Mobile analytics firm AppsFlyer found that 69% of dating apps installed in 2025 were deleted within a month, up from 65% the year before. Two thirds of people who download one are gone in four weeks. That number explains the crowds turning up at run clubs, climbing gyms, pottery studios and book groups on weeknights, most of them saying they are there for the activity, roughly half of them scanning the room.
The Exhaustion Numbers
A 2024 survey commissioned by Forbes Health and conducted by OnePoll found that about 8 in 10 Gen Z and millennial app users felt mentally and emotionally exhausted by them. The specifics were worse than the headline. Around 40% said they struggled to find a real connection, 41% admitted to ghosting somebody, and 27% said they had been love bombed.
What wears people down is the ratio. An evening of swiping produces a few dozen decisions, a handful of conversations that go nowhere and, on a good week, one meeting with a stranger who bears a moderate resemblance to their photographs. The effort goes in at the top and almost nothing comes out at the bottom.
A hobby group inverts that. The effort goes into something the person wanted to do anyway, and the social result is a byproduct. A bad Tuesday at a climbing gym is still a Tuesday spent climbing.
The Advantage of a Shared Activity
Meeting through an activity solves three problems the apps never did.
It removes the audition. Two people stacking chairs after a rehearsal talk the way colleagues talk, without either one performing. Nobody has been evaluated against a grid of alternatives that morning.
Repetition is the second gain. A group meets weekly, so a first impression can be revised. Someone who came across as quiet in week one turns out to be the person who fixes everyone’s bike in week four, and that information never surfaces from a profile.
The third is witnesses. A person’s behavior in front of a group they see every week is a better sample than their behavior across a table on a Thursday night, because the group has watched them lose, get tired and deal with someone irritating.
The Number of Meetings Required
Compatibility does not reveal itself in one evening. Most people need a few dates before they can say anything about somebody with confidence, and that count does not drop because the two of them met at a pottery class.
What changes is the length of each meeting. Four Wednesdays in the same room deliver about as much as four dinners, with nobody having to book anything.
The Run Club Boom
Running has been the loudest version of this. Strava’s 2024 Year in Sport report recorded a 59% rise in run club participation worldwide, with the number of new clubs increasing by a factor of 3.5. The same report found that 1 in 5 runners had been on a date with somebody they met at a club, which is the figure behind every news segment about single people trading the apps for a weekly 5K.
The scale in big cities is startling. NBC News reported on New York run clubs where one group’s weekly events grew from 20 or 30 people to between 400 and 500, with a dress code that replaces the profile. Black for single, white for taken. A co-founder described the Wednesday session as the largest singles event the city had seen.
Running gets the coverage because it scales cheaply, though the same thing is happening in quieter rooms. Climbing gyms produce conversation by design, since belaying requires trusting a stranger with a rope. Board game nights and community choirs run on fixed weekly attendance. Volunteer shifts and amateur sports leagues put people through mild adversity together, which does more for acquaintance than any icebreaker. The activity barely matters. The common feature is that the same faces are there next week.
The Saturation Problem
The romantic possibility behind the spike in running has produced the predictable second act. Members of the same New York club told reporters that the group had turned into another crowded market with the same problems they had left behind. People ghost and misrepresent their status, and somebody you dated in March runs past you every Wednesday in April while the mutual friend group quietly splits down the middle.
That is the cost of a scene becoming a destination. A 500-person club is a bar with better cardio. The groups that still work the way people hope are the ones nobody has written about yet, which is a moving target by definition.
There is also a behavior problem inside the trend. A person who joins a group purely to meet somebody tends to be visible about it within two sessions, and the group adjusts around them. The people who do well in these rooms are the ones who would keep showing up if nothing ever happened romantically, which is difficult to fake across 20 consecutive Wednesdays. That is what the filter is for, and it is the reason the advice to join something you already care about holds up in practice.
Selection Criteria for a Group
The features that make a group useful socially have almost nothing to do with the activity itself.
Size is the first one. Look for a group small enough that faces repeat and names get learned, which in practice means a few dozen regulars. Above a few hundred, the anonymity of an app returns with worse lighting.
Frequency matters as much. Weekly beats monthly by a wide margin, since a monthly group takes a year to produce the familiarity a weekly one produces in eight weeks.
Then there is the question of what happens afterward. Groups that end with a drink or a shared table generate conversations that the activity itself never allows. A club that finishes and disperses in the parking lot is a workout with company.
The last criterion is the awkward one. Mixed groups, mixed ages and a membership that turns over slowly all help, because a room where everyone arrived at the same time and knows each other already is difficult to enter at week three.
The Arithmetic of Showing Up
The trade the apps offered was volume. Hundreds of candidates, minimal information about any of them, and a filtering job left entirely to the user. A hobby group offers the reverse, which is a small number of people and a great deal of information gathered slowly and almost for free.
Neither approach is efficient. The difference is who pays the cost and in what currency. Swiping charges the user in attention and disappointment, which is what app burnout describes, while a Wednesday run charges an hour that the runner wanted to spend that way regardless.
Strava’s number is the one to keep. One in five runners went on a date with someone from their club, which is a poor return on any single evening and an excellent one across a year of Wednesdays.
