For a long time, the romantic comedy films and TV shows of the past served as Cupid’s true north, where we all took our dating cues. These days, rom-coms have fallen off from where they once were. In fact, they aren’t even a designated category on Netflix.
Take a step back and you’ll see that the millennial generation has now gone through three iterations of dating media. First, there was the tail end of the rom-com era with films like How to Lose A Guy in 10 Days and Hitch. Then our watercooler talk shifted to reality shows like The Bachelor, Love Island, and Love is Blind.
But now internet creators are spearheading dating content across video clips on TikTok and Instagram reels, podcasts, and online dating shows that are even more participatory, viral, and bingeable than ever. Now many of the intermediaries like moderators and Chris Harrison are gone and there is no dating topic too taboo. For example, take YouTube channel Jubilee (8.45 million subscribers) and associated Jubilee Media, which has soared since its 2017 founding behind videos that depict the swipe-happy no-guardrails nature of dating today like “6 Tall Queens vs 1 Secret Short Girl,” or ” “Blind Dating 5 Girls Based On Their Outfits.”
Jubilee’s most popular video “30 vs 1: Dating App in Real Life” (with more than 29 million views) involves a clearly conflicted guy swiping right and left on potential dates complete with swipe audio cues from your favorite dating app. “I’m positive he was swiping based on if they were smiling or not,” one top comment levies, more interested in claiming to know the alchemy that goes into attraction and dating in 2023.
It’s more clear than ever that we’re looking to the internet to give us clues and cues on how to date. But why are people responding so strongly to dating content online these days? What opportunities exist in the realm of the internet that didn’t in the format, say, of a rom-com or a reality TV production? And most importantly, what do the creators of some of these shows have to say about more and more people getting dating cues from the internet in 2023?
Truly Blind Dating
Brandon Berman and Harrison Forman are the co-hosts and creators of UpDating, whose viral show with two (or often much more) blindfolded dating contestants, has taken YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok by storm post-pandemic. The show is actually a live dating stand up comedy mashup shot in cities around the country. It aims to be the “most raw dating show in existence.” But most people consume the show online, with UpDating’s YouTube channel nearly at the 600,000 mark and its TikTok at well over 1 million followers.
In one recent clip, two contestants happened to be on three separate UpDating episodes, finally started talking on the third, discovered that they had also matched on Hinge, and voted to keep dating at the end of the episode. If that’s not a modern dating story, what is?
Berman and Forman first met back in 2014 through a mutual friend. Berman was passionate about stand up and Forman was already pushing dating content bounds by livestreaming some of his dates. “[We] knew dating was the hook, the way to break in,” Forman told The Daily Beast. “People were just clicking on dating stuff[…]We kinda set out to create a dating show. We just connected creatively right away.”
The duo first took their format out for a spin at a Tribeca taqueria with 20 people, handing out notecards for feedback. Within five minutes, everyone was laughing. Berman and Forman, who both have marketing backgrounds, started looking at TikTok as a home for their dating content, observing that the platform was in this “weird purgatory state” pre-pandemic before exploding.
Today, UpDating is asking the questions that all of us as daters are asking, and we get to see that process play out in real time. Does height in men matter? Or asking if “body count” matters to women? The show is upending what used to be a delineation between dating participant and dating consumer. At a certain point, almost all episodes end up with members of the audience pitching a contestant on stage who still hasn’t yet been paired off to date them.
Two blindfolded contestants participate in one of UpDating’s shows. Berman and Forman, who both have marketing backgrounds, started looking at TikTok as a home for their dating content before transitioning to YouTube.
Courtesy of UpDatingOnline dating shows are also pushing back on the idea of a dating judge, or a sole dating arbiter who can help you navigate your love life. Unlike the credentialed “experts” of Married at First Sight, Berman and Forman do not purport to know the answers to most of these questions. They’re just interested in being relatable and topical and seeing that process play out in real time with real people.
And Berman believes that even if rom-coms were still as common as they once were, this thirst for authenticity would remain. “Because of the desensitization of so much content and everything over time, now it needs to be bare bones,” Berman said. “So I think that’s why people go to the internet.”
When Harry Swiped Right on Sally
Ashley Hesseltine and Rayna Greenberg, creators of the podcast “Girls Gotta Eat,” agree that the internet has allowed for more space to talk about dating in raw and authentic ways. Their podcast very much focuses on dating but also aims to speak in an open way about many topics relevant to women. “We’ll tackle anything from really fun and sexy,” Greenberg told The Daily Beast. “We’ve had [everyone from] dominatrixes on the show, to politicians… to talk about women’s rights, and everything in between.”
“Girls Gotta Eat” came of age in 2018 right around the time that podcasts were booming and became a serious place for people to get their information. A key component here is that a lot of that information is condensed and quick-hitting. “Girls Got Gotta Eat” has featured guests like Elizabeth Warren, who tackled income inequality, child care and student debt; psychotherapist Esther Perel, who makes the case that cheating isn’t always black and white; and Nick Viall, a Bachelor contestant turned dating expert.
Back in the day, Hesseltine notes that maybe she would’ve been looking to magazines to consume information about dating, but she believes that the internet is now a better repository for authentic stories. A recent episode of their show called “Nudes Gone Wrong” explores what happens when you send the wrong photo to the wrong person, upload it to social media, or even make an accidental airdrop.
“And I think it’s allowed us to normalize a lot of topics and talk about things that maybe previously weren’t allowed to be spoken about,” Greenberg said.
Jonah Feingold, director of the 2023 Paramount+ romance At Midnight and 2021 indie rom-com Dating & New York, has been creating dating content at the intersection of the internet and film for years. He plays with old rom-com formats and social media formats. Before he had his Hollywood break, he co-hosted a Hinge podcast called “Dating Sucks” with Ilana Dunn. The twist is that Feingold and Dunn went on a few dates, but ultimately ended up as friends. They later spun that podcast off into “Seeing Other People.”
Feingold’s obsession with online dating content goes back even further to his Buzzfeed days as a video fellow in 2015 . “[Buzzfeed] basically gave you a camera and said, ‘Go make something’. And so I had noticed by doing that, that a lot of people on the internet seemed to really care about the microcosms of dating, that I didn’t necessarily see in modern movies,” Feingold said. “Things that dealt with like, what does it mean when they're taking a couple hours to text you back? [Or] what happens when someone Venmo stalks you?”
One thing that stands out in Feingold’s early rom-com work, especially Dating & New York is how well technology like texting is integrated into it. Since the halcyon days of You’ve Got Mail, examples of modern rom-coms that depict the dynamic ways we use technology are hard to come by. Feingold says he really wants people to feel immersed in the modern technological realities of dating culture and “suffocate with us when you’re waiting for that text bubble to come up or disappear.”
He started applying these ideas when he made a short film for Facebook Watch called “Maybe:Josh,” or creating a series of videos on TikTok he calls “Hopeful Romantic.”
The dating market today is something of a wild wild west. People are in uncharted territory and still fashioning the rules and the structures as we go along. But the diversity of the dating content churned out, and its wild popularity, speaks to a desire that Feingold himself said he was looking for when he first started creating his dating content—the search for elusive consensus.
“I think there’s this really interesting line that exists where people are realizing they are less alone in their delusional thoughts,” Feingold said. “If anything, the internet and dating culture unites us in a way that there is a shared vocabulary and a shared dictionary of emotions and situations so you kind of feel less alone.”
