Continuing the “John asks embarrassing questions about how social reality actually works” series...
I’ve always heard (and seen in TV and movies) that bars and clubs are supposed to be a major place where single people pair up romantically/sexually. Yet in my admittedly-limited experience of actual bars and clubs, I basically never see such matching?
I’m not sure what’s up with this. Is there only a tiny fraction of bars and clubs where the matching happens? If so, how do people identify them? Am I just really, incredibly oblivious? Are bars and clubs just rare matching mechanisms in the Bay Area specifically? What’s going on here?
I get the impression that this is true for straight people, but from personal/anecdotal experience, people certainly do still pair up in gay bars/clubs.
Yeah, feels like the current zeitgeist in Anglo countries and upper middle class environments at least is that it is simply bad manners to ever approach anyone with romantic/sexual intentions lest it’s a context where everyone has explicitly agreed that’s what you’re there for (speed dating, dating app, etc).
Well, I don’t have much recent experience of dating myself, so it’s second-hand. But also, this user specifically is talking about Bay Area, and if there’s a single place and single social circle in the world where I expect this to be closest to true, “educated well-off tech people in the Bay Area” is it.
I’m not saying this is a truth anywhere and with everyone. Also, even if it’s not out of an actual social custom, I think at this point lots of people still resort to the internet as a way of looking for dates simply because the possibility is there and seemingly more direct (and lower effort). IIRC there’s data showing that the number of couples that started on the internet has dramatically increased across the last years, leaving almost all other methods behind.
I think people use the internet/apps for dating due to a combination of convenience in sorting/search, because it’s less awkward to be rejected online, and because it’s the path of least resistance, not because asking people out in person is considered rude.
It’s true that in middle-class/upper middle class circles, professional events/workplace is now considered ~off-limits for dating, which wasn’t true 30 years ago. However, that’s a big difference from what you originally said where only dating-specific events are okay.
People also do professional networking online + in dedicated networking events, but I don’t think it’s considered impolite to (eg) incidentally network in a ski lodge. Less effective, sure, but not impolite.
I’m also in the general Bay Area/tech/educated milieu, so I do have relevant anecdotal experience here[1].
eg I recently went on a few dates with a leftist girl I asked out at a stargazing thing. Neither of us thought it was impolite, I think. That said, it didn’t work out, and I guess I should’ve been able to figure that out a priori from stargazing not being the type of thing that’s sufficiently indicative of relationship compatibility.
TLDR: People often kiss/go home with each other after meeting in clubs, less so bars. This isn’t necessarily always obvious but should be observable when looking out for it.
OK, so I think most of the comments here don’t understand clubs (@Myron Hedderson’s comment has some good points though). As someone who has made out with a few people in clubs, and still goes from time to time I’ll do my best to explain my experiences.
I’ve been to bars and clubs in a bunch of places, mostly in the UK but also elsewhere in Europe and recently in Korea and South East Asia.
In my experience, bars don’t see too many hookups, especially since most people go with friends and spend most of their time talking to them. I imagine that one could end up pairing up at a bar if they were willing enough to meet new people and had a good talking game (and this also applied to the person they paired up with), but I feel like most of the actual action happens in clubs on the dancefloor.
I think matching can happen at just about any club in my experience, although I think . Most of the time it just takes the form of 2 people colliding (not necessarily literally), looking at each other, drunkeness making both much more obvious than usual and then them spending a while making out with each other. Sometimes things go beyond that point. Mostly not, in my experience although a friend recently told me that he rarely kisses girls in clubs and instead directly asks them home (apparently successfully).
I’ve seen enough people making out in clubs before to be confused as to why John hasn’t seen this sort of behaviour. I don’t know in what ways clubbing in the Bay Area is different from the UK, so I won’t speculate on that but I think that there is sometimes a difference in attitude depending on the music being played. In particular, I think people are more likely to make out to pop/classics than to e.g house. It may also just be that I’m more likely to kiss people when listening to music I enjoy.
Additional advice for clubs (heterosexual male):
Go there to enjoy the music (this may sound weird but enjoying clubs is very much a skill)
Don’t worry about pairing up with someone too much, this will remove opportunities to have fun (although you can still take actions which improve your odds)
Drink enough that you have no issues with dancing badly
When dancing, do literally any movement in time with the beat (ideally make the motions as varied as possible)
Humour is king, if something funny pops into your head do it.
