Singles nights have been making a comeback for a couple years now, and when Allison P. Davis recently started to get a lay of the new land, she found a huge variety of options: an AI-matchmaking singles night, singles chess, a Central Park sunset stroll for singles, speed dating specifically for tall men, a singles night for “interracial romance,” a singles “drink and doodle,” and a lot more.
Events like these had always seemed heroically uncool to Allison, but enough were springing up at hip venues downtown and elsewhere to convince her that they were worth a try. A try for what exactly, she wasn’t sure at first. She’s happy being single — she wasn’t setting out to find “a match.” In looking back at singles nights in their last heyday, in the ’90s and aughts, she saw they looked like they’d often been a genuinely good time, a party. Now that having a boyfriend was supposed to be embarrassing (see British Vogue last October), and now that being single was cool again, she wondered, could the city’s new singles circuit be liberated from the expectation of finding someone?
—Katie Ryder, features editor, New York
