Ditching dating apps and going off-line: New ways to find love in Limerick

AT THE START of this summer, I downloaded a dating app for the first time in over two years.

My last major foray into online dating took place during the nine or so months I spent living and working in Dublin, as you do.

I was gonna be fancy-free and footloose, like Carrie Bradshaw but drinking Guinness instead of Cosmos, living it up in the Big Smoke.

What I got was a litany of flings, most fizzling out before I even got off the night bus back home, and enough disappointment to make me swear off apps completely until a few months ago, but things weren’t much better when I reinstalled them.

The endless swiping, the inane first messages, being left on read and ghosted left me feeling just as low as before.

I wasn’t alone. A Forbes Health survey published this July shows that four out of five people on dating apps feel burned out from using them.

Failure to find a good connection with someone and being disappointed by people (i.e. being ghosted or lied to) were the two most common reasons people gave for burnout.

One group of exhausted would-be daters even launched a class-action lawsuit this Valentine's Day against the company that owns Tinder, Hinge and Match, accusing them of “game-ifying” dating apps and trapping us all in a miserable spiral of swiping for “the one”.

Burnout is higher among younger generations, like.e, and who are now leading the way back to more real-life ways of meeting “the one”.

Samantha Keating runs Your Friend My Friend, a speed dating and singles events company that runs events in Dublin, Galway and Limerick. Originally from Canada, she and her Limerick-born husband Eoin started the events last year to help a friend looking for connections.

“One of my friends was moving here from Canada, and she'd been in all the apps and she's just sick of it.

“So I just said why don't we try doing a speed dating night and so we did one for charity. And then it just went really well.”

I stumbled across YFMF’s first Limerick singles BBQ on Instagram just after I had reinstalled my apps, at the end of May. Was it the algorithm or just chance? I wasn’t sure, but I was ready to give it a try.

The BBQ is ticketed, to ensure an equal number of single men and women. Upon my arrival I was handed a glass of bubbly (non-alcoholic options were offered) and a little pink cartoon card.

This was an ice-breaker game where we had to go off and find our ‘match’ - the person of the opposite gender with the matching card. (YFMF updated this process for their most recent Limerick event on Saturday, September 7: you now take a quick compatibility test when you walk in which provides you with the names of your top 3 matches).

My match found me pretty quickly, a nice guy who’d just moved to Limerick and was looking for a connection. We chatted while we finished our complimentary bubbly, but no real sparks were flying so we wished each other well and went our separate ways.

Leaning into the Sex and the City vibe of being a journalist at a dating event, I ordered a cosmo and circled about.

It felt like a work party at a big company, where everyone vaguely knows each other by sight or by email signature, and so you feel free to strike up a conversation with someone you've never spoken to.

A quick search on Eventbrite shows that YFMF aren’t the only ones tapping into this new-found nostalgia for old-school dating.
Singles and dating events saw a whopping 42% boost in attendance from 2022 to 2023, according to stats from the events site.

“When you're in a venue and everyone is single, and wants to be chatted up, it's a lot easier to approach someone,”Samantha said.

“You can tell so much about someone when you meet them in person,” she continued.

“There's so many people on apps putting on a portrayal of who they want to be rather than who they are, so when you meet them, they never live up to that.

“It's very different meeting somebody out, you know if you're attracted to them and I think it's so different than all the build up and anticipation, sometimes for nothing.”

Though I was unsuccessful in finding my happy-ever-after on that particular day, others have reported more luck.

Many people get in touch with Samantha to say they’ve set up a second date with someone they meet at an event.

“We've had a lot of people come back and tell us they've gotten multiple dates or started relationships, and we've actually had one couple get engaged even though it was just last year that they met so there's already one happy ending so far.”

And her friend from Canada, who started it all? Samantha tells me though things didn’t work out at the first event, she’s now happily in a relationship.

And where did she meet him?
“At a speed dating event”
So they do work?
“Yes!”

Find out more at yourfriendmyfriend.ie