A Twist in the Love Story: The business of restoring offline romance

TUSHAR MATHUR found Wingy on Ins­tagram and messaged it out of curiosity. In­stead of being asked to fill out a profile, he was put on a call. The voice on the other end, an AI “wing woman”, as Wingy styles itself, asked questions that felt unusual for dating tech. What had he liked about his previ­ous relationship? What hadn’t worked on his last date? What traits had mat­tered more than he realised at the time? The conversation lasted 15 to 20 minutes. “It made me think,” he says. That alone, he says, set it apart from most dating apps, where you are usually reduced to photos and prompts. After the call, Wingy suggested one match—not a stack of pro­files—who, it said, fit his vibe. He was added to a WhatsApp group with his match, and introductions were made. Wingy followed up a week or so later, not to pressure, but to check in. That small act made Mathur feel, in his words, “accountable”. It reminded him of something almost old-fashioned: the way, in arranged setups, someone would ask how things were going.

 Mathur is an R&B musician who runs a music marketing company. Wingy matched him with someone in the arts, a dancer. “Both of us are yappers so the date wasn’t awkward,” he says. They met about a month ago in Bengaluru and have stayed in touch since. Mathur’s previous relation­ship came through Hinge, which he con­siders one of the better platforms. Apps, he admits, make filtering efficient. In real life, it takes time to get to the important ques­tions. But, he also sees the distortion. He once looked at his sister’s Hinge: she had “a thousand likes”. She was overwhelmed and looked at none. Meanwhile, he knew men who had got zero matches. Women are inundated; men are invisible. Both ex­periences, in their own way, are demoral­ising. It is a broken economy of attention, where the currency floods one side and evaporates on the other.

That imbalance is the engine behind nearly every new dating experiment emerging in India. Wingy, a Bengaluru startup by Priyansha Mishra, is one such startup trying to reduce the tyranny of endless choice, add back a witness, and drag the entire process out of the purely digital realm where you can be anything until you are nothing. Mishra, who quit her job three months ago to build Wingy, says the problem had been “prominent” to her for years, especially after she exited a long-term relationship at 25. She used every app, until she noticed herself triag­ing her way through 10 options. This, she says, is “bad behaviour” that has emerged as an adaptation to the way dating apps are designed. Yet a purely offline solution may not scale at all. Her answer is to make AI do the onboarding and matching, then anchor the meeting in real life, especially in interest-based clusters where the con­text signals something about the person.

Wingy’s (@meetwingy) early pilots matched people at Lollapalooza, and at the Dynamite Disco Club Valentine’s party in Bengaluru. The point wasn’t just the vibe but also a kind of safety signalling. If someone is attending a niche gig, they likely share certain cultural habits: they go out, they invest in experiences, they are comfortable in public social spaces. “From a woman’s point of view,” she says, “it be­comes a metric for: this is not some creep.” The gig also reduces the burden of conver­sation. “The pressure of a classic date—sit­ting across a table in a restaurant—really wears off in a setting like the Lollapalooza. There’s already an activity grounding you, so people start talking about the music, dancing, and getting comfortable in a way that might otherwise have been awk­ward,” says Mishra. Events turn intimacy sideways; you do not stare directly at each other. It is a shift in how safety and attrac­tion can build.

The idea of meeting through shared interests is also taking other niche forms. In Bengaluru, Shruti and Harsh, co-founders of Cubbon Reads, built Bookmark, a dating app for book lovers, where matches begin with reading lists rather than profiles—and the founders say they have already been invited to a few wed­dings of couples who first connected over a favourite book. Another startup, Deuce, approaches connection through shared activities rather than profiles. Launching in Bengaluru, the platform matches people around things they already enjoy doing—running, badminton, pottery or hikes—on the premise that conversation flows more naturally when two strangers are already doing something together.

It is a principle that Ravinder Singh, au­thor, social media personality and founder of Let’s Socialise, has taken even further by building entire social rooms designed to bring single people together in person. Coming out of Covid, he was on dating apps and talked to a few women. One meeting, he says, was particularly alarm­ing. She looked nothing like her display picture. She apologised and explained it was a safety choice but he felt “cheated”,

 not because she had protected herself, but because time had been invested under a false premise. He began to wonder why dating apps often fail. The metaphor he reaches for is retail: you see a sari on a man­nequin, you enter the shop, but once you are inside, you don’t want to leave quickly because you wonder if there is a better sari inside. The shopkeeper encourages the condition. On the apps, Singh argues, hu­mans have become the sari. And the psy­chological consequence is brutal: “You feel what I don’t have is of greater value than who I have at this point in time.”

Let’s Socialise brings singles together at structured social gatherings, with ice-breakers, team rounds and light competition designed to dissolve initial awkwardness. By the final stretch, Singh says, people have made friends, formed groups and even planned to meet up. This concept of engineered proximity, achieved by creating a safe, filtered room where loneliness can loosen its grip, friendships can form, and relationships emerge organically, has been repeated at 330 Let’s Socialise events in three years.

In contrast to most mixers, Let’s So­cialise often sees more women than men at its events. “When the room is curated, when singleness is guaranteed, when pric­ing filters seriousness, and when there is meaningful moderation, women feel safer participating,” says Singh. He believes the “singles only” rule is critical here. The mo­ment you let married men with unclear intent enter, women pull back. He also talks about how 60 per cent of attendees stay back after the event, not in pairs but in groups. That, he says, is where India is more comfortable: not the high-pressure one-to-one, but the group that slowly frac­tures into smaller groups, the WhatsApp circle that becomes a Goa trip, the friend­ship that becomes a relationship without anyone having to declare romantic intent on arrival. The post-app romance, then, is a social emergence rather than a private negotiation. Apps tried to make dating sol­itary; the new wave is making it commu­nal again, but with modern sensibilities, where safety is paramount and financial independence is assumed.

