Forget Swiping. Your Mate Might Be Better at Finding Your Next Date

Date My Mate founder and Northern Beaches local Laura Greenwood

Dating apps were supposed to make finding love easier. Instead, a Northern Beaches start-up is betting that the person most likely to improve your love life isn't an algorithm at all. It's your mate.

There was a time when meeting someone involved actually meeting someone.

You caught someone’s eye at a café, were introduced by a friend at a party or met someone through work who just happened to know someone they thought you might like. There was flirting and awkwardness, a little bit of courage and, if the stars aligned, that lovely moment when you realised the person standing in front of you might actually be interested too.

Then came dating apps and suddenly finding love became something we could apparently do from the couch, based on someone’s best carefully filtered photo, while watching Netflix and eating dinner.

Convenient? Absolutely.

Romantic? Perhaps not so much.

Now a Northern Beaches start-up is hoping to bring a little of the human element back into dating, with one important addition: your best mate gets a microphone.

Date My Mate is the brainchild of Northern Beaches local Laura Greenwood, who is married with two children and therefore happily removed from the frontline of modern dating herself. But watching her single friends navigate it was enough to convince her something had gone slightly awry.

“I watched too many brilliant, funny, kind single friends spend their nights swiping on a screen and coming away feeling worse, not better,” she says.

“I kept thinking, why are we outsourcing the most human thing we do - meeting someone - to an app?”

It's a fair question.

Dating apps gave us access to more potential partners than any generation before us could have imagined, but having so much choice hasn’t necessarily made dating any easier or more enjoyable. In fact, the endless stream of potential matches can have the opposite effect, leaving people feeling as though they’re just another face on a screen and there’s always someone else waiting with the next swipe.

One more swipe and there could always be someone taller, funnier, prettier, more successful or with a better photo holding a fish.

Laura initially toyed with the idea of creating an app where friends wrote each other's dating profiles, before realising that another app probably wasn't the answer to app fatigue.

“A photo and a bio can't vouch for you in person,” she says. “A mate can.”

And so Date My Mate was born.

The premise is wonderfully simple, with singles spared the awkward task of standing in front of a room and selling themselves because their friends do it for them.

A mate gets two minutes and a slide deck to pitch their single friend to a room full of other singles, complete with the good stuff, the reasons they love them and, presumably, at least one story the person being pitched would rather had remained buried forever.

The room watches, laughs and cheers, and afterwards everyone does something increasingly novel in modern dating: they mingle in real life.

There’s no swiping, no carefully curated profile and no wondering whether the person whose photographs you’ve been studying for three days actually looks anything like them in real life. Instead, it’s simply about putting people together in a room and seeing what happens.

It's a live dating format that has already attracted attention overseas, and Laura believes its appeal lies in something most of us instinctively understand, which is that our friends often know us far better than any algorithm ever could.

“They've seen you at your best and your worst, they know the difference between the type you say you want and the type you actually fall for, and they've got your back,” she says.

“An algorithm optimises for engagement; a good friend optimises for your happiness. Those aren't the same thing.”

Has dating become too much like admin?

There is something slightly depressing about the language we've developed around modern dating.

We swipe, match, unmatch, ghost and block, all while optimising our profiles, analysing response times and wondering whether two kisses at the end of a message mean anything different from one.

For something that's supposed to be about attraction, sex, romance and falling in love, it can all start to feel suspiciously like work.

Laura describes it as “unpaid admin for a shot at a drink with a stranger”.

“People aren't tired of dating,” she says. “They're tired of this way of dating.”

She's probably onto something.

Forbes Health has previously reported high levels of emotional exhaustion among dating-app users, while even the big dating platforms have been experimenting with ways to move beyond the endless swipe.

At the same time, something else has been happening offline.

Run clubs are packed, book clubs are back and social sport is booming, with people volunteering, joining groups and increasingly looking for ways to meet each other that don’t begin with staring at a photograph on a phone.

For Laura, that's no coincidence.

“A generation that grew up online is the one leading the charge back into rooms, because they know better than anyone what the screen doesn't give you,” she says.

“There's a hunger for the real thing.”

And perhaps that's the most interesting part of Date My Mate.

Underneath the laughs and potentially mortifying PowerPoint presentations, it's really about putting community back into dating.

Friends have always played matchmaker. Most of us have, at some point, uttered the words, “I have someone you should meet.” Date My Mate has essentially taken that age-old ritual, given it a microphone, added a bar and invited everyone else along.

Bringing back the butterflies

Laura believes somewhere in our pursuit of convenience, dating lost some of the very things that made it exciting in the first place.

“There's no butterflies in a notification,” she says.

“The spontaneity of catching someone's eye across a room, the nervous laugh, a mate nudging you and saying ‘go talk to them’ - we've traded all of that for a frictionless scroll, and frictionless turns out to be a bit soulless.”

Date My Mate nights are deliberately designed to be the opposite.

They're social, noisy and a little unpredictable. You can bring a friend, grab a drink and watch other people being pitched before deciding whether you're brave enough to join in.

And if you don't meet the love of your life? That's not necessarily a failed night.

“If someone leaves not having met a partner but having had a genuinely great night, made a few new friends and remembered that meeting people in real life is a joy rather than a chore, that's a win in my book,” Laura says.

“Meeting someone is a lovely bonus, but the real goal is reconnecting people with the feeling of connection.”

It's an approach that might particularly appeal to anyone who has deleted Tinder for the fourth time, sworn they'll never download Bumble again, and then found themselves reinstalling it three weeks later because they're not entirely sure where else single people actually meet.

Laura's advice to those who have lost confidence in dating is to change the environment.

“Try changing the room, not yourself,” she says. “Come somewhere your friends are with you, where the pressure's off and no one's being judged on a photo.”

There is, of course, no magic formula for finding someone. Date My Mate can't manufacture chemistry any more than Tinder can, and Laura isn't pretending it can.

But it can create the conditions for something to happen.

“Luck and timing are real, but you can absolutely stack the deck,” she says.

“Most ‘lucky’ meetings are really just being in the right kind of room - one full of open, like-minded people who are actually there to connect.”

And maybe that's where we've been going wrong.

Perhaps finding love was never supposed to be quite so efficient.

Maybe it needs a bit of awkwardness and uncertainty, a crowded room and a friend embarrassing you on a microphone.

And someone across the bar thinking, actually, your mate sounds pretty great.

Date My Mate is a Northern Beaches-founded dating concept bringing singles and their friends together at live events across Sydney, with further Northern Beaches events planned. Follow them at @datemymate_au