There's a fantasy that persists among us single people in Melbourne: you're out at a bar in Fitzroy or a café on Sydney Road, you catch someone's eye, and something happens. A conversation starts. Maybe it goes somewhere.

The fantasy is not unreasonable. It's just increasingly rare.

"People basically said that no one approaches you anymore," says Jennifer Gray, a Monash University PhD candidate whose research explores dating culture and digital disillusionment. 

Gray, who interviewed Australians under 40 about their dating experiences, said of the lack of the real-life approach: "That's definitely something happening a lot less than, say, 20 years ago."

Gray's participants used a particular word when describing what they actually wanted: organic. They wanted to meet someone "out in the wild." They romanticised the idea of bumping into someone while going about their lives, the way people used to, before 2012 brought Tinder and with it the slow annexation of romantic possibility by the smartphone.

"There's a romantic, exciting element that people attribute to meeting someone by chance," Gray says. "You're not expecting to meet someone, and then you do."

It's a sentiment familiar to anyone who has spent a Friday night on Hinge. The apps, paradoxically, have made people want to get off the apps—but the social infrastructure for meeting people in person has quietly atrophied too, and nobody quite knows how to rebuild it.

The dissatisfaction of the swipe

Dating apps are, at this point, mundane. Around a third of couples in Western countries now meet online, generating over $6 billion in revenue globally each year. In Australia, Hinge, Bumble, Tinder and Feeld have become so embedded in the lives of singles that for many people they represent the default—not an option, but the option.

We all know the success stories, and the horror ones too. I have personally been catfished by a 45-year-old pretending to be 23. I've also been told I wasn't worth a second date because I wasn't an AFL player. Most of the rest were simply boring, platonic, or a case of two people wanting different things and never quite saying so.

Dr. Maddison Sideris, a sociologist at Deakin University whose studies examine how young adults navigate digital relationships, said many people feel conflicted about dating apps. Her research found women often described their experiences in terms of "fatigue, failure and frustration." They used the apps because they felt they had no other choice. They weren't finding what they were looking for. And they couldn't stop.

This loop—reluctant reliance on something you resent—is one of the defining textures of modern dating. Gray's participants described the process of scrolling as "dehumanising," both for users and for the people they were assessing. Profiles flatten personality. Photos obscure chemistry. Humour, which Gray's participants consistently rated as one of the qualities they most wanted in a partner, usually fails to translate in a bio. The appeal of the apps is also reflective of modern society's need for instant gratification. The inherently human desire, to be desired.

Then there's the insidious design of the apps themselves: a capped number of likes per day, a ceiling on how many matches you can hold onto at once, and an algorithm seemingly engineered to promote the worst of what's out there—the dreaded mirror selfie, the man holding a fish, the bio whose idea of a "craziest travel story" is having been briefly stuck in an airplane toilet.

Lucy Winter and Shaid Sasulu, co-hosts of the University of Melbourne radio podcast Hook Up, echo the idea that the dating app game is making people feel disposable. Winter says the filtering process has made her "quite judgmental in a way I absolutely hate." Of Hinge's free tier, Sasulu put it more bluntly: "They hide the hotties behind the rose wall. You have to pay for it."

The skewed horizon

Dr. Khandis Blake, an evolutionary social psychologist at the University of Melbourne, says that part of what makes apps so corrosive is their effect on our perception of possibility.

"In hunter-gatherer times, you might have lived in a group of one to two hundred people," she says. "You had a really good sense of the social network—who has what qualities, where everyone fits. You could make smart judgments about who you might want to approach."

Social media and dating apps collapse that calibration. "Your mind is seeing very beautiful, very rich people come along, just like you see people from uni or friends in your feed," Blake explains. "It's all the same feed. And your mind starts to think that your social world has expanded—that what you might hold out for is getting skewed."

The result is an inflated sense of what's available, combined with a corresponding rise in rejection sensitivity. Blake notes that research has found no amount of rejection—not even rejection by a computer programmed to reject you—fails to sting. Scale that across months and years of unreciprocated likes, and the accumulated weight starts to affect how people see themselves.

The nonchalance problem

A frustration persists among my single female friends in Melbourne: the fact that men never approach them romantically. 

In contrast to the attention they say they receive abroad, in places like Italy or Spain, men in Melbourne are damned by being too nonchalant.

The disappearance of organic encounters  isn't only about apps. There's a cultural dimension to it that's harder to pin down—and nowhere is it more visible than in Melbourne.

But Sasulu is cautious about the framing of this: "I think labelling it as a singularly male issue—there are loads of problems around it," she says. "You can complain about men being nonchalant, but are you approaching anyone you're interested in, or are you just measuring it based on your lack of being approached?"

I would be remiss not to mention the safety concerns at play too. Both Gray and Sideris point out that many women, particularly when out at night, do not want to be approached or interrupted by strange men looking to flirt, or have been scarred one too many times by negative experiences they have checked out of dating completely.

The nonchalance, though, may be a symptom of a wider issue rather than the disease itself. Sideris says studies of young people point to a decline in social confidence and a rise in self-consciousness since COVID. In a digital age, more of us are wary of our online footprint, and of how an attempted interaction with a stranger might be filmed, judged or recirculated without context. 

In Gray's study, her straight male participants told her they didn't approach women in bars because they didn't want to seem creepy—not because they weren't interested.

Michael Wilson, a mental health research fellow at the Movember Institute, corroborates this, and thinks the culture has overcorrected in a way that's left everyone worse off. "The presumption of creepiness, the cultural norm of not putting yourself out there—I think that has gone a little too far," Wilson says. "It's meaning that people's capacity to just generally talk to new people has kind of atrophied."

Blake makes a related point about generational change and conversation as a skill: "Previously, having small talk conversations with strangers was extremely common. By the time people got to twenty, they'd been doing it for years. There was nothing else to keep you occupied on the bus or the train. You just chatted." Now, she says, a significant proportion of young adults in their 20s have reportedly never made a phone call.

"What you need," Sideris says, reflecting on a piece she read about Gen Z's reluctance to approach strangers in person, "is spaces where the conventions are set up for that interaction, so people don't have to guess."

Making the space

Izzy Burns was complaining to friends about her Hinge dates on a night out in 2024 when an idea struck her: what if she just threw a speed dating event?

The result was Crush Club, a Melbourne-based singles events company that has since run events for straight and queer attendees. 

What Crush Club offers, at its core, is permission. "It takes a lot of anxiety out of it," Burns says, "knowing everyone is single and everyone is there to meet people. You don't have to guess."

Burns has noticed something at her events that cuts against one of the central myths of digital dating: that we know what we want before we meet someone. "I often hear from people that they didn't think so-and-so was their type, but actually they hit it off and it was great," she says. "So much of attraction you can only find out in person."

The approach in the wild isn't dead either. My female friends were quick to point out that the men most worried about coming across as creepy are never the ones who are.

On how to actually do it, Winter recommends a direct approach over chit-chat for the sake of it. "Don't just come up and say, 'Oh, I love your earrings, where did you get them?'" she says. "We see what you're trying to do. Get to the point."

The apps, for all their engineers' efforts, haven't found a way to manufacture an organic connection. They can improve their algorithms and train their AI on thousands of data points, but chemistry still happens in a room with others.

Whatever shape Melbourne's dating culture takes in the years ahead, people will keep looking for somewhere to walk in, catch someone's eye and let something begin.

Next: How people are dating—expectations, red flags, and the paradox of abundance.