Real People, Real Life, Real Love (And a Man Who Oiled My Chain)
This week, the event I’d planned to attend (Holiday Macrame at an adorable local brewery) was cancelled. No crafts, no cocktails, no flirty small talk with strangers. Just me, my couch, a glass of wine and a lot of feelings about dating.
So instead of writing about an IRL Singles Club event, I want to talk about something I stumbled on Reddit: curiosity about dating IRL versus apps. (Reddit)
For me, the honest answer looks like this: I primarily try to meet people in real life, doing things I actually enjoy and want to do anyway. Every so often, I dip a toe back into the dating app waters to see if they’re any warmer than I remember. Usually… they’re not. But the contrast between the two has taught me a lot.
This is my personal experience, colored in with what other people are sharing and what some newer research is saying, written with as much vulnerability (the wine helps) and optimism as I can manage.
IRL Chemistry vs. “Would I Swipe Right?”
One of the biggest surprises of focusing on IRL dating is how often I genuinely click with someone I never would have swiped right on. When you’re on an app, people are compressed into a handful of photos and a few lines of text. In real life, people unfold slowly. Someone whose photos wouldn’t catch my eye in a feed might make me laugh so hard my mascara is in danger. Someone whose profile I might scroll past without a second thought can feel magnetic when we’re talking about something we both love.
If you scroll through dating and online-dating subreddits, you’ll see a lot of people saying the same thing: that they have much better luck, or at least more satisfying experiences, meeting people in person than through apps. (Reddit)
Recent research backs up at least part of that feeling. A large international study found that, on average, couples who met offline reported slightly higher relationship satisfaction and stronger feelings of love than those who met online, even after accounting for age, gender, and other factors. (PsyPost - Psychology News) This doesn’t mean online couples can’t be deeply happy—many absolutely are—but it does suggest that how we meet can shape the texture of the relationship in subtle ways.
For me, it simply confirms what my body already knows: I tend to connect more deeply when someone starts as a human standing in front of me, not as a tile in a grid.
Sharing from Personal Experience
The last guy I met, I met at a time when romance was absolutely not on my to-do list. I wasn’t in my “soft girl era.” I was in my “frazzled mom with too many browser tabs open in her brain” era. I was busy, tired, and the idea of investing energy in a new connection honestly sounded exhausting.
The one non-negotiable I try to protect is my health, so even in the chaos, I joined a couple of local cycling groups. I’m a slow rider, so I always end up in the slow group at the back of the pack—the group that’s just happy to finish, not chasing segment records. After a few rides, I started to notice this one guy. He was clearly stronger than the rest of us: the kind of rider who could easily hang with a faster crowd if he wanted to. But he kept choosing the slow group… my group.
One day, as we were rolling along, he glanced down at (and heard the squeak of) my bike and casually said, “You know your chain really needs oil, right?” I know a lot of things. Bike maintenance is not one of them. My poor bike had been living a quiet, dusty life in a garage for a few years because I didn’t have anyone to ride with until recently. So when he said it, I just nodded and thought, “I have no doubt.”
At the next ride, he showed up with a little bottle of chain lube in his hand like it was the most normal thing in the world. Before we took off, he carefully oiled the chain while we chatted. It took maybe two minutes. But when I got on the bike and started to pedal, it honestly felt like a different machine—smoother, lighter, like someone had quietly turned down the resistance on my whole life.
Somewhere in the middle of those slow miles and silly conversations, my mindset shifted. I caught myself wondering if he would be there before each ride, feeling that little flicker of hope when I spotted him unloading his bike. I’d feel a small rush when he drifted back to my pace again, choosing my slow lane over the faster groups he could have easily dominated.
Eventually, I had to admit that I wasn’t just grateful he’d revived my neglected chain. I was looking forward to him—to the way he made space for me on the road, to the easy, unforced chatter, to the simple, thoughtful act of making my ride a little easier when life felt hard in other ways. If I had seen him on a dating app, I honestly don’t know if I would have swiped right. But real life let me see his kindness, patience, and quiet thoughtfulness in a way no profile prompt ever could have captured.
It didn’t end in a great sweeping love story. But I walked away with a genuinely wonderful human in my life, someone I now call a friend. And that’s exactly why I trust IRL connection more than my thumb. Out in the world, doing the things I love, I get to meet real people who surprise me—people I might have filtered out in five seconds on a screen, even though they’re exactly the kind of real-life magic I’m hoping to find. That’s the whole point of IRL Singles Club for me: real people, real life, real love, not just another swipe session.
Plans Made IRL vs. Plans Made In an App
Because I mostly meet people while I’m already out living my life—at gallery events, wineries, coffee shops, cycling, or whatever else sounds fun—there’s a built-in sense of reality from the beginning. We have already shared physical space. We’ve exchanged actual eye contact. If we decide to make a plan, that plan usually happens.
When I meet someone IRL and we decide to grab coffee next week or check out a local spot together, those plans rarely fall apart. There is some natural accountability in having already spent time together and knowing the other person actually exists in your town.
When I occasionally dip into the apps, it feels very different. If I had to put a number on it, I’d say maybe thirty percent of “we should meet up” conversations actually make it all the way to an in-person date. The rest vanish in classic modern fashion: ghosting, slow fades, or “sorry, things got busy” that never quite un-busy.
