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The Daily

Is the Swipe Era Over?

22 Feb 2026

Transcription

Chapter 1: What was the impact of Tinder's swipe feature on dating?

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Hey, it's Vaughn Vreeland from New York Times Cooking. Baking season is here.

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Almost any cake can be turned into a one-bowl cake. There's nothing better than a freshly baked croissant from my oven.

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Oh, my God. I could eat five billion of these. That is a brownie.

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Don't be afraid. This is so forgiving. These are deluxe cookies.

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At New York Times Cooking, we've got it all. We've got tips, recipes, videos for whatever you want to bake. So come bake with us at NYTCooking.com.

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From The New York Times, I'm Rachel Abrams, and this is The Daily on Sunday. When Jonathan Bedin is asked about how he revolutionized dating, he talks about taking a shower. It was 2012, he was a software developer in California, and he'd forgotten to turn on the fan in the bathroom. So he gets out of the shower, and the mirror's all fogged, and he swipes to clean it off.

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After a second, it fogs up again, and he swipes again, and again, and again, until he finally sees his face. And this gives him a world-changing idea for his new dating app, Tinder, which is that users should also be able to swipe. Tinder could show you a person's face, a little bit of bio, and within seconds, you could swipe yay or nay, left or right. And people loved it.

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Other apps copied it, and in the years that followed, swiping changed how we date. But fast forward more than a decade to our current moment, and daters have turned on Jonathan's brilliant invention, and they are demanding something different.

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Today, I talk with my colleagues, dating columnist Gina Sherilis, daily producer Luke van der Ploeg, and writer-at-large Amanda Hess about dating in the post-Swipe era. It's Sunday, February 22nd. Gina Sherlis, welcome to the Sunday Daily. Thanks for having me. Gina, so you are the dating columnist at The New York Times. What does that mean?

Chapter 2: Why are singles experiencing dating app fatigue?

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I'm guessing tanga is not a word. Let's see.

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Tanga is a word. Oh-ho. I don't know what Tenga means, so I'm going to press down on the word, and oh, definition popped up. Former monetary unit of Tajikistan. Learn something every time I play this game.

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Even though I'm about 50 points ahead, one thing I've learned in cross-play is that the game is never over.

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I just got a notification and Dan played his last turn. Let's see who won. It's so close, but I did win.

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New York Times game subscribers get full access to Crossplay, our first two-player word game. Subscribe now for a special offer on all of our games.

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Luke Vander Ploeg, Daily Producer. Welcome to The Daily on Sunday.

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Thank you, Rachel.

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So last weekend was Valentine's Day, and we heard that you were available to go to a couple events. Tell us what you went to.

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Yeah, so I actually went to a couple of very, very different dating events.

Chapter 3: What alternative dating methods are emerging in response to app fatigue?

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Oh, my God. I think my soul just left my body. Why was it so much more for women than for men?

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I mean, I think the truth is that there are a lot more women out there interested in showing up for these dating events, and it's not as easy to get men to show up.

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Okay, so tell me about what this event actually was.

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How you doing? Is this the Swirl School thing? Yeah, my name's Chris. Luke, nice to meet you. Nice to meet you too. So it was held at this really gorgeous home in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn. Oh, you're the guy. I'm the guy. What's up? How are you? Nice to meet you. The host was this woman named Amari Collins. She is a wine influencer, wine caterer, who runs a lot of wine tasting events around New York.

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Okay, so as you can probably tell, this isn't a very traditional wine tasting.

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The event was pretty intimate. I would guess there were around 20 people there, maybe a little more.

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Wine for me is the vehicle to open the gates of hell.

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We're like people's personalities and life and like getting into it, swirling on into it.

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And Amari basically guided us through a series of fun little activities punctuated by just general mingling, sipping wine, snacking on delicious hors d'oeuvres.

Chapter 4: How do in-person dating events differ from online dating?

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Yeah, I actually don't know if they need to have a conversation. They can have like a... And understanding.

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I'm not sure. They just trade information instantly and tell you where to go.

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Yeah, this is all, like, in the realm of ideas. I heard from someone who was suggesting that, like, in the future, our lived environment could be optimized so that, let's say you, like, walk into a bar, your agent can be... Sort of like scanning the other agents and finding like the people in the bar who might be compatible for you.

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And then perhaps it could engineer a romantic moment for you by like turning up the glow of the light in the bar over the person who you're meant to speak with. That sounds so cinematic.

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But of course, like all of these things, like if there are sensors that are hooked up to our AIs that are like changing the lighting in the bars that we were going into, this is a very extensive surveillance state. Right, right. It's just like going even harder than we are already. Right. There were people there from a company called Keeper, which bills itself as an AI matchmaker.

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Keeper says that it will find your soulmate.

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For you. Big promise?

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Yeah. I filled out a lot of the keeper form just to see what kinds of things that they were asking. And for me, like someone who is married to an individual human being, I was like, I don't know how to fill this out. Like, what's my ideal man? Men are not ideal. Women are not ideal. Like people are not ideal. And that's not how people get together.

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Like they find each other through circumstance and circumstances.

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