Why More Singles Are Trading the Swipe for a Run Club

Photo: Joshua Tsu, via Unsplash

The dating apps are telling on themselves

For years, the industry line was that swiping worked fine, people just needed to try harder. That story is falling apart in public. In its second-quarter earnings, Bumble reported paying users down 16.4% to 3.2 million and revenue down 15.2%, while Match Group said Tinder's direct revenue slipped 1% and monthly active users fell 7%, according to Fortune's August 14 report. Global app downloads have now fallen for six straight years, with category revenue down to $6.07 billion.

So the apps are quietly building their way out of the swipe. Bumble is scrapping the rule that women have to message first, stretching reply windows from 24 to 72 hours, and testing a standalone app called Plans built around curated group events instead of one-on-one matching. Tinder is expanding its Events tab, the one with trivia nights, ceramics classes and beach tennis, to 75 cities by year's end, after 71% of 18-to-24-year-olds engaged with it during the LA pilot. One researcher put it bluntly to Fortune: "A success story for a dating app is ultimately deleting it."

Meanwhile, everyone just started running together

While the apps rebuild, actual singles have already moved on, straight into running shoes. Run clubs have exploded into one of the most talked-about ways to meet someone in 2026, to the point that outlets from AOL to TechRound have been covering it as a real dating trend, not a fitness fad. Nearly three million Gen Zers in the UK reportedly now think of run clubs as the new dating app, and one in five runners says they've gone on a date with someone from their club.

It's not just running. Eventbrite's own platform data, comparing the first half of 2025 to the first half of 2026, found a surge in in-person, connection-oriented gatherings: trivia nights up 403%, mahjong meetups up 235%, birdwatching groups up 131%, all tagged with language like "singles," "come solo" or "find your people." The appeal is pretty simple once you see the pattern. A run club replaces "meet, swipe, message for two weeks, maybe meet" with meet, sweat, talk, decide, all in the same hour, with none of the profile-curation step in between.

Why this is happening now

None of this reads as a rejection of dating apps as a category. Hinge, which leaned into prompts and conversation starters over pure swiping years ago, grew revenue 22% to $203.5 million last quarter while its rivals shrank. The pattern across every one of these numbers is the same: whatever forces people to actually reveal something about themselves, instead of scrolling past another photo grid, is what's growing. Whatever rewards volume swiping is shrinking.

Run clubs and hobby meetups succeed for the same reason Hinge's prompts do. They front-load the thing dating apps kept trying to simulate with better algorithms: seeing how someone actually behaves and talks, before either of you has decided anything is a "date." There's no risk of catfishing your own personality through six curated photos when the whole group already watched you nearly trip over a curb at mile two.

What this means if you're actually dating right now

If you've been swiping into a wall for months, the data says you're not imagining it, and you're not alone in noticing it. It might be worth treating your dating app less like the whole strategy and more like one channel among several, alongside whatever run club, pottery class or trivia night already exists in your city.

And if you do stick with the apps, it's worth paying attention to how you're actually using them rather than just how many people you're matching with. That's the gap RizzStats' free upload tool is built to close: it reads your own Tinder or Hinge export and shows your real match rate, reply rate and activity over time, so you can see whether the problem is the pool of people or the way you're fishing in it.