8 MAY 30-JUNE 5, 2024 westword.com WESTWORD | MUSIC | CAFE | CULTURE | NIGHT+DAY | NEWS | LETTERS | CONTENTS | tion that Denver’s dating scene is improving. At the same time, though, Fields notes that the demand for matchmaking services in the city has skyrocketed since 2000, even as free dating apps and websites are more popular than ever. Build-A-Boyfriend Apps After some fruitless meetups with people she met on dating apps, Karen Richards started scheduling her dates to take place in a grocery store. “So if the date was crummy, at least I would get my shopping done,” she explains. That killing-two-birds-with-one-stone approach to dating is what eventually in- spired her to start Two Birds Fit, a Denver- based matchmaking service where singles participate in exercise classes, speed-dating workouts or active events in order to meet one another. Even if they don’t hit it off, they get a good workout. “This is like my grocery store date, but now I can do it for everybody else,” says Rich- ards, who is also a personal trainer. “This is how I would like to be match-made myself.” Richards says she found online dating services like Tinder, Match and Bumble to be time-consuming and ineffective, with only one in ten dates turning out as good as “just okay.” But apps have quickly become a leading tool in the modern search for ro- mance. Three in ten U.S. adults have used a dating app, and that jumps up to 53 percent for adults under the age of thirty, according to the Pew Research Center. Last year, Fort Collins had the second-most Tinder searches in the country. But while the prevalence of dating apps is clear, their success is still up for debate. Users are split on whether the apps are benefi cial or not, with 46 percent of users reporting an overall negative experience and 53 per- cent reporting a positive experience, Pew Research found. The stats tip to 51 percent negative when looking at only women users. “The mentality around dating apps was ‘The grass is always greener,’” Richards says. “People were always just seeming like, ‘Yeah, you’re cool, but are you cool enough?’ My best experiences have always been meeting somebody in person.” Eric Alstad has witnessed numerous dates while running the Thin Man, named Westword’s best bar for a fi rst date in 2023. The bar gets a boom in business early in the week that the staff refers to as “Tinder Tuesdays,” he says, and when couples sit at the high tables across from the bar, the workers “have front-row seats.” Alstad says he sees several patrons bring new fi rst dates to the bar each week. He knows one customer who conceived two children from two different one-night stands he met at the bar fi ve years apart. But mostly, Alstad has seen people walk out in the middle of dates — a phenomenon more common in recent years than when the Thin Man fi rst opened in 2001. “People don’t mess around anymore,” Alstad says. “If they don’t think it’s going to work, they want to be done with it and move on to the next one.” Andy Bruch, owner of Westword’s 2024 best fi rst-date restaurant, Point Easy, says most of his regulars intentionally avoid bringing fi rst dates to the restaurant so that they don’t ruin their special spot if the date goes poorly. Instead, they retreat to Point Easy for solace afterward. He recalls one woman who came directly to Point Easy after a particularly terrible date. “How do you list your height as six feet tall when you’re fi ve-foot-seven?” Bruch asks. “There’s the usual ‘ghosting’ after what seemed like a great date,” he adds. “Integrity doesn’t seem to be a big thing. ... At the older end of the spectrum, it’s ‘All my friends are divorced.’ At the younger end, it’s ‘Apps are toxic; it’s hard to meet somebody naturally.’ It’s just really tough out there.” Even for those who do achieve matches through dating apps, Davis fears the practice often leads people to view romantic partners as unlimited and disposable. “We have this ‘build-a-boyfriend’ mental- ity. It’s disillusioned people,” Davis says. “You have to commit to the relationship. It’s not about fi nding this person who has all these character traits and whether you can fi nd somebody who is a little bit better. ... They’ll keep swiping forever because they’ve never really given anyone a true chance.” The Menver Myth The “Menver” phenomenon was fi rst reported in Westword back in 2006, when twenty-something transplants coined the term to describe the city’s man-heavy singles market. Eight years later, Pew Research named Denver the second-best place for women to fi nd eligible bachelors, with re- portedly 101 single employed men for every 100 single women at the time. Today the ratio is about the same...but that’s when you factor in all men, not just the available and employed ones. In Denver, 49.5 percent of the residents are female, according to U.S. Census data from 2018 to 2022; that’s less man-heavy than the state overall, where the population is 49.2 percent female — compared to 50.4 percent