Good examples: Miming the lyrics of a song (depending on the song), dancing with another guy (the more exaggerated, the more obvious it is you’re being funny), miming sex positions (you’d be shocked how many people in clubs are completely cool with this, and just find it entertaining)
If someone else does something entertaining support them (apart from anything else the more funny stuff is happening around you the more you have to bounce off of)
These tips do tend to require some extroversion—I don’t know how good this advice is macroscopically but in the clubbing scene this tends to be achieved via alcohol
If getting with girls really is the priority, then be obvious (there’s always the caveat not to do things likely to upset people, but I think that in the context of a) LessWrong b) clubs, the advice is overwhelmingly on the side of being far more forward and less worried about misdemeanours)
Pick one girl and single her out, don’t hedge your bets. Read body language (it’ll be more obvious when everyone else is drunk, and hearing each other can be a pain)
If rejected, brush yourself off and try again (probably in another part of the club, although remember having fun is the main thing so don’t abandon a good group)
The centre of the circle is centre stage—go nuts here, this is your opportunity to entertain people with the dumbest idea that just occurred to you
Caveats: this is what works for me. I have found that people consistently commenting they enjoy nights out with me significantly more than average, and I have found I enjoy nights out more when I employ these methods. I have not tried this everywhere and there have been places where I’ve felt a bit out of place (although I’d still argue I was having more fun than those around me).
I expect introverts to be scared by many of the ideas here, but I also feel like there are situations in life where acting more confident is universally better (public speaking is another example). Personally I’ve found this becomes easier with time and practise. Good luck all.
Edit: I just remembered I first got together with my ex-girlfriend at a bar. However we already knew each other and decided to meet up just the 2 of us, which is a somewhat different situation from most occasions I go to the bar.
How do you find good places and times to go? You just described exactly the sort of clubbing experience I most enjoy, but I’ve never had many close friends into it so I don’t really know where to look.
Yeah having the right friends to go with is important. I’ve recently finished university so that’s been easier for me than most, but in general I think it’s easier when going to an event with a decent number of people (I play ice hockey and so team/club dinners are a good example). With more people there’s a greater chance of there being a critical mass willing to go.
Aside from that I’ve recently been backpacking around Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand and I’ve found that being in a hostel makes it incredibly easy to meet people and go out locally. This does require being comfortable in that environment though.
I think that all you really need is one friend who is willing to go with you, and they then become the main point of contact when you want to go.
It’s also possible to go alone, especially in communities like the backpacker community where it’s incredibly easy to meet people. This is generally a lot more sketchy in many places though as you have no backup if you e.g get spiked or drink too much.
Oh I have no problem going clubbing alone, I can have plenty of fun dancing with strangers. The hard part is finding the right club on the right night; AFAICT most of them are dead most nights. How do you solve that problem?
Oof honestly I feel like I mostly just kind of go and find a place with decent music that’s open. I normally find there’s at least one (or maybe my standards are just low), but I’d imagine that in places where that isn’t the case you’d be able to look on the good clubs websites to see when they have events.
I know that in Oxford clubs often have weekly theme nights, such as this one https://www.bridgeoxford.co.uk/wednesday. I’d imagine that a quick browse of your favourite clubs’ websites would give you a good idea of where to go when.
I’ve not done this myself* (my clubbing days were long ago now) but a few approaches:
If you live somewhere where some areas specialize in nightlife—bars, clubs, restaurants and even cool street scene—then just be a tourist there for a bit. You’ll see/find something that seems to fit for you.
Used to be “City Papers” that tended to focus on social life and what was happening during the week/month for people to learn about. So you’d hear about live music or popular DJs and where they were playing.
2a. More current take I assume would be online versions of this.
Social apps that are about meetups (One is called that) but I suspect even FB has something along these lines, which have group you can join or are open to the public that talk about what activities, where and when the get together is occurs. So will specifically state they are NOT about any hookup possibility but other are about meeting others for more than the specific activity (activity is more about the introduction and something to so rather than the whole reason for going).
