The thread took off. Morgan basked in the feel-good vibes of seeing people find each other—“I love love!”—and reveled in the real-life connections she was able to mastermind: multiple dates in her hometown of Portland, Oregon; someone who was thinking of flying to meet somebody in New York because of the thread; even a short relationship. Even today, people continue to add their pictures to the thread, seeking love all across the United States.
If this feels a bit like old-fashioned matchmaking, it is. But it’s a long way from gossipy neighborhood grandmas setting up dates. These operations are often ad hoc, based on platforms like Twitter and TikTok, and—unlike the dating apps, with their endless menu of eligible suitors—hyperfocused on one person at a time.
Play by mail
Randa Sakallah launched Hot Singles in December 2020 to solve her own dating blues. She’d just moved to New York to work in tech and was “sick of swiping.” So she created an email newsletter using the platform Substack that had a seemingly simple premise: apply via Google Form to be featured, and if you are, your profile—and yours only—is sent to an audience of thousands.
Yes, each profile features the requisite information: name, sexual orientation, interests, and some photos. But crucially, it has a wry editorial slant that comes from Sakallah’s questions and the email presentation. This week’s single, for example, is asked what animal she would be; the answer is somewhere between a peacock and a sea otter. (“My main goals in life are to snack, hold hands, and maybe splash around a bit,” she writes.)
Sakallah says part of the appeal of Hot Singles is that only one person’s profile is delivered via email on Friday. It’s not a stream of potential faces available on demand, she says, which makes it possible to really savor getting to know a single person as a human being and not an algorithmically offered statistic.
“I try to tell a story and give them a voice,” says Sakallah. “You really want to think about the whole person.”
Dating apps may be quick and easy to use, but critics say their design and their focus on images reduces people to caricatures. Morgan, who started the long-running Twitter thread, is a black woman who says that the dating-app experience can be exhausting because of her race.
“I’ve had friends just put their photo and an emoji up, and they would get someone asking them to coffee so fast,” she said. Meanwhile, “I’d have to put more work into my profile and write paragraphs.” The results of her effort either didn’t get read or attracted a slew of uncomfortable, racist comments. “It was frustrating,” she says.
Scratching a different itch
Dating-app fatigue has a number of sources. There’s the paradox of choice: you want to be able to select from a wide variety of people, but that variety can be debilitatingly overwhelming. Plus, the geographic parameters typically set on such apps often actually make the dating pool worse.
Alexis Germany, a professional matchmaker, decided to try TikTok videos during the pandemic to showcase people and has found them immensely popular—particularly among people who don’t live in the same place.
“What makes you think your person is in your city?” Germany says. “If they’re a car ride away or a short plane ride away, it could work.”