In New York City, conversations often drift from subway delays and thrift shop finds to the ever-present topic of dating apps. Almost everyone seems to have a story-whether it’s a friend’s awkward Tinder encounter or a viral video essay about finding true love on Hinge. Social media is filled with hashtags like “how they met their husbands on Hinge,” highlighting the occasional fairy-tale ending. But more often these days, the dominant narrative is one of frustration and disappointment.

Overall, dating apps are most popular with young adults and more than half of people under 30 have tried them. But as people get older, the number of them going on dating apps decreases as well. Only about a third of people in their 30s and 40s have tried online dating.

According to the research by Pew Research Center, experiences on dating apps are divided depending on gender and sexual orientation. Among those who have used them, about half report positive experiences, while the other half describe their time on the apps as negative. Men tend to have a slightly more positive outlook with 57 percent saying their experiences were good, compared to 48 percent of women. For women, the split is almost even, with 51 percent reporting negative experiences. LGBTQ+ users, however, are more likely to report satisfaction, with 61 percent describing their experiences as positive, compared to 53 percent of straight users.

Many expected dating apps to thrive during the COVID-19 pandemic, but reality didn’t match those predictions. While dating apps had already become the most common way people met partners before the pandemic, their reliance on eventual in-person meetings made them less effective during lockdowns. Instead of a surge, there was an overall decline in romantic activity. A study led by Stanford professor Michael Rosenfeld found that 40 percent of people used dating apps less during the pandemic, while about 70 reported using them with the same frequency as before. The anticipated boom in virtual romance simply didn’t happen.

Despite the frustrations and the odds, dating apps do sometimes deliver on their promise. The same Stanford study found that 30 percentof respondents met their spouse through an online dating app. So while the path to love might be filled with awkward encounters and disappointing swipes, especially in a city like New York, success love stories do happen.

Methodology

In order to explore what online dating really looks like in New York City, focusing from user experiences, dating trends after COVID-19, and the city’s reputation as a challenging place to find romantic connection, I began by analyzing three major datasets: Pew Research Center’s public polling on online dating, Stanford University’s “How Couples Meet and Stay Together” (HCMST) survey, and U.S. Census data on marital status. The HCMST data, originally in SPSS (.sav) format, was converted to CSV using pyreadstat. I used Python’s pandas library to clean and analyze all datasets, examining how dating app experiences differ by age, gender, and sexual orientation, while also tracking changes in relationship formation before and after the COVID-19 pandemic. Census data was used to compare NYC’s single population with national trends. To understand how New York compares to other U.S. cities, I scraped WalletHub’s city rankings for dating friendliness using Playwright and BeautifulSoup. These rankings were used to evaluate NYC’s performance across multiple dating-related indicators, including social opportunities, affordability, and population balance. No personally identifiable information was collected or used. All data sources are publicly available and cited for transparency.