How a pineapple can help you find love
With Tinder declining, do gen z care about coupling up?
Hello!
Thank you for joining me, I’m so glad you’re here.
I’ve been out at Grandma Steggall’s 92nd birthday party this afternoon. We had a lovely little lunch put out for her, but her whole face lit up with her two besties walked in the room.
I often joke with my two besties that we should buy a house together when we’re old, and pool resources for carers and nurses. I see how much friendship means to my grandma - she was a mason, and also still goes to church each week, and these two communities have helped her stay mentally fit until recently.
I hope to be as lucky as Grandma and have so many amazing friends when I’m her age.
This week, I’d like to talk about gen z and the world of dating.
It’s not something I talk about a lot, but I am an elder millennial who is single through just being tired of the BS of dating. Every now and then, something will happen (like seeing a friend’s lovely wedding photos on Instagram) and I’ll jump back on an app to see if I can snag myself the same future. But then I’ll remember how exhausting it all is and how, actually, I lead an amazing life where I don’t feel anything is particularly missing.
I have a number of similarly aged single female friends, so being single isn’t even a lifestyle that feels out of place in 2024 millennial life. But the fact remains that it’s a privilege to be able to afford single life.
It’s much more expensive to be a singleton than it is to be in a couple; it’s estimated that a singleton pays up to £10k a year more than a coupled individual [UK Debt Expert], meaning that we need to earn more more than average (£71k+, apparently [Raisin Research]) just to have the same level of lifestyle as people in couples.
This comes down to things like splitting bills, and being able to buy larger quantities of food at a lower price. I find that either I pay more for the smaller packaged items, or buy the normal sized ones and have a heck of a lot of food waste.
The only thing we have as a small benefit - the 25% discount on council tax (which is ridic if you think that if I were in a couple I’d pay just 50%) - but even this is looking likely to be taken away in the future [The i].
As an elder millennial, I am already in a good place to survive single life through tough times. I switched up my career so that I had a higher earning potential, following this change I was able to save up to buy a home by myself, and those financially taxing years of celebrating normie milestones like weddings and baby showers seem to have come to a happy ever after.
But gen z are only just realising what’s ahead.
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I already discussed previously how some young women are looking at the unfavourable job market ahead and choosing to seek out a wealthy partner instead, with the rise in “trad wife” content:
But how are gen z going about finding a partner?
In a year that saw female-first dating app Bumble make a huge marketing blunder [Inc], it seems Tinder is also doing pretty badly, so is tailoring its products around uni students in the US [Tech Crunch], including massively discounted premium subscriptions.
There is the gen-z focused dating app Thursday, which has the USP of only allowing people to match on Thursdays (thus making sure people are using their dating app time wisely - matches disappear at midnight), which also heavily promotes its Thursday night singles events.
In a post-pandemic world with a very lonely generation emerging from a remotely driven education, this has been going well, and is even operating globally now [Tech Crunch]. But as the company grows and becomes more mainstream, members are becoming agitated at how bland the experience is becoming [Reddit], and the org actually laid off 70% of their staff earlier this year [City AM].
So apparently gen z singletons in Spain are going around the supermarket with pineapples, trying to attract other fellow singletons [Fortune]. This kind of reminds me of the Pear Ring [Pear Ring], a turquoise plastic ring that’s meant to signify that you’re single when out and about, encouraging those meet-cute encounters.
A story that really tickled me this week, however, was about this guy who ran a Facebook advert for himself, linked to a Google form, asking potential partners to supply information [Dazed]. I think this is genius. Marketing doesn’t cost a whole lot on Meta, and you can be super specific in your targeting, so it’s really ideal.
I think this topic is still very much early-days, and it will be interesting to see what happens when gen z move out of their houseshares and start attempting to live alone. Will their efforts to couple up increase, or will they continue the trend of oldies being disappointed they won’t get to be grandparents [Threads], and not getting married [SW Londoner].
Links
General
This Tab article about a John Lewis “back to uni essentials” list really tickled me - I wonder how many parents are sending their kids off to uni with a £350 coffee machine.
Substack
This was a cute newsletter about how chance encounters when we’re young can help shape our future careers.
I love that Bruce Daisley is back with his newsletter, and focusing still on that intersection between loneliness and hybrid working. It’s something I think about a lot, working as a recruitment leader in an org that is 100% on site. I personally have really enjoyed coming back to the office full time (but again, I have the privilege of being a single, childfree person). One link I really liked from his newsletter was about the rise in office pods for privacy [The FT]. Unfortunately, my employer isn’t fancy enough to have such things, and it comes at a cost of really not having any privacy in the office. I think the next few years must see employers invest in their office spaces to meet the needs of a modern workforce.
TikTok/Instagram
The trend of the week has been “we let gen z write the script” marketing videos. It started with a very good offering from Currys:
Which quickly spawned hundreds of so-so versions. I particularly liked this one from Wimpole Hall:
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If you’re thinking of doing this - don’t. The ship has sailed and it’s over saturated. There are only so many combos of gen z lingo that can continue to be entertaining.
I am sad to report that gen z still do not know what to wear to work, and it’s getting more and more hilarious.
You know that nothing gets me going more than social media posts that talk about jobs, and I’ve found this brilliant one of a chap linking him trying to explain maths to his little sister, to him going on to teach maths:
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And the link I’ll leave you with today is the energy I want you to take into next week. A guy wanting to grow his business as a personal chef came up with a genius strategy, using social media:
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Have a great week!
Until next week,
Charlotte