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Don’t swipe, just swoon. Love is going old-school
No hook-ups, no apps, no ghosting, no DMs. Three couples who found love offline share their IRL meet-cute stories
Sorry tech bros. You couldn’t hack love after all. A November 2023 study by news outlet Axios and American think tank Generation Lab finds that Gen Z and millennials are falling out of love with dating apps. All that swiping, location matching, bio filtering and the carousel of middling options has exhausted young singles – 79% of those polled said they hadn’t used a dating app in the past month; 61% said they hadn’t used one in three months. Those looking for love have found that the online experience shallow, inauthentic and frustrating. The online generation is looking for love, at least, offline. Here’s how some of them have given Cupid an IRL pivot.
*Ashmita Mondal (33) and Uday Raj (33) were friends in college in Shantiniketan, West Bengal. When they moved to Bengaluru to work, they’d cross paths occasionally. By 2017, they’d become travel buddies enjoying each other’s companionship and appreciating each other’s pursuits: Travelling, trekking in Himachal, art and history workshops. At a time when most young people were hooking up on Tinder, “we had years of inside jokes, friendly fights, moments when we felt time had stopped,” recalls Mondal.
So, when she asked Raj out in 2018, he was both relieved and glad. “That familiarity that the both of us had during our college days had transformed to love,” says Mondal. They weren’t names on a screen, but real people who’d spent time with each other. “I could open my heart to Uday without the fear of being judged,” she says.
The shared connection helped fuel some hurdles – when Raj shifted to a job in Chennai, Mondal decided to move there too, although their parents took some time to accept them as a couple. When they eventually married in 2021, in a hybrid Kannadiga-Bengali ceremony, they knew they’d chosen each other not from a dating bio but as people first. They now work as assistant professors at NIFT Chennai.
*V Edison (32) was Hannah Grace’s (28) best friend’s boyfriend’s best friend. It was 2019, Grace, a counselling psychologist in Chennai felt she was “done with the whole dating scene”. She’d heard about Edison, an assistant manager at a food chemicals firm, from her best friend for years. “I hadn’t met him yet, but he came across as amazing friend and a strong person, who had been through hardship but was kind,” she recalls. “That always intrigued me.”
It took Grace 10 years to reach out to Edison. Even then it was tough. Edison was not active on social media. There were no pictures of him online. Grace had no details to build on. She initiated a conversation on WhatsApp, and as soon as they started talking, they clicked. Three months in, they took their first trip together. “It felt safe because each knew the other’s social circle – it wasn’t a stranger from an app,” says Grace.
Grace says the biggest green flag with Edison is that “he made me feel like I could be myself around him”. She also found him respectful and progressive, more mature than any man she had interacted with. After dating for two years, the couple opened up to their parents about their relationship and got married in December 2022.
“It is difficult to find someone offline if they aren’t social enough,” Grace admits. But with a person you know in the real world, there’s a circle of trust build by people you already know. Edison trusted her too, Grace says, which worked out great for the relationship.
*In 2019, Atharva Datar (27) was in his final year of pursuing MBBS when Shriya Nulkar, a handmade-gifts-business owner (26) sent him a friend request on Instagram. Datar accepted. They lived in Pune. Their mothers were old friends. He thought nothing of it. Then, Nulkar liked one of his old pictures on Insta. He still didn’t catch her drift. It was only when she posted her painting of her dog on her Instagram Story that they got talking.
After only 12 days of chatting, exactly at midnight on January 1, 2020, Datar confessed his feelings to Nulkar. “I didn’t expect him to ask me out this soon,” says Nulkar. But she clearly had feelings for him too. They hovered around the idea for two months, getting to know each other more, making they were both serious, before making it official. “I’m too shy to have found someone on an online platform,” says Nulkar. “Our tiny, indirect connection via our mothers gave us the initial push.”
The families, of course, were thrilled. They had a two-year courtship, got engaged in December 2022 and are set to marry in June. Datar credits Nulkar for introducing him to the idea of modern feminism. Nulkar, on the other hand is smug. “That painting of the dog that I had put up? I was deliberately to get his attention, because I knew he liked dogs.” Datar was part of the plan all along.
