When I finally downloaded a few dating apps last year, after years of threatening that I would to nobody in particular, I had high expectations. Remember those old Lynx Africa ads where the guy would spray some on and then get chased – hunted – down the street by literal hordes of women? Yeah, that was more or less my starting assumption. Folks, the reality has been slightly different.

In the past six months I have been stood up, ghosted, catfished, breadcrumbed and gaslit out the wazoo. And I’ve been assured that not only is this completely normal, but that I’m one of the lucky ones for getting dates and matches to begin with.

Every once in a while I do meet someone I get along well with. But what I thought was going to be an efficient way to find a connection has instead turned out to be a very time-consuming and expensive series of wild-goose chases. These things were supposed to make it easier, weren’t they? It sort of feels harder than ever right now. And I can’t shake the feeling that joining a major dating app in 2024 is a little bit like showing up to a party at the end of the night, when all the lights are on, with a few stragglers on the couch and the host passive-aggressively suggesting you help out with the dishes.

Something about the vibe on the apps is just off right now. Even though the major players – Tinder, Hinge, Bumble – are culturally ubiquitous and pulling in record usership and revenue, as a soldier on the frontlines of the dating apps (my battlefield? My couch, my bed, my toilet) I can confidently say that the vibe is changing. App fatigue is real out there.

After the past few intensely online years we’ve had, there is now a palpable desire for many to meet people the old-fashioned way: in real life, maybe spontaneously. “There’s a lot of discourse right now about how run clubs are the new dating apps or, like, the apps aren’t working so it’s time to look confused in a Bunnings,” says Rylee Cooper. She’s the owner of Date Night Adelaide, an Instagram account which started out by recommending places around town for dates, before switching gears at the start of the year to organise real-life events, which regularly sell out.

“People started asking if I knew any places where they could meet people, or where they could go if they were new to Adelaide,” Cooper says. She started out by throwing a quiz night last December at a brewery, Yellow Matter, hoping for modest attendance. “And it sold out within 24 hours,” Cooper says. “The next one, at Bank Street Social, sold out in two-and-a-half.”

Now, there are just under 2500 members, and Cooper’s always introducing new events – from ticketed night-time meets to free Sunday hikes. “Our first hike was maybe 20 people, then it went up to 30, and 40, and the weekend just gone had 60 people show up,” Cooper says. “A few people have messaged me saying that they met at one of my events and have gone past the first-date stage.

“I think people forget how easy it is to talk to people face-to-face, and that’s what these events are all about, creating a space where people are happy to talk to you. [When] you know that other people are as open to connection as you are, it just takes a load off your shoulders.”

Em Daniels – who started hosting speed-dating nights in Sydney in 2010, under the name Dear Pluto – has noticed a dramatic uptick in interest in their events recently. “When I started, all you had to pay was a gold coin donation, and I just thought, ‘Let’s see who shows up,’” Daniels says. “Then about 70 people came, and soon everyone was messaging me about the speed dating.

“But this was when the apps were starting to take off, and that made me take a bit of a break because I thought, ‘There’s this new thing, people don’t need me anymore,’ – but it only took a few months before my friends started messaging me saying, ‘No, no, we want the speed dating back.’”

Dear Pluto regularly hosts speed-dating nights in Sydney and, since 2016, in Melbourne too. There’s a monthly night for straight people, and one that alternates each month between being for gay and sapphic folks, and for pansexual, bisexual and poly daters. “The apps are a big time investment,” Daniels says. “This way, you can go out, it’s one night, and you meet like 20, 30, 40 people – and you know who you clicked with, because you met them in person.”

Daniels doesn’t view the apps as a bad thing, but rather as a healthy part of a balanced romantic diet. “Some people who come to our events aren’t on the apps, but most who come are doing them concurrently – our events aren’t a replacement for the apps, they’re just something fun to do that’s a bit different.”

But if you haven’t got the appetite or social confidence for a speed-dating event, or if you’re looking for connection instead of romance specifically, there are plenty of more low-key ways to get out there and expand your circle.

