In July, dating app Bumble, which also has networking and friend-finding features, completed the acquisition of Geneva, an app designed to help people find new friends to spend time with offline (currently available in North America, Europe and Australia). Bumble CEO Lidiane Jones said on a quarterly earnings call this month that fostering platonic bonds is core to the company’s future business. “We’re hearing from our young users that they’re feeling lonely and disconnected,” she said.
Maxime Barbier, co-founder and CEO of Timeleft, an app that organizes Wednesday night dinners for groups of six in 170 cities across 37 countries (including Auckland), says dating app fatigue is leading people to move to in-person meetings with just friends. “We see that people are craving something that isn’t a dating app,” he said.
These services are proliferating at a time when loneliness is widespread and city dwellers report feeling disconnected from their local community. According to a Gallup poll conducted in February, one in five workers suffer from loneliness. Workers who work entirely from home are more likely to feel lonely (25%) than workers who work exclusively on-site (16%) and hybrid workers (21%).
A 2023 Pew Research Center survey found that Americans in urban areas are less likely to feel they have local ties, with 49% of city dwellers saying they feel close to people in their local community, compared to 55% of people in the suburbs and 58% of people in rural areas.
Raymond Ou is one of those city dwellers who struggles to make friends. The 41-year-old used to attend tech events to meet people, but since he started working as a broadcast producer at a local TV station where the workday starts at 7 p.m., he no longer has time for happy hours or cocktail parties in the evenings. “I sacrificed my social life for this job,” Ou said over tofu and vegetables at a Burmese restaurant in downtown San Francisco, adding that while the sacrifice was worth it, he would still like to have more friends, especially those who have time during the day.
Ou signed up for the Creative Lunch Club app after seeing an ad on Instagram that promised to connect people in similar industries (the service is available in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch). In his first three months as a member, he paid $11 to be paired with two others for a small group lunch. On the day of the meeting, one of those Ou was supposed to meet with canceled due to a work emergency — and the other was that WashingtonPost Reporter.
Ou, who also works as a documentary filmmaker, said he wanted to try out the Creative Lunch Club because it offers a space away from the tech scene that is ubiquitous in San Francisco. “It provides opportunities for different people that we want to meet,” Ou said.
Ou told me he usually eats lunch alone, part of a pattern of behavior that prompted Klaus Heller, founder of Creative Lunch Club, to launch the app. “I thought this might be a good time of day … to get to know other people or to make better use of them,” Heller said in a phone interview.
Heller, a freelance social media marketer in Vienna, also felt that people in the creative industry would find many opportunities to connect. This was true for me and Ou.
Having spent a lot of time in my twenties working nights as a journalist, I could tell Ou that I knew exactly how unconventional work hours can make social life difficult. We also talked about the challenges of convincing sources to confide in journalists, how we build trust with people we’ve only just met – and our love of Japanese clothing brand Sou Sou. Meeting Ou was pleasant, but at times I thought a larger group would have helped the conversation to be more well-rounded.
Kasley Killam, social scientist and author of The Art and Science of Connection: Why Social Health is the Missing Key to Longer, Healthier, Happier Livesestimated in a phone interview that there are now hundreds of apps trying to combat the loneliness epidemic by helping people connect with others — she hears about a new app nearly every week. It’s easy to meet new people while in college or your 20s, Killam said, “but what if you move to a new city or go through a breakup? A lot of people have trouble finding someone to turn to in that situation.”
Damian Jacobs, a 44-year-old lawyer, faced this dilemma after recently moving to San Francisco from Hong Kong. His wife and children are still thousands of miles away and visit occasionally while the family finalizes their relocation plans.
Jacobs tried going to bars and restaurants and striking up conversations with strangers – but it didn’t work. “People my age are mostly married and have kids. They don’t go to bars on a Saturday night and mingle with strangers,” Jacobs said in a phone interview. “I found that in the places I went, the people were much younger than me and hanging out with their friends.”
At his first dinner, arranged through Timeleft, things felt very different. “Everyone at the table is here to meet strangers,” he said. Jacobs paid $25 to attend a month of meetings, with a different group coming together each week.
After each dinner, Timeleft picks a location where the group can move on to an optional after-party. At the dinner Jacobs attended in San Francisco’s Japantown, his table partners, including this reporter, chose a nearby karaoke bar instead. “If you had told me I’d end up at a karaoke bar afterward, I would have laughed at you,” said Jacobs, who isn’t normally a fan of the practice.
Nevertheless, he went on stage and mouthed the words I will be (500 miles) of the Proclaimers with the rest of his table companions and later described the performance as “a testament to the power of peer pressure”.
He’s not sure if he’ll see the group again, but he has a three-month subscription to Timeleft and will soon be going to dinner with a new group again.
