This article was originally published on Crafting Your Home. A human contributor also wrote and edited the post.
Tinder is testing in-person dating events in Los Angeles just as singles nationwide say they want clearer intentions, less pressure and more reasons to put down the phone.
LOS ANGELES: For a city that helped turn app-based dating into an everyday ritual, Los Angeles is now becoming a testing ground for what may come after endless swiping.
Tinder, headquartered in West Hollywood, chose Los Angeles this year to pilot a new Events feature that helps users discover real-life gatherings in the app. Instead of simply matching two profiles and leaving them to arrange drinks, Tinder can point local singles toward activities such as pottery classes and trivia nights where multiple people can meet in person.
The experiment arrives at an interesting moment.
Dating companies have spent the past several months introducing a small dictionary’s worth of terms for what singles supposedly want in 2026. Tinder has “clear-coding,” “friendfluence,” and “hot-take dating.” Plenty of Fish has “love-loreing,” “ChemRIZZtry,” and “truecasting.”
Strip away the marketing language, however, and many of the terms point to the same basic desire: to make dating feel less like managing an app and more like meeting another person.
Los Angeles may be one of the clearest places to watch that transition unfold.
Tinder is trying something different in Los Angeles.
The most significant local development is not another dating buzzword. It is Tinder experimenting with ways to move its users offline.
At its Tinder Sparks 2026 product event in March, the company announced that Los Angeles would be the first test market for its Events feature.
Users can browse participating events, see which singles have expressed interest, and then potentially meet people while doing something together rather than beginning with a conventional one-on-one date. Tinder said the gatherings could include activities such as ceramics or trivia.
It represents an intriguing change for a company synonymous with swiping.
Tinder CEO Spencer Rascoff said more than half of the app’s users are younger than 30 and described that generation as wanting dating to feel more authentic, lower pressure, and worth the time they invest in it. Tinder is also experimenting with video speed dating and other ways of changing how an online match becomes an actual interaction.
Los Angeles has already seen signs of demand for alternatives.
The Guardian reported last year on a Los Angeles “Bring Back Flirting Party” that drew about 150 people for an event intentionally built around face-to-face interaction rather than profiles. Wired has also reported on Singles Only Social Club, which has organized real-world dating events in Los Angeles and New York as an alternative to conventional app experiences.
The message is not necessarily that Angelenos are deleting every dating app.
It is that some singles appear increasingly interested in using technology to get somewhere, not as the place where the entire relationship remains.
‘Clear-coding’ is really about ending the guessing game.
Few phrases capture this year’s frustration with modern dating better than “clear-coding.”
Tinder included the term among its defining dating trends for 2026, describing a broader shift toward honesty, emotional openness, and fewer mixed signals.
The behavior itself is much less complicated than its name.
Someone looking for a serious relationship says so.
Someone who wants something casual makes that clear.
Instead of sending a vague “we should hang out sometime,” a person actually proposes a day.
Instead of maintaining an undefined relationship for months because neither person wants to appear too interested, daters put their intentions on the table earlier.
Tinder’s trend report also highlights “hot-take dating,” where singles bring values and firmly held opinions into the conversation rather than carefully avoiding everything remotely controversial.
That runs against generations of first-date advice telling people to stay away from politics, religion and other potentially divisive subjects.
The new logic is almost the reverse: If a disagreement will eventually make a relationship impossible, some singles would rather find out before date six.
Whether everyone actually follows that rule is another matter. Dating-company forecasts describe what survey respondents say they value, not a scientific prediction of how millions of individual relationships will unfold.
Still, the repeated emphasis on clarity across competing platforms is notable.
Then there is ‘love-loreing,’ which sounds almost like the opposite.
Being intentional does not necessarily mean every date needs to feel like a job interview.
Plenty of Fish found another impulse in its survey of nearly 6,000 U.S. members.
It calls the behavior “love-loreing.”
The company describes it as dating “for the plot,” meaning someone agrees to a date partly because the experience itself sounds interesting, even without confidence that the person sitting across the table will become a long-term partner.
In the survey, 37% of singles said they had gone on a date to see where the story might lead, while half said they were pursuing romance through new shared experiences.
That idea fits neatly with what Tinder is trying in Los Angeles.
A pottery class gives two people something to do besides interview each other. Trivia creates conversation automatically. A group event can reduce some of the pressure that comes with meeting a stranger across a small table and trying to determine within 90 minutes whether there is “chemistry.”
It also restores an ingredient that dating apps can struggle to reproduce: spontaneity.
A person may arrive interested in one attendee and end up talking to somebody completely different.
Plenty of Fish has another elaborate name for that.
