I’m an elder millennial that has and continues to do all of this shit they are saying in other comments, I still meet more new people regularly that I actually want to talk to again through dating apps. Third spaces are dead and people have over the past 10ish years stopped being interested in expanding their circle by happenstance. I’ll even admit to this myself.

In general we don’t trust each other, and there’s a very real chance that any person you meet could be a fascist even in left leaning cities. This has understandably made women especially more leery of the men they meet even when men are explicitly feminist because the men that hate women lie about their beliefs exacerbating the underlying problems even more.

People don’t understand that we’re not just experiencing political and economic collapse, the culture we all grew up learning how to live in no longer exists. This is a symptom of that

He gave a couple good ideas, join a service group, take Salsa lessons, go to local events. There's a tree planting event in my community this week. You won't meet people if you go once, but if you keep going people will recognize you. This is called "making friends" and sometimes that leads to romance. Things in your community still happen like the olden days.

Things have changed especially because we all are becoming less social. Getting to know someone in person is still much more effective. Talking to strangers without pretense is however less accepted.

But it doesn't though. Dating is something you do to find people to be with IRL. Dating apps are made to keep you engaged and noy to lose customers. If you want to find someone to be with IRL, you gotta look IRL and it helps going somewhere, where people have similar interests