The World Is Your Dating App

ADVICE: How to meet people off screen

Designs for Living is an advice column "dispensing sound advice in a noisy world.” Need advice? Write to me here. The previous home of this column was The Baffler. Paid subscribers get access to this column and the entire archive of advice.

Dear Marlowe,

Here's the short of it: I am in search of suitors, but if I have to re-open Hinge one more time and read through another man's lacklustre profile, I may unleash a scream from the depth of my lungs. It's just become so boring, the opposite of romantic. You seem like someone who would have thoughts and opinions about how to captivate a potential beau in real life. Where does one go? How does one behave? I feel like it's a lost art, and I want to make a study of it! Please advise. (I'm based in New York City, if that makes any difference in terms of strategy.)

-Dead End Dating Apps

Dear D.E.D.A,

You have come to the right place. I am (sometimes unfortunately) the queen of Meet Cutes. Sometimes it doesn’t even have to be romantic, when I’m in the right mood I love making friends all over the place. The idea of a run club is literally my worst nightmare, but I guess people love it. Anyone who plays pickleball… I’m sorry but it’s a no for me. See below, from 2022.

For those of us who would rather die than bump into anyone while wearing workout clothes, this just isn’t an option. This sports club conversation has come up with people who aren’t even in the loop and all I have to say is, it seems a little incestuous, no? What happens when you find yourself overlapping within your club? If you can handle the drama that comes up when everyone has all those athletic endorphins coursing through them, then sure. Seems like a recipe for mess!

Your quandary is why we should bring back singles bars. Historically, T.G.I. Fridays was a singles bar that specifically catered to single women. This is one of my favourite little facts. Singles bars were called “fern bars” as they were furnished with lots of ferns AND were the home of Tiffany Lamps. I dole out this knowledge every time I see either of the two (it’s why I have a soft spot for those… slightly kitschy lamps). I discovered this years ago from a little ditty of a New Yorker article.

His new place was brighter and cleaner than your average saloon, and dotted with familiar domestic flourishes: dainty bentwood chairs, framed photos, Tiffany lamps, and, of course, the signature ferns. Stillman painted the building light blue, and dressed the waitstaff in soccer shirts with red-and-white stripes (a pattern that was later adopted for T.G.I.’s logo). He had no background in either hospitality or interior design—“If you think that I knew what I was doing, you are dead wrong,” he told me. But T.G.I. Friday’s clicked. Almost immediately, Stillman had to hire a doorman to help manage the young people—young women!—who were standing in line outside on Friday nights, waiting to get in. Within eighteen months, two more fern bars had opened up on the same block. By the summer of 1965, the crowds going back and forth between these new, female-friendly bars had become an impediment to traffic, and police had to close First Avenue between Sixty-third and Sixty-fourth Streets on Friday nights, from eight P.M. until midnight.

It would make things so much easier! Alas, unless this article sparks an idea in one of you readers we must soldier on without. I am absolutely not someone who would wait for a man to talk to me. You must get over the fact that you might get rejected. You’re only embarrassed if you accept embarrassment. When I was in London recently I met my friend for drinks who was at a table of all these straight men. Honestly I had not sat at a table with so many straight men in years. Anyway, I sat down at the table and since I had walked through some sticky sap on my way there, a napkin was stuck to my shoe. One of the men remarked about it with a smirk and you know what I said? “Well, get it off?” and when it was taking a little longer than usual I said, “Try harder!” Everything that might seem embarrassing could also be a chance to show off your charm, ingenuity, or at the very least… show them who’s boss.