Dating in Pittsburgh — a community happy hour gathering for local singles started when Jillian Shearer and her business partners, Rachel and Megan Carlton, decided they were “sick of the dating apps” and wanted another option — is winding up to celebrate their first anniversary this weekend.
A year ago, Shearer and her partners envisioned a space where singles could connect in person. Their very first event attracted 75 enthusiastic participants. Shearer had no idea how big these events were going to get and how needed a safe dating space like this really was. Throughout 2024, Dating in Pittsburgh hosted 22 total events at 15 different venues. The largest event had 275 participants.
Dating in Pittsburgh will celebrate its first anniversary on Jan. 18 at the Aspen, located at 960 Penn Ave. Downtown, from 3 to 5 p.m. This milestone event was built around expressing gratitude to everyone who supported Dating in Pittsburgh in 2024. Attendees can look forward to exciting giveaways, prizes, and a wonderful afternoon filled with joy and connection.
Last year, I wrote a piece called “Dating outside the apps in Pittsburgh doesn’t have to suck.” But, while there are some opportunities to meet new people in public aside from Dating in Pittsburgh, Shearer and her partners strive to meet the needs of Gen Z and millennials who are sick of the apps and want to meet new people.
Attendees and followers of the Dating in Pittsburgh Instagram page have voiced concerns about catfish and bots on dating apps. They prefer to make connections in person, while dating apps only seem to offer a shallow dopamine rush. Some former online daters who spoke with Shearer were “concerned about falling into quick attachments rather than making connections and letting love blossom naturally.”
A question must be asked: has dating come full circle? As an elder millennial, meeting people organically was the only way to meet anyone at all in my early twenties. By the time I hit my late twenties, people I knew who were single were joining the early PC versions of Plenty of Fish, Match, and even the culty-feeling and pricey eHarmony app. Now, after apps hit their highest high mid-pandemic, they’re quickly falling off. In last year’s article, data determined that large platform dating sites for cis/straight daters, particularly Tinder, had taken a plunge numbers-wise. According to The Guardian, Tinder experienced an even bigger loss last year, “with more than half a million users abandoning the platform” from May 2023 to Dec. 2024.
Jennie Young, a scholar of applied rhetoric and owner of Substack The Burned Haystack Dating Method, attributes dopamine rush with no reward or “ludic loops” as a pattern “intentionally built into dating apps such as Tinder and the like, which are designed to keep you hooked in almost nonstop.” This addictive yet hopeless feeling is another reason people are ditching the apps.
Shearer agrees it’s harder to find connections on dating apps. She says that singles have noticed in 2024 and 2025 dating profiles are becoming more and more superficial, if not entirely AI-generated. Another thing Shearer and her partners observed is that the same straight dating pool fellas continue to be posted over and over again within dating safety groups on Facebook — and all of them are from the apps.
Over the last year, people have enjoyed making connections at the Dating in Pittsburgh events, and not just through romantic connections. While most attendees sign up hoping to meet that somebody special, some have walked away making beautiful platonic connections with other singles. Some single women mentioned to Shearer and her partners that they did not have other single friends until they went to a Dating in Pittsburgh event.
Shearer and her partners have cultivated a large, local, and active following via Instagram. Twenty-two events later, Shearer is looking to implement new marketing strategies. The crowd for Dating in Pittsburgh events is generally late 20s to early 30s while their 35+ events are generally smaller and less well attended. While there is no age limit for the general Dating in Pittsburgh events, the attendees are usually ages 21 to 45. Shearer is looking to expand her events to a wider age range.
Shearer has had eight couples reach out to her and tell her about their success stories. She assumes there are more than eight couples who have been forged over the last year at the Dating in Pittsburgh events. Shearer also met her significant other at a Dating in Pittsburgh event this summer.
Looking forward into this year and beyond, Shearer and her partners are looking to find avenues to include the LGBTQ community in upcoming events or possibly run an LGBTQ-exclusive event. She and her partners “would bring in a partner from the LGBTQ community to help navigate those events.”
This article appears in Jan 15-21, 2025.
