discovered in person, with a simple way to follow up after.

That's the gap. And it's wider than anyone in Silicon Valley seems to want to admit.