After a particularly bad relationship ended in 2023, tiny pieces of me covered the streets of San Diego, filling every pothole and sidewalk crack with the parts of my heart shattered by that love.
I scrolled TikTok daily, watching every influencer and content creator who offered advice on how to heal from a toxic relationship while trying to put myself back together. I felt hope as social media tarot card readers told me that my love was just around the corner, but mostly, I sat on my phone to feel less alone.
When I turned 40 in January of 2024, I was finally in a better place to start dating again, but I found that the app world was a whole other universe for people my age.
So, I took matters into my own hands and launched a dating column to seek advice from relationship experts and dissect the current local landscape. Unhinged, A Dating Series was born— my platform to check in with other local singles and find answers to all of our burning love queries.
But I’m not the first San Diego Magazine editor to take up the mantle. Throughout its 76 years, the mag has consistently covered the dating scene in the city. Going back through old issues, I find titles like “Falling in Serious Love” (1984), “Love on the Internet.com” (1997), and “Older Women, Younger Men” (2003).
A quote in that first article reminded me that, while the world has drastically changed in the last four decades, much has also stayed the same. “Singles bars are kind of like New Year’s Eve,” observes Nora Slattery, a local businesswoman. “Everyone thinks they’re supposed to be having a great time. But if you really look at the scene, most of them aren’t. And the chances of meeting someone among the vast number of people who also like French films, the symphony, and Chinese food are really slim—unless you do your drinking at a Chinese restaurant that has a foreign film festival.”
As hard as things are today, at least we can call out our passion for Francophile cinema in our Bumble bios.
After a year of writing the column— publishing nearly 40 articles, transcribing hours of interviews, getting vulnerable about my own love life, and drinking plenty of wine—I’ve finally begun to better understand San Diego’s dating climate.
While the city’s singles haven’t cracked a foolproof formula to finding their perfect match, I do believe we’re entering a more earnest era. People are getting back out there to meet others in the real world, and they’re looking for partners that share their values. Relationship structures are becoming increasingly diverse. And daters are putting in the work to become better partners by checking in with their own mental health and aiming to understand what makes their significant others feel loved—so there’s plenty to look forward to in 2025.
A Return to Meeting People IRL
When the pandemic hit in 2020, it altered everything about our lives, including the way we date. With the opportunity for in-person interactions significantly reduced, dating apps became one of the few places you could actually chat with new people, leading to a renewed focus on virtual connections.
But centering tech-driven romance was a long time coming. In February of 1997, a feature in San Diego Magazine entitled “Love on the Internet.com” discussed a novel way to search for your soulmate: “on the electronic highway.” Even then, the challenges were palpable.
“It’s so competitive,” personal matchmaker Debra Winkler told SDM writer Virginia Butterfield. “Nobody can just be attractive, they have to be gorgeous. And everybody says they look 15 years younger than they really are.”
Even after matching with someone, Butterfield points out, “you could chat for months before a real date occurs.” While it’s more rare to be off the apps than on them nowadays, the sense that they just aren’t working persists.
“I think the challenging part is getting to the date,” 44-year-old San Diego county resident Matthew Roberts says about his own romantic struggles. “There [are] just so many different profiles, and [maybe] this person looks great, but you never get a response from them, or even if you do get a response, it’s a line and then they’re gone.”
Roberts isn’t the only one over the ghosting. Last year, we began to see a huge shift in people ditching Hinge, Bumble, Tinder, and other apps to get back out into the world and more actively seek their match—a post-pandemic reemergence of sorts.
“The societal mentality of being willing to go beyond yourself and speak and connect and exchange and share with other people in any kind of setting—that’s the mentality that’s slowly but surely been shifting since we came out of the pandemic,” South Park resident Brianna Wilkerson tells me. “I feel hopeful for everybody that we’re in a place now where we can just do that with more ease and more excitement and embrace the opportunity to do that at any given moment.”
Activity-based gatherings intended to casually bring together singles with similar interests are likely to become much more common in 2025. It’s a natural progression of a phenomenon that was already gathering steam. “A perfect storm of pandemic-induced loneliness coupled with serious dating-app fatigue has turned the city’s sports leagues, running clubs, and gyms into the hottest places to date in New York,” The Cut reported last year.
The same was true of San Diego, with singles like Wilkerson taking matters into their own hands. The 44-year-old has actively been dating in the city for the past six years, but she felt that when it came to her age group, there were few opportunities to meet someone in person—after all, the bar scene had worn out its welcome some years ago.
So, Wilkerson decided to host her own singles’ mixer last July. Forty-five attendees showed up ready to make a match. Bolstered by the success of her first event, Wilkerson is throwing her second one this month and hopes to continue to offer more chances for locals to meet each other outside of their phones.
The Need for Stability and Emotional Availability Will Dictate Future Dates
If Covid pushed us to start meeting people in real life again, it also changed our priorities—after years of “unprecedented times” and an uncertain future, it’s no wonder singles began craving commitment and stability.
In November of last year, the dating app Bumble released its 2025 Dating Trends study, which surveyed more than 40,000 Gen Z and millennial users worldwide to find out what singles were searching for this year.
