By Perla Bloom, Sr Comms Planning Manager, Expedia
36% of liberal women say dating is now harder for women (American Survey Centre, 2024). Meanwhile, Pew Research Center reports 52% of unmarried men say they’ve become less interested in dating overall. Since my last piece, the Love Island finale has come and gone, a reminder that this reality-TV juggernaut is still our cultural petri dish for modern love. Every year it serves up the same cocktail of love triangles, betrayal, and tearful exits.
And yes, before you roll your eyes, the most recent season of Love Island UK racked up 1.47 billion minutes watched in a week and 54 million social interactions. Even if you don’t care, enough people do. It’s not just entertainment; it’s a lens into shifting dating norms.
Something’s changing. For years we’ve lived in a platform-led ecosystem – Tinder swipes, Hinge prompts, Bumble icebreakers, but we’re now seeing a push back toward IRL connection. A shift from URL to street corner, park run, or coffee shop.
For dating apps, this isn’t welcome news. But some brands have met the challenge head-on:
Tinder: Moving Beyond Swipes
Tinder’s partnership with Runna taps into the UK’s run-club-meets-dating trend. Running is now among the top 10 date activities, and Tinder even pinpointed the ideal “date pace”: 12.1 minutes per mile. Together they launched SoleMates Run Clubs, free 5K events in London combining running and mingling, promoted through a ‘Swipe Card’ in-app. The result? App downloads, which had been declining, are climbing again.
Hinge: No Ordinary Love
Hinge’s 2024–25 campaigns extend its “Designed to be Deleted” philosophy, stripping things back to focus on emotion over algorithm. No Ordinary Love explored the twists of dating through an 80-page zine on Substack, alongside shorter storytelling on OOH and social. The result? Q2 2025 revenue up 25% year on year.
What can we learn?
Life feels fast, transactional, optimised. Romanticising the ordinary; a breakfast, a walk, a conversation. It feels like rebellion against efficiency culture.
Romantic takeaways for brands:
- Romanticise the ordinary, not just candlelit romance. It can be a celebration of platonic or familial love; a train ride with a grandparent (Trainline), or the kind of emotional texture you’d find in a Hugh Grant-era rom-com or a Bill Nighy indie drama. (Ffern did this beautifully).
- Bring dormant platforms to life IRL.
- Reimagine old comms – sonnets, mixtapes for digital.
- Borrow romance via partnerships, as Pinterest did with Urban Outfitters.
We’re in a moment where people crave connection that feels tangible and intentional. The challenge for brands is to blend into real life and breathe meaning into even life’s smallest moments.