female in the country at large. Not all Denver women are seeking men. Around 7 percent of Colorado adults are part of the LGBT community, which leans female. But even if there are slightly more straight men in Denver than straight women, they’re not all available. Colorado has among the highest marriage rates in the country, according to the National Center for Health Statistics. Its divorce rates also rank above average, but not quite as high. While Richards says her Two Birds Fit meetups have resulted in hundreds of suc- cessful matches and at least one marriage, it’s diffi cult to get male Got a Match? continued from page 5 Project Man Cave: Sometimes You Just Need a Bro! BY BENNITO L. KELT Y For men in Denver, dating might not be the only diffi cult part of their social life. The city turns out to be a tough place to fi nd a bro, too, says Devin Weider, a tech entrepreneur who is testing Man Cave, his new app, in the lonely Mile High City. Throughout his life, Weider says he’s moved to different countries, states and cit- ies; as he’s gotten older, he’s noticed it’s been harder to make friends. “As I’ve traveled and moved, it takes about one year, two years, three years to fi nd a good friend group,” he says. “But then every time I move to a new city, I have to go start my friend group up all over again.” So last year, he started Project Man Cave with a small team of developers. The goal was to create an app that would help males living in the same city to get together in groups of four to six, hang out and develop real, lasting friendships. He’s now testing Man Cave in Denver and hopes to launch the app nation- wide to tackle male loneliness — a problem that affects more than modern nomads. “Loneliness has been a big thing in aca- demia and on TV ever since COVID. We’re trying to help solve that issue,” Weider says. “It’s crazy there’s not a better way, because technology does not address friendship.” The Man Cave app launched on April 1. It targets men 25 to 40 years old who are in relationships, new to town or looking for closer friends; about 500 have signed up for the free app so far. “We’re really trying to help men who are married, with kids, in a serious relationship, and it’s hard to make a new friend,” Weider says. “Allowing these guys to actually have a way to have guys’ night and a way to meet other friends.” Weider, who has family in Denver, re- cently settled here, but that’s not the only rea- son he chose to test Man Cave here over San Francisco, Seattle, Austin and Charlotte — all other cities with a lot of “digital transplants,” people who moved there for tech jobs. According to Weider, Colorado also tends to rank as one of the loneliest states in America. He was also looking for a medium-sized city, because people in big cities are too spread out when the number of app us- ers is still small, and smaller cities make it harder to fi nd users to join the app. “We’re Denver-only right now, hoping to build up the community here, get funding and then hopefully expand,” he says. The app has a retro video game and cave- man vibe. Users, who are called “cavemen,” select 8-bit characters for their profi le avatar and customize their “man cave.” In the game, they interact with other users around a bon- fi re; every day, the app recommends other users for them to meet. But Man Cave moves away from swiping profi le photos to fi nd matches and arrang- ing one-on-one meetups, which are classic features of dating apps. Instead, users have been organizing events with other users, like hiking meetups and movie nights. Weider says 90 percent of the planned meetups on the app have been reported as successful. “We think it’s much more natural to hang out in small groups,” Weider says. “That’s how we can actually get to know each other, make a friend and have a deep conversation.” Weider points to national data from the Survey Center on American Life indicating that one in fi ve men report having no close friends. “What we’re trying to do is combat loneli- ness through friendship,” Weider says. “We focus on in-real-life friendship, not digital.” While other apps have similar concepts — like Facebook meetups, Bumble For Friends (BFF) and Hey! VINA — Man Cave is only for guys, which Weider claims makes it the fi rst of its kind. While Facebook meetups tend to attract larger groups, Man Cave is designed for smaller groups, which is meant to help “the socially awkward person,” Weider says. BFF tends to only match people one on one, and Hey! VINA is a women-only app. For women who want a female-only app like Man Cave, “I would love to get there someday,” Weider says. “We want to make sure we have our for- mula down for men, and we’d like to release a women-only version, but step by step,” he adds. “It’s just such a common, fundamental need for all humans to have food, clothing, shelter and friends for happiness.” ■ Devin Weider helps bros connect through Man Cave. COURTESY OF DEVIN WEIDER continued on page 10