Last, you might check for any pub crawls going on. Some of the stops will be good clubs to check-out and even sometimes joining the crawl will offer opportunities. Particularly true if you’re good at joining in with some new group of strangers—very good social skills required as the group needs to want you to join.
* Well, I have used Meetups for getting together with others but that was language based for learning and practicing so anyone that seemed more interested in meeting and other activities were discouraged or kicked out if overly obvious.
What’s the age range on clubbing? I’m newly single at 43 and I might have aged out of it, and a 43 year old trying to dance the way he did in high school usually looks stupid. (Or at least my late wife thought so.)
I think with enough enthusiasm anyone can go clubbing, and tbh imo stuff which looks stupid in a club just becomes entertaining. If you really feel embarrassed about it, one way to go about this is to play into the stupidity by really overexaggerating the moves to play into the humour.
I think with age the ick comes from older guys who come to look at young girls and nothing else. I have a mate who’s 49 and comes out clubbing with us, and is more enthusiastic than any of us on the dance floor and everyone loves it.
My late wife in particular thought my dancing was bad, which is why I brought it up; I mentioned the term “dad dancing” to her and she thought it was an appropriate description. (She happened to be nine years younger than I was.)
The point about making out is very valid, I’ve seen that plenty of times, and that should count as “pairing up sexually”. For whatever reason/no good reason, it didn’t occur to me to mention it in my longer comment.
From the perspective of someone who has never actually enjoyed the clubbing experience before, the above advice sounds like good advice for how to have a better time. :)
My brother met his spouse at a club in NYC, around 2008. If I recall the story correctly, he was “doing the robot” on the stage, and then she started “doing the robot” on the floor. They locked eyes, he jumped down and danced over to her, and they were married a couple years later.
(Funny to think we’re siblings, when we have such different personalities!)
In my experience, bars these days (in the era of dating apps) are less a place where straight people pair up with strangers, and more a place where they:
Go on a first/second/third date with someone they know from a dating app or mutual friend or interest group, and maybe hook up with that person
Go with a friend group, and meet someone through a mutual friend, and maybe pair up with that person
But fwiw, it still seems reasonably common for people pair up with strangers in bars/clubs where I live. I don’t think bars/clubs are the perfect solution to meeting people romantically/sexually, but they have some advantages:
Alcohol makes people more willing to approach strangers, open up personally, and judge potential partners less critically
Bars/clubs (at least in major cities) are mostly filled with strangers you won’t see again, reducing the (perceived) costs of rejection or committing some faux pas
Bars/clubs being dark and noisy makes it easier to approach someone without a lot of other people observing you
In bars and especially clubs, (good) music creates an atmosphere where people (who like that music) feel mildly intoxicated
Clubs in particular involve quite a lot of moving around (across/to/from dance floors, bars, toilets, and chill-out areas) that create opportunities to meet/interact with strangers
That said, I think 10+ years ago bars/clubs were more of a place where people paired up with strangers. My sense is that this has changed largely due to dating apps, not by making it less acceptable to approach strangers, but more that dating apps offer an (often superior) alternative way of getting dates, which means people go to bars/clubs less to meet strangers and more to spend time with friends/partners. And even if a person is still interested in going to bars/clubs to meet strangers, it is harder when most other people are just there with their friend groups and not interested in interacting with strangers.
(Bars/clubs for gay people, and especially gay men, are different. There, it is still pretty common with random hook-ups, I should think.)
Yet in my admittedly-limited experience of actual bars and clubs, I basically never see such matching?
Personal experience—in uni, went to bars/clubs, I was generally pretty incompetent at the flirting thing, but danced with a bunch of girls, got numbers and didn’t really know what to do after that.
A handsome, charismatic friend of mine got together with a number of women, went home with a few, etc.
A quick search found this chart from a 2019 study on how couples meet. It looks like the fraction of couples who met at a bar has actually been going up in recent decades which is not what I would have predicted. But I don’t know how reliable this study is.
A member of my family (rather normie-ish) met his current girlfriend in a bar. A similar story with an EA acquaintance. But I don’t hear stories like that very often, and also caveat that these were in Eastern Europe (Poland and Estonia, respectively).
It’s out of date given how much dating has moved to apps.