Making friends as an adult after the pandemic has been Sophie McIntyre’s focus since she founded Club Sup. What started out as a series of ad hoc dinner parties in Melbourne a few years ago has become a full-blown events business. McIntyre now hosts everything from book swaps and pub catch-ups to cookbook clubs and over-50s dinner parties (hosted by her mum), all with the mission of getting strangers to meet each other and become friends.

“When you’re texting someone or you’re on the apps it’s so difficult to get an understanding of each other and get something off the ground,” McIntyre says. “And at the club, literally not a single person picks up their phone – everyone is there to enjoy themselves and connect without being distracted or online. It’s just real life.”

Beyond Club Sup’s events, McIntyre is noticing a widespread return to good old face-to-face contact. “We were already connected, and then the pandemic made us super connected, and now everyone is just like, ‘Screw the internet, screw DMs, screw all of it,’” she says. “It’s so interesting how much I talk to people now who are like, ‘I hate the apps. I’m just going up to people in bars and saying hi now.’ There’s just been a full flip.”

Introducing yourself in person to someone you’re interested in is also a really efficient way to figure out who they are – quickly. “In this hyper-curated world, anyone can look good on paper, but the real thing? How they carry themselves, their energy? That’s much easier to spot in person,” McIntyre says. “So being brave for 20 minutes and going up to someone and saying ‘Hi’ – that’s worth the same as a year on the apps.”

Maybe we’re just tired of the big apps, not apps in general. If Tinder, Hinge and Bumble are the Coles, Woolies and Aldi of the dating-app world, maybe we’re not actually tired of shopping for food so much as getting it from the big supermarkets. To stretch this metaphor a little further – perhaps it’s time we started shopping from local, smaller independent grocers instead?

Especially because not everyone is physically or emotionally able to just go out and be social, and not everyone has a sexuality or gender identity that’s conducive to meeting people similar to them en masse. Dating apps can – and do – provide valuable and safe spaces for many different communities to connect with one another.

There’s lots of interesting stuff happening in the broader dating-app ecosystem. Feeld is out there for the open-minded and sexually adventurous among us, Grindr was doing its thing three years before Tinder even launched, Thursday is an interesting hybrid of dating apps and in-person events, and Raya does us all a favour and keeps us away from people who use Raya. And that’s just the tip of the app iceberg.

One new local example of that is Wable (a portmanteau of willing and able), a Melbourne-based dating app geared towards facilitating romantic and platonic connections between neurodivergent people.

“During lockdown in Melbourne, I was at home watching a lot of Netflix and Love on the Spectrum says Wable’s CEO, Holly Fowler. “And I particularly liked [LOTS star] Michael Theo, who’s now our ambassador and who I thought gave a really authentic and meaningful insight into what it’s like for someone on the autism spectrum to navigate modern dating,” Fowler says. “So I wondered, ‘Why isn’t there a platform out there for such a large portion of our community?’ And I decided to make an app where neurodivergent people could connect, that [was tailored] to their needs.”

Since launching at the end of February, the response has been great. Support workers have been reaching out, and parents and carers are helping users to make profiles. Wable plans to launch in New Zealand next, with the world’s other English-speaking countries to follow. “I think there will always be a place for dating apps, especially smaller ones like ours – they’ll never be phased out,” Fowler says. “Meeting people the old-fashioned way is lovely, but it’s good to have options.”

Dating-app fatigue might just be a symptom, not the cause, of our modern dating melancholy. A lot of people I spoke with while researching this article met their partners on the apps, and some of the best couples I know started out as an app match. But we’re clearly hungry for real-world connection, and even dating apps recognise that – Hinge has recently launched a $1 million fund to help combat the loneliness epidemic by encouraging people to do activities in person (which is a sort of like your drug dealer telling you he’s worried you’re overdoing it).

Like most people, I have a love-hate relationship with dating apps; stuck in the cycle of downloading them for a few months, then deleting them, wash-rinse-repeat. Overall, I think they’re fine. But I feel like lot of us are at a point where we want love lives that are a little bit better than just fine. The good news is, if you’re willing to be a bit courageous and put yourself out there, there are plenty of ways to get out and find that offline spark. And you don’t even need to join a run club to do it.