After a particularly bad relationship ended in , tiny pieces of me covered the streets of San Diego, filling every pothole and sidewalk crack with the parts of my heart shattered by that love. I scrolled TikTok daily, watching every influencer and content creator who offered advice on how to heal from a toxic relationship while trying to put myself back together. I felt hope as social media tarot card readers told me that my love was just around the corner, but mostly, I sat on my phone to feel less alone.
When I turned 40 in January of , I was finally in a better place to start dating again , but I found that the app world was a whole other universe for people my age. So, I took matters into my own hands and launched a dating column to seek advice from relationship experts and dissect the current local landscape. Unhinged, A Dating Series was born— my platform to check in with other local singles and find answers to all of our burning love queries.
Throughout its 76 years , the mag has consistently covered the dating scene in the city. A quote in that first article reminded me that, while the world has drastically changed in the last four decades, much has also stayed the same.
And the chances of meeting someone among the vast number of people who also like French films, the symphony, and Chinese food are really slim—unless you do your drinking at a Chinese restaurant that has a foreign film festival. As hard as things are today, at least we can call out our passion for Francophile cinema in our Bumble bios. Relationship structures are becoming increasingly diverse. When the pandemic hit in , it altered everything about our lives, including the way we date. With the opportunity for in-person interactions significantly reduced, dating apps became one of the few places you could actually chat with new people, leading to a renewed focus on virtual connections.
But centering tech-driven romance was a long time coming. And everybody says they look 15 years younger than they really are. Last year, we began to see a huge shift in people ditching Hinge, Bumble, Tinder, and other apps to get back out into the world and more actively seek their match—a post-pandemic reemergence of sorts. Activity-based gatherings intended to casually bring together singles with similar interests are likely to become much more common in The same was true of San Diego, with singles like Wilkerson taking matters into their own hands.