And before apps, it was friends/families, and various communities like church, more than it was bars.
Whether cause or effect, alcohol interest has gone down, so it’s only weirder to picture meeting someone in a bar.
There’s some moral panic that Gen Z doesn’t know how to talk to people in person which interacts with your question somehow. Like people will excessively mourn the loss of bar dating, when actually meeting dates while drunk sort of sucks. I’m sure there’s a kernel-of-truth here, but generational moral panics are pretty much the default.
It’s extremely sitcom-friendly in a way that staring at phones and computers isn’t.
By the time it’s in TV/movies, it’s already heavily romanticized. The best example is “Cheers” which is a bar-as-church show. But the show is made when that type of community is already bygone.
When I was dating 10 years ago people still romanticized “meeting someone organically,” but not in any serious way that would stop them from app dating.
If you want to understand how a cool bar thinks, just take the way every other business thinks—”please the customer and they’ll come back”—and do the opposite.
I call it the You’re A Little Bitch strategy. Being forced to stand in line like a tamed snail—often when it’s cold and even sometimes when the bar is empty—is your first taste of the You’re a Little Bitch strategy.
While you wait, you’ll watch several all-girl groups walk to the front of the line without waiting, where the bouncer opens the rope and lets them in. Ahead of you. Because you’re a little bitch.
When you finally get to the front, you’ll notice there’s no sign with the bar’s name anywhere, because the bar likes to watch its little bitch customers go through extra trouble to find them.
You’re then asked for your ID by someone who may not have been the biggest dick in your high school—but he was the biggest dick in someone’s high school.
My model is that the primary service the Cool Bars provide is gatekeeping, so if you’re not the kind of person big spenders want to be seen with (pretty girls and impressive men) it’s going to be a hassle.
I can’t make strong claims here, as I go to bars and clubs fairly rarely. But I second the observation that it might be different in urban vs. rural areas, or (I add) different based on type of club. For example, the bar in my dad’s family’s extremely small hometown is the local gathering spot for those who want to have a beer with friends, which is very different from the loud, confusing, crowded dance clubs where you’re packed in like sardines with people you don’t know and can’t even see clearly. I think a valid analysis has to segregate by type of bar/club. The small-town bar I’m thinking of does have live entertainment and dancing (also darts, which wouldn’t work in a darkened environment where many people are quite drunk), but it’s a very different scene.
With respect specifically to the loud, dark, crowded places, lots of people find those off-putting and don’t go, or go rarely. It is fairly common advice to look elsewhere rather than at bars/clubs for dates. But: for someone who is young and anxious and not very sure how to meet people for dates/sex, going out with friends and getting moderately to very intoxicated in a place where you will also meet people you don’t know who are in a similar situation, is a way to overcome that barrier. And the fact you can’t really tell what’s going on 10 feet away, can’t hear what other people are saying very well, and everyone is expecting this to be an environment where people are drinking, means this is a more forgiving environment to do/try things that might be judged inappropriate and/or unacceptable in other environments. If you do something very obvious to indicate your sexual interest in someone in most public places, security may be called, but on the dance floor of a club, standards of acceptable behaviour are more lax, and behaviours themselves are less consistently observable. Also, if you try something with one person and get rebuffed, few to none of the other people will know it happened, so you can try again with someone else shortly thereafter. So my sense is that there are (or, were last time I checked, which admittedly was a few years ago) a lot of young (late teens to early 20′s) people bumbling their drunken way through social interactions in clubs. I’m sure plenty of them do leave the club together and have sex, but it’s hard to know for sure. Another thought: By reputation and it seems by design, clubs are places where bad decisions are made, and so if you want to stress less about your decision-making around sex and just go have some with someone fairly random who you don’t know well (many people will not want to do this, but some do), clubs give you license to do so. Or you think of yourself as not particularly worthy of the attention of those you may be interested in and so you figure you might have a better short if everyone’s drunk and can’t see each other very well, a club is a place where this will be true.
I started this whole train of thought by considering the sentence “Yet in my admittedly-limited experience of actual bars and clubs, I basically never see such matching?”, and thinking that that’s true for me as well, but I do (did, when I went) see people trying to get laid—and by its nature, the environment of a club is not conducive to my monitoring the social interