Why Gen Z Loves “Friends-First” Dating

A few years ago, a single friend of mine did something that many people only dream of: she… stopped scrolling. She was still looking for a romantic partner, but she was tired of wading through an Olympic-sized pool full of new strangers every day trying to find one. Instead, she asked friends to introduce her to people they knew, betting that there was already someone in her wider circle who might be a better fit. She recently told me that she had been on several dates with “wonderful people,” and while not all of them had sparks, “they were all positive experiences made even richer by our mutual connections.”

“The applications are so overwhelming, especially for women,” she continued. But your friends know you and know what you're looking for, “so asking them to recommend you to other people requires a lot of vetting.”

My friend is just one of a growing number of young people who disappointed in dating apps and looking for something deeper. It's safe to say that the cold, distant ringing of a new Tinder match may never truly help the generation raised on Disney Channel Yearning and love at first sight”I think you dropped itHowever, some apps try to rise to the occasion by trying to spark connections based on more factors than just proximity and attractiveness.

One way to do this, as my friend discovered, is to involve friends in the process. Apps like double dating are seeing growth not only Tinderbut apps have emerged that are entirely dedicated to double dating, such as Fourplay Social. At the very least, it gives users the illusion of familiarity as part of a community and not just as an individual. The idea is that when you are responsible to communityyou behave better and act more authentically.

One app takes this trend even further by attempting to emulate “dating friends first” or dating through mutual introductions. Instead of pitting an entire group of daters within a five-mile radius on you at once, Cerca uses your phone contacts to connect you with a more curated set of qualified candidates who are part of your larger social ecosystem, whether you have a mutual friend, a former co-worker, or even an ex. The app, which quickly became popular on several college campuses, was conceived in part by a Georgetown student named Miles Slayton, who saw the need for a new kind of swipe.

“It's not that people hate dating apps, it's that they hate the products that are out there,” Slayton, now 23 and living in New York City, tells POPSUGAR. Especially given the “frightening direction” of AI, young people desperately need more reliable ways to communicate that involve the real opinions of their real friends rather than the disembodied advice of a machine, he said.

“Soon you won't be able to tell the difference between what's real and what's not,” Slayton says. “But what won’t change is dinner with friends; you will only appreciate what your friend thinks about something more. You'll never trust a computer more than you trust your friends at dinner.”

The mechanics of the application are relatively simple: for each profile, the user can see common contacts. If that user is interested, they can send a like, which will notify the profile owner, giving them the opportunity to like them back (or not), depending on sentiment and, of course, what information they can squeeze out of their shared contacts about the user. Any matches that are created happen at the same time every night – so if you don't match with someone, you'll never know.

Some have raised concerns about the ethics and safety of sharing your contact list with a third-party application. In April of this year, a computer science student at Yale University accused Cerca of allowing “crazy” security breachAs a result, some user data, such as phone numbers, sexual preferences, and even scans of passports, become vulnerable to potential hackers. Slayton says the Cerca team “values ​​the privacy of our users” and has taken precautions to prevent security breaches, such as prohibiting screenshots and screen recording. But ultimately, Slayton insists that sharing contacts is the only way to make online dating more bearable.

“If you want to find mutual help, you have to do it through your phone book,” Slayton says. “We don't sell your data. We do not ask for your ID or your bank account. We don't read your messages. [But] you need your friends to be on Cerca for this to work.”

And while everyone has a different level of tolerance for the security of their data and that of their friends, 23-year-old former Cerca user Dana* cites a different kind of security as the main reason she started using the app.

“As a woman, I had to be very careful who I decided to date from other apps because these people are complete strangers and you can't be sure who they are or what their intentions are from just a few text conversations,” she tells POPSUGAR.

According to Dana, dating apps allow people to present themselves however they want, and that's true for Cerca as well. But what's different about Serki is that Dana can reach out to their mutual acquaintances and check out her dates first, “or basically check their references to find out more about who they are before I go on a date with them.”

The friends-first dating model had an unexpected ripple effect for Dana, whose friends in New York still use the app. “There's more incentive to treat others with respect and behave in ways that we're proud of when we know our friends or acquaintances might hear about it,” she says.

Dana used the app herself for a while before getting into a serious relationship with her current boyfriend, who she actually first met on Hinge, although they didn't start dating right away. They first discovered that they had many mutual friends, and then they developed their own friendships. It wasn't until a few months later, when they had both graduated from college, that they met in an irresistibly romantic way. Dana herself is hardly immune to meet-cute fantasies: Her “ideal scenario” involves meeting someone “in the wild,” not on an app,” and falling in love with someone “who’s sort of been there all along, an invisible string, if you will.”

As long as we continue to chase the teddies in our personal lives, there will always be tech entrepreneurs who will try to synthesize those teddies into algorithms and develop them on demand. Does it suck the magic out of him? Slayton would say no. But for my friend, who took a similar approach to finding love by ditching apps entirely, the magic is not in the coincidences, but in the intention: coming together and strengthening the bonds that already exist.

“It’s one of the best feelings in the world, bringing people together and seeing the people you love begin to love each other too,” my friend told me, reflecting on how she also began to bring her own friends together, sometimes romantically, sometimes platonically. “It creates a richer picture of the community, and that’s what it’s all about.”

*Name has been changed for privacy reasons.

Emma Glassman-Hughes (she/her) is an associate editor at PS Balance. During her seven years as a reporter, her beats covered the entire lifestyle spectrum; she has covered arts and culture for The Boston Globe, sex and relationships for Cosmopolitan, and food, climate and agriculture for Ambrook Research.