That isn’t just my perception either. Surveys and commentary on dating apps describe ghosting as basically endemic to the online dating experience, with around thirty percent of U.S. adults reporting that they’ve been ghosted by someone they were dating or talking to, and the rates even higher for young adults and active dating-app users. (Mentor Research Institute)
So when I compare my own experiences, IRL dating gives me fewer “options” on paper but dramatically higher follow-through. Dating apps give me more options and a lot more noise. At this stage in my life, I’d rather have fewer conversations that actually go somewhere than dozens that fizzle out in my inbox.
The Catfish Problem (And Why IRL Feels Calmer)
Another thing I quietly love about meeting people in real life is the absence of the “you don’t look like your photos” moment. Online culture has conditioned us to expect some degree of curation. Photos might be heavily filtered, strategically cropped, or just very out of date. Sometimes the person looks different; sometimes the vibe is totally different. Sometimes, if you’re unlucky, the profile is barely real at all.
Surveys consistently show people reporting being ghosted multiple times and catfished at least once while using apps, and many younger users describe app-based dating as superficial and game-like, rather than meaningful. (The Sun)
In an IRL setting, people can still misrepresent themselves emotionally or leave out important facts, of course. But at least you see their face in regular lighting, hear their real laugh, feel their energy in the room, and watch how they treat the people around them. There is less room for that particular kind of disappointment. You are starting from a baseline of “this is a real person who exists in the same physical space as me.”
It doesn’t guarantee compatibility. It just removes a whole category of weirdness that has become strangely normalized online.
What Apps Actually Do Well (And Why I Still Only Dip a Toe In)
To be fair, dating apps do something inarguably useful: they expand your reach. If you live in a small area, or have very specific preferences, or want to meet people outside your existing circles, apps can open doors that real life might not easily open. In theory, they let you connect with people you would never cross paths with at your regular haunts.
Some studies and personal stories highlight that couples who meet online can be just as satisfied and stable as those who meet offline, especially in certain populations. (rikithompson.ds.lib.uw.edu) And for a lot of people—especially those who are shy, work odd hours, or live in niche communities—apps can be a lifeline.
But the bigger story emerging right now is how drained many people feel by them. Surveys and articles are finding that around seventy to eighty percent of Gen Z and Millennials report some level of dating app burnout, and many say swiping feels transactional, superficial, or like a game. (Forbes) That matches what I notice in myself. If I spend much time on the apps, it starts to feel like work, not connection.
Personally, I like to date locally. I want to be able to say, “Want to meet at the hot new wine bar downtown?” and have that be a casual suggestion, not a cross-state road trip. I like meeting people in context, seeing them in the wild, watching how they move through a room. So I keep the apps in experiment mode. Every once in a while, I’ll re-download one, tweak my profile, and see if anything feels different. As soon as it starts to feel like a chore or a slot machine, I delete it and go back to real life.
What IRL Can’t Fix: The Human Condition
There’s one piece I think is really important to acknowledge. Even if you meet in the most wholesome, organic, story-worthy way—at a cozy local spot, at a concert, through a friend—none of that erases the fact that both of you are human beings who have been through some, well . . . shit.
By this age and stage, most of us have scars. Maybe it’s a divorce, a long-term relationship that imploded, a major health scare, a betrayal, a slow accumulation of disappointments, or all of the above. We carry our histories into every new connection. We bring nervous systems that have learned to expect certain patterns. We have triggers, sensitivities, and places where we guard ourselves a little too tightly.
Online dating can amplify some of that pain. Being ghosted again and again or treated like a disposable option can make anyone feel less trusting. But even if you never touch an app again, those deeper patterns don’t magically disappear. They will show up in IRL dating, too.
At the end of the day, I’m not really obsessing over the question, “Is IRL better than apps?” I already know I feel more alive, more like myself, when I meet people out in the world. The question that matters to me now is much simpler and much harder: are you someone who wants to be on the same team?
I’m looking for the person who, when life pokes at old wounds, doesn’t run or shut down, but says, “Okay, this is a thing for us—how do we figure it out?” Someone who is willing to sit on the same side of the table with me, even when the problem is messy and neither of us is at our best. Someone who can laugh with me about how human we both are, and still choose to stay in the room when it would be easier to disappear.
Because, at the end of the day, we all need THAT person. Not a flawless partner with no baggage, not a perfectly healed soul who never gets triggered, just a person who’s willing to keep choosing “us” when it would be easier to retreat into “me.” Whether we meet on a bike ride, at a wine bar, or yes, even on an app, that’s the part that matters most—not where we found each other, but whether we’re both willing to keep showing up and figuring it out together.
A Little Hope to Take With You
If you’re exhausted by the apps, you are not broken. If you are scared to put yourself out there in real life, you are not broken either. You are just a human trying to sort through a very noisy dating culture and find something that feels real.
For me, that means letting my real life be the main course and treating everything else, including the apps, as optional side dishes. It means staying open to small, ordinary moments: sitting next to someone at an event and realizing the conversation is strangely easy; laughing over shared disasters; admitting, “Yeah, I’ve been through some stuff too,” and watching the other person soften instead of pull away.
That is the kind of connection I am holding out for: real people, real life, real love.
And if you are ready to lean a little more into the real-life side of things too, you know where to find me. 🥂