Where are all the men?

Last year, Emily*, a 29-year-old social media manager from Nunhead, booked herself a spot at a speed dating night at an artsy social club in Peckham. She’d been feeling increasingly frustrated by the men she was meeting on dating apps, who were “not bad guys”, she says, “just unstimulating”. Speed dating — specifically, speed dating at a venue that usually hosts electronic DJ sets and panel discussions about gentrification — seemed like an opportunity to meet men more on her wavelength; men who were perhaps creative, left-wing, and interested in finding love. Women’s tickets for the event sold out quickly, and Emily felt lucky to have secured a spot. 

But the event turned out to be a “fiasco”, Emily says. While it had been promoted as “open to all” genders and sexualities, it quickly became apparent that there just weren’t enough men for the speed-dating element of the evening to work. This seemed at least in part due to the fact that some women had turned up with men’s tickets, which they’d bought after female tickets sold out. “It was mortifying,” Emily remembers. “The organisers were running out onto the street to try and recruit random men to come in and make up the numbers.” 

This story is likely to send a shiver down the spine of people who organise in-person dating events. But it is also unlikely to come as a surprise. Against a backdrop of widespread disillusionment with dating apps, a new wave of romance-focused nightlife — aimed predominantly at millennials and Gen Z — is currently booming in London. It includes roving supper clubs in chic restaurants, pizza parties thrown for hundreds of people and speed dating evenings in buzzy cocktail bars. The intended atmosphere is warm, stylish and un-embarrassing; worlds away from the stereotype of a stilted singles mixer in a drafty town hall. But whether they’re hosting an intimate dinner for 30 or a raucous event for 300, many organisers report exactly the same pattern. Women’s tickets sell out almost immediately. Getting men through the door requires much more work. 

“When we saw the raw numbers — the raw uptake [among men compared to women] — it was like: oh, for god’s sake,” says Viggo Blegvad, the co-founder of Cafe Mondo, a cult sandwich bar that opened in Camberwell late last year. Blegvad and his business partner Jack Macrae recently hosted a singles night for people aged 25-35 as their first ever event at Cafe Mondo, featuring games, a raffle and special cocktails alongside the restaurant’s usual menu of crostini, toasted muffuletta and tiny Cubano sandwiches. 

But the run-up to the “Mondo single mingle” was anxiety-inducing: with a week to go before the event, the team simply hadn’t shifted enough men’s tickets to make it viable. (Female tickets sold out within an hour of being posted on Instagram.) Increasingly urgent promotional efforts ensued. Cafe Mondo staffers tried asking male customers about their relationship status as a way to bring up the event. (“That got uncomfortable fast,” says Blegvad.) A blackboard — “ASK US ABOUT OUR SINGLES NIGHT” — went up in the cafe. Finally, in a last-ditch push, Blegvad and Macrae decided to put something special on the menu for one night only, distorting the familiar dynamic of bars and nightclubs enticing female punters with cocktail deals or free entry. “Single men: you’ve made us do this,” they posted on Instagram. “WE WILL SELL CHEESEBURGERS AT SINGLES NIGHT. Men love cheeseburgers!”

It’s not as though Blegvad and Macrae, who are both in their 30s, don’t know how to market to a certain genre of male Londoner: walk past Cafe Mondo on any given day and you’re all but guaranteed to see several mulletted 20- and 30-something guys milling around outside, wearing the creative-bro uniform of tiny sunglasses and trucker jackets. So what, exactly, was happening here — and where have all the men gone? 

It’s a rainy night in February when I find myself in a Clapham pub with arcade games and karaoke booths, at the second ever singles night by Haystack. The London-based business, which launched in January, bills its dating events as “tech meets in real life”. Before turning up, guests are invited to fill in a questionnaire covering areas such as their career, interests and hobbies, and founder Lucy Rout runs their answers through data-matching software to identify compatible pairings. At the event, attendees are given clues — kind of like a treasure hunt — to help them “network” around the event and find the people they’ve been matched with. Although on paper this sounds horrendous, in practice it all seems to be quite jolly: shiny-haired women in Ganni blouses and men in quarter-zip fleeces excitedly dashing about the pub to find their partners (sample question: “are you the person who visited 30 countries before turning 30?”) 

Nick, who works in education and looks vaguely like a young Mark Ruffalo, introduces himself by saying this is his first time at one of these events, and he is feeling nervous. But as soon as I explain why I am there — not to date, but to research this article — his self-effacement evaporates. “That was a lie,” he says cheerfully. “I’ve been to loads of events like this. I love them. I just tell women it’s my first time because it sounds better.” 

Nick thinks that women may be “more likely to come to something like this with their female friends; there’s a sense of camaraderie and support there”. In contrast, he says, some men might be too embarrassed to ask their mates to go to a singles night together, and too intimidated to go alone. Straight men are “more sensitive to rejection” than their female counterparts, he adds. “And rejection seems scarier when it’s out in the open, compared to on the apps.”

There are more reasons at play. Rout, 30, tells me she often hears from men who assume events like speed dating will be “cringey.” A lot of men, she says, “just want to go for a pint. They don't want to go to this organized thing.” Others are sceptical about what they perceive as attempts to profit from their singledom (a ticket to a Haystack dating event costs £30, which is pretty standard for this sort of thing) — a contrast to the more optimistic, more hopeful way that women perceive alternative approaches to dating, Rout tells me. And there are more straightforward concerns. Rout says that while not one woman has asked her about the attractiveness of the men at Haystack’s event, over half of the straight men she spoke to during her market research for the business “were asking about the appearance of the women that would be there, basically”.