Does Dating in Vancouver Have to Suck?

Georgia Zeray was excited for this first date. She’d connected with the guy on a dating app and the banter had been great. She was looking for a relationship, and maybe this would be it! As moms everywhere love to say, “It only takes one.” But when Zeray got to the restaurant to meet her suitor for lunch, things took a sharp wrong turn.

“He pushed to see naked pictures,” she recalls. “And then wanted to go have sex in his truck after our lunch. When I said no, he pushed and suggested I come watch him get off instead.”

Getting physical on a first date is, of course, completely chill and cool—if it’s what both parties are into. But for 50-year-old Zeray (who’s using a pseudonym to protect her privacy, because the dating world is #cruel), it was just another example of why trying to find a partner in Vancouver is so damn hard.

The city has long carried a reputation for being unfriendly and flaky among those who are new to town and trying to make friends. Enter the dating pool, however, and those unfavourable traits seem only to amplify. There’s the pen pal problem, for one thing: the people you meet on dating apps who seem happy to chat back and forth, forever, without meeting up. Or there’s the ever-growing epidemic of ghosting, when everything seems to be going well and then one day, poof! They disappear from your matches or stop answering your texts, never to be heard from again (until perhaps they circle back six months later with a poetically aloof “Heyyyy”). Then there are the people who will make a plan, but right before it’s time to meet, they’ll bail—or worse, just not show up. For Vancouver singles who are actually looking to make a connection, it can feel like excruciating work to find someone who’s equally committed to the process.

“I have a love-hate thing with dating apps, because I’ve had some great experiences on there and met some wonderful men,” Zeray says. “It’s the ratio of what I have to deal with in order to find them that’s so exhausting to me, and why I’m hesitant to go back on. It’s really a numbers game.”

Part of the problem, says Vancouver-based dating coach Amy Chan, is the way the apps—Bumble, Hinge, Feeld, Raya if you’re fancy—have changed our views on not only the act of dating, but also on the actual humans we interact with along the way.

“Something happens, I think, on a very subconscious level, when you’re constantly swiping on the apps,” she says. “The act of doing this on a regular basis turns people into objects.”

Spending so much time on our phones, she argues, has also caused us to lose some of our most important skills when it comes to dating: reading physical cues, approaching someone in public and carrying on a conversation with a stranger.

“Social skills have atrophied,” Chan says. “Many people deeply want connection, but the fear of rejection and emotional vulnerability holds them back. This anxiety can lead to self-sabotaging behaviors—they may claim they want a relationship while unconsciously creating barriers to prevent real intimacy from developing.”

Chan, who has lived (and dated) in other major cities across North America, thinks that a lot of these problems are not actually Vancouver-specific at all.

“I’m hearing the same thing, whether I’m talking to people from Vancouver, L.A., or New York,” she says. “There are pros when there’s an abundance of options and you have condensed areas where people can meet, and you can meet a lot of people—and different people. I think the con is that we have so many choices, and we know people are kind of disposable because they’re a swipe away, or you can go to another bar and meet someone else.”

There are still, of course, some specific Vancouverisms when it comes to dating, and they were recently encapsulated in a viral video by content creators Jonas Gillespie and Veronica Skye. The satirical clip features Skye across the table from Gillespie, grilling him on his viable partner potential: Does he own more than one pair of skis? Does he have an Epic Pass? Does he wear Hokas? Does he have a Salomon trail run vest? And perhaps most importantly, does he have a Subaru Outback?

 

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“It’s obviously an exaggeration that everybody’s like that, but a lot of people are just so in your face about their hobby,” says Gillespie, who currently lives in Calgary but previously spent a year living and dating in Vancouver. “It’s like, ‘Cool, yeah, you have some money to spend on Patagonia.’”

Jokes aside, there are plenty of people in the city who are committed to helping others find connection. Skye, for example, noticed that her popular Mondays Run Club (covered in this magazine’s previous issue) had a matchmaking opportunity.

“As a newly single girl in Vancouver, I realized there was a serious gap in how we meet potential partners,” she says. “Beyond bars and dating apps, there weren’t many natural, low-pressure environments to spark connections.” So she launched Sole Ties: an offshoot of Mondays specifically designed for singles, who are all united by a shared love of running. Over 100 people show up to each one.

Then there’s Meet Cuties: an event at Mount Pleasant’s Chill x Studio that has single comedians go on real dates onstage with available audience members.

“I’ve been single for a year and a half, and I’m a fourth-generation Vancouverite, so I know Vancouver well, and the dating scene here is, and has always been, terrible,” says studio founder Talie Perry. “But with my business I get to meet a lot of people, and I was trying to think of a way we could have a dating show that could also be entertaining, and take away the awkwardness of dating.” It’s become one of Chill x’s most popular shows, inspiring the studio to host dog-friendly speed dating events, which are due to start in March.

There are a growing number of events specifically for the queer community, too, including Lips’ lesbian mingles; My Cheeky Date’s speed meet-ups for gay men and women; and Lez Hookup’s sapphic speed dating parties.

“We create a space where everybody starts off with one thing in common, which is that they’re all there to meet someone else,” says Lez Hookup’s Dionne Tetangco. “So already they feel safe when they walk in.” These events have been running for 15 years, and boast many relationship (and friendship) success stories— including a few marriages.

So while it may be rough out there at times, hope is far from lost for those who are looking for love in Vancouver. And, really, when it comes down to it,  a life can and should be well lived regardless of your  relationship status.

“While I do have hope, if I end up just having lovers or not having a live-in partner, that would be OK! I made this peace with it that, yes, of course, I would love someone to share a life with—and I’m also not going to chase it endlessly,” Zeray says. “I want to have a good life, regardless of if anyone’s in it.”