The data showed that 59 percent of women respondents were looking for someone emotionally dependable and emotionally stable and choosing to talk about these topics in the early stages of a courtship—proof that now, more than ever, women are no longer willing to waste their time with someone whose long-term goals and values don’t match with theirs.
Bumble is calling this “future proofing” and expects 2025 to be a transitional year, one in which people will be more upfront about what they want and need from the get-go.
“One in three users are discussing heavy-hitting topics earlier in their dating journeys than before, leading to candid conversations about budgeting, housing, climate change, and job ambitions,” a Bumble spokesperson tells me. “We’re seeing that people are taking a more active role in identifying and controlling these things where and how they can, including in their relationships.”
As a single dad looking for someone who “matches his energy,” Roberts sees the benefit of getting these questions out of the way during initial dates.
“I try to get to a place [on dates] where we’re talking about what we want in life. Values. You know, kids, dogs, traveling, what they love, health and fitness, meditation, self-improvement,” he adds. “So I talk about all those things and see how they reciprocate.”
Trading in Monogamy for Non-Traditional Relationship Structures
Of course, future proofing requires a good idea of what you want out of a relationship—and, increasingly, daters are finding that traditional monogamy may not be what feels most authentic for them.
In 2023, Match.com’s annual Singles in America study of more than 5,000 people found that 49 percent of singles indicated monogamy as their ideal sexual relationship structure, meaning that more than half are open to non-traditional structures such as consensual non-monogamy. Survey participants noted that they’d participated in swinging, open relationships, polyamory (being in committed relationships with more than one person with the consent of all people involved), and being somewhat monogamous (allowing for sexual variety either together as a couple or individually).
Those numbers are a big jump from previous studies, including a 2021 YouGov poll in which 25 percent of surveyed Americans said they’d be interested in having an open relationship.
The shift has been the most noticeable amongst members of Gen Z, who are more fluid in their sexual orientation and more diverse in their views on monogamy, according to Dr. Miriam Torres Brinkmann, a San Diego licensed marriage and family therapist and relationship coach. “Younger people [are] more open to that as a possibility that they are willing to explore. They’re less rigid,” she says.
But conversations about non-monogamy have become more mainstream across generations, with shows like Peacock’s Couple to Throuple helping lead the way.
“People are talking more about opening up their relationship. There [are] a lot more conversations around just exactly what dating means and what people’s expectations are when they’re in a relationship,” says Christopher Wilhelm, a San Diego–based licensed professional clinical counselor with more than 15 years of clinical mental health experience. “I think people nowadays feel like if they’re in an exclusive relationship, they’re kind of cutting themselves off from other possibilities.”
Choosing non-monogamy allowed 36-year-old SD local Jess Parker and his husband Alex Aragon to add a third person to their relationship. The pair and their boyfriend are in a closed throupledom, meaning that all three of them are sexually and romantically involved with each other, but they don’t date outside of their threesome (they define this dynamic as “polyfidelity”).
“When the two of us started dating polyamorously, there definitely was messiness. It was a lot harder, just because you don’t know how to react to things,” Parker says. “But as time went on, there were lessons learned; your own boundaries start being understood more.”
Dr. Brinkmann’s advice for anyone interested in polyamory or an open relationship? Constant communication. “If it works, it can be really fulfilling,” she adds. “But it requires a lot of communication and [knowing your] boundaries. If you don’t have clarity in the boundaries, then it can be very messy.”
Social Media is Helping Us Learn How to be More Mindful Daters
Thankfully, people dating today talk about the importance of boundaries a lot—but it wasn’t always that way. Past SDM dating articles from our archives never mention the word, and other now-familiar therapeutic terms like “attachment styles” and “gaslighting” are absent, too.
However, as digital content creation started to become a legitimate career path starting in the early 2000s, we saw the rise of “social media therapists” in the mid-to-late 2010s. These mental health professionals use YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok to offer educational content on therapeutic concepts, reaching people who can’t afford therapy or aren’t currently interested in it.
And many saw their platforms grow during the pandemic, when people sought online access to mental health information and support. Armed with new language, people began to speak more freely about topics that were once only discussed behind closed doors.
“Some people like to complain that psychology words, clinical words, are now super mainstream, but I see the [benefit],” Dr. Brinkmann says. “Now everyone has more awareness.”
Knowledge of these concepts can help people become better partners—take the concept of “love languages” as one example. In 1992, marriage counselor Gary Chapman introduced the term to the world in his book The 5 Love Languages.
Chapman claims that everyone gives and receives love differently—and that understanding your loved one’s ideal language is the key to a successful relationship (whether romantic or not). He identified five basic love languages: acts of service, physical touch, receiving gifts, quality time, and words of affirmation. The theory has since become so mainstream that apps like Hinge and Tinder have a dedicated space for users to list theirs.
“People are trying to figure out what they can do to speak their love language better to their partner and what theirs is so they can communicate better with them,” Wilhelm says.
Whether they gain a deeper understanding of these concepts in their own therapy sessions or from their For You pages, singles will increasingly explore therapeutic language and ideas as a way to strengthen relationships and become more mindful daters in 2025. It’s all part of an age of increased earnestness and openness and more real-life encounters—one in which we understand ourselves and each other better, hopefully finding more enduring and fulfilling love in the process.
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