“ChemRIZZtry” describes unexpected attraction to someone a dater did not initially think would be their type. One in four respondents in its survey reported experiencing that kind of surprising chemistry. Another 42% reported connecting with someone outside their usual type, a behavior Plenty of Fish calls “curveball-crushing.”
Ridiculous names, perhaps.
Very old human behavior.
Your friends are apparently part of the date now.
Another 2026 trend gives the group chats an official job title.
Tinder calls it “friendfluence.”
The company’s research found that 42% of young singles said friends were a major influence on their dating lives. Another 37% were interested in double or group dates, according to figures from its Year in Swipe report.
That may sound familiar to anyone who has ever sent screenshots of a new match to three friends before responding.
But moving friendship directly into the date itself changes the experience.
Meeting somebody alongside friends can provide a social buffer. There are more people to keep conversation moving, fewer stretches of uncomfortable silence, and another perspective on how a potential partner behaves around other people.
Tinder has already leaned into that behavior through its Double Date feature. The company said in March that its own research showed strong interest among younger users in lower-pressure social formats.
The irony is hard to miss.
Dating apps initially allowed people to search for partners privately from a phone.
Now at least part of the industry is rebuilding the friend introductions and group encounters that existed before dating moved onto screens.
Artificial intelligence makes the authenticity question more complicated.
The push toward supposedly more human dating is happening at the same time dating platforms are adding more artificial intelligence.
Tinder is expanding its AI-powered Chemistry system in the United States and Canada. It is designed to learn more about users and provide curated recommendations rather than requiring them to browse profiles endlessly. The company has also developed AI features related to profile photos, safety, and personalization.
Bumble is moving in a similar direction. In February, it announced AI-supported profile guidance and photo feedback intended to help members create stronger profiles while presenting themselves authentically.
Singles seem to be drawing an interesting boundary around that technology.
Match Group research surveyed about 1,000 U.S. singles ages 18 to 39 and found that respondents were more open to AI handling practical parts of dating than replacing the human part of romance. Separate reporting on the findings showed 47% viewed the use of AI in romantic contexts negatively, while friends and family remained far more popular sources of dating advice than artificial intelligence.
That distinction may become one of the defining questions for dating apps.
People may welcome an algorithm that helps them find a promising person.
They may feel very differently if the charming message that person sends was composed by another algorithm.
The Associated Press has also documented people using chatbots to write dating messages, improve profiles, and navigate breakups, while continuing to express concern about whether outsourcing those interactions undermines authenticity. The technology can make dating more efficient.
Dating itself still requires two humans to show up eventually.
Not every trend deserves to become a new word.
There is a reason to approach the annual dating dictionary carefully.
Tinder and Plenty of Fish are businesses. Plenty of Fish is part of Match Group, which also owns Tinder, Hinge, Match, and several other dating brands. These annual trend reports are partly consumer research and partly marketing campaigns designed to keep the companies involved in cultural conversations about relationships. A catchy name does not automatically establish a major sociological trend.
“Love-loreing” may disappear from conversation by next Valentine’s Day.
“ChemRIZZtry” has an even steeper hill to climb.
But the underlying behaviors matter more than whether the terminology survives.
Plenty of Fish found 37% of respondents dating partly for the experience, 42% reporting attraction outside their usual type, and one-quarter saying they were showing up authentically from the first date. It also found respondents increasingly willing to label what a relationship actually is instead of leaving it deliberately ambiguous.
Tinder, meanwhile, is talking about clarity while simultaneously investing real money and product development into moving people from digital profiles toward offline encounters.
That makes the behavioral shift harder to dismiss as pure branding.
Los Angeles may show whether the post-swipe model actually works.
Los Angeles is a particularly interesting laboratory because Tinder’s Events experiment asks the company to solve the very problem dating apps helped transform.
The app made discovering strangers remarkably easy.
The difficult part became turning discovery into connection.
Now Tinder is testing whether the solution is not a better swipe, but a pottery class.
That does not mean dating apps are disappearing. Tinder is simultaneously introducing more AI, new profile features, music-based matching, astrology tools, and additional ways to interact digitally. What appears to be changing is the role the app wants to play.
Instead of being the date, it increasingly wants to become the bridge to one.
That shift may ultimately tell us more about dating in 2026 than “clear-coding,” “love-loreing,” or whatever term arrives next.
Singles still want help finding people.
They appear less interested in spending the entire experience looking at them through glass.
And in Los Angeles, where one of the world’s best-known dating apps is now actively experimenting with getting users into the same physical room, the industry’s next chapter may look surprisingly familiar.
Meet someone. Do something together. Say what you mean. Then see what happens.
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