Singh knows of tens of couples who met at Let’s Socialise mixers and got mar­ried, including one in Dubai, which is the company’s second-biggest market. “We don’t market ourselves as a dating or match­making platform,” he says. “In fact many attendees come simply to socialise. They are single, but their primary need is com­panionship, conversation or expanding their circle. A lot of people in their 30s, 40s and 50s just want to meet people—friends to call, people to invite to a house party, a circle to travel with, a reason not to spend every weekend alone.”

The deeper truth is that modern Indian dating is no longer just about finding love. It is about rebuilding the social infrastructure that used to carry people toward love—of­fices, campuses, joint families, neighbour­hood networks—and which has been weakened by migration, remote work, atomised entertainment and the seduc­tive convenience of the personal screen. Apps tried to replace those encounters with efficient matching. But efficiency is not intimacy. Efficiency does not create a shared world.

Singh’s answer is to put people under one roof, make sure they are single, and give them a reason to interact. The rest, he believes, is not an algorithm’s job. It is the job of being human—how you hold eye contact, how you laugh, how you treat a stranger when you’re not curating yourself for a profile. “The more AI grows, altering faces, ghostwriting charm, manufacturing entire personae, the more valuable presence becomes. The kind of presence that cannot be fil­tered, cannot be swiped away, cannot be outsourced.”

THE DATING APP market, mean­while, continues to grow on paper. Reuters, citing projections, report­ed that India’s dating app market is poised to grow to $1.42 billion by 2030. Growth in revenue does not necessarily mean growth in satisfaction. Match Group and Bumble, globally, have faced falling paying users and layoffs, which suggests that the old growth story has begun to wobble. The business model—keep people swiping, keep them paying—collides with the human desire to exit the app by finding someone. Which is why the newer Indian experiments feel like they are not simply competing with Bumble and Hinge, but trying to rewrite what “dating” even means.

Gautham Shivakumar, the Chennai-based founder of Together App, didn’t set out to fix dating. He set out to solve the problem of making friends as an adult. He had watched most of his close friends leave Chennai for Bengaluru or the US. “Adult life offers surprisingly few natural avenues to build new connections, even for extroverts,” he says. So he began look­ing at formats abroad and came across Timeleft, a global dinner-with-strangers platform that matches small groups of people through a personality quiz and brings them to a restaurant for a meal. It launched in India last year, with dinners beginning first in Bengaluru and Mum­bai, drawing attention as one of the early adopters of IRL (in real life) social connec­tion formats in India. Bunchh, a Mumbai startup, curates similar small-group din­ners for strangers, positioning itself as a friendship-first alternative to traditional dating formats. “Chennai didn’t have something like that. Together App was born out of that gap,” says Shivakumar.

Together App matches small groups for dinners through a questionnaire and a per­sonality balancing system. Users answer around 20 questions and are grouped into character types—extroverts, introverts, ambiverts—so that each table has a social mix that actually works. Each dinner has a host from the Together App team to initiate icebreakers and guide the flow. Gender ra­tio is a structural issue, he admits. On a good day, the organic ratio might skew 70/30. To encourage more women to attend, Togeth­er App allows women to bring a free plus-one and is planning women-only events to lower the entry barrier. The idea is that once women experience the environment and feel safe, they are more likely to return for mixed gatherings. Together App also holds a bigger event every month, around activi­ties like karaoke and Zumba.

A growing crop of Indian platforms is experimenting with structured, offline social connection as an antidote to swipe fatigue. UrbanMatch and Unfoldlove host curated mixers and speed-dating evenings in metros, emphasising balanced gender ratios and in-person chemistry over pro­longed texting. Earlier hybrid attempts like Floh blended app-based discovery with real-world meets before shutting down, but the underlying impulse has only strengthened: move people out of algorithms and into bounded, physical spaces where conversation does the work.

Cupid’s Soiree by Rhea Pius for instance targets professionals in fin­tech and entrepreneurs by organising premium and tightly curated events with a near-equal ratio of single men and women. The high ticket price does the job of filtering, Pius says. In fact, Ravinder Singh’s next bet is a premium format he calls Select, a smaller, tighter room within the larger Let’s Socialise universe. Unlike his 40–60 person so­cials, Select is designed for five to seven participants at a table, with a near-equal gender ratio and pre-vetted profiles shared in advance. Everyone is single, screened, and aligned in terms of life stage and se­riousness. You have to send in a short, self-recorded video so his team can assess presence, clarity, and communication. The idea is to bring together people who are accomplished, intentional, and un­willing to waste time, and to create a set­ting where compatibility can be tested in depth rather than in passing.

The first era of digital dating sold us in­finity. But infinity, it turns out, is exhaust­ing. What these founders are building now are smaller worlds. Rooms with rules. Tables with hosts. Voice calls before photos. Love, in this emerging model, is no longer a private scroll in the dark. It is social again. Not engineered by algorithm alone, but made possible by proximity and intent. The swipe hasn’t disappeared. But it has compe­tition now—from the dinner table, from the gig floor, from the moderated mixer where, by the last half hour, nobody is lis­tening to the mic because they are too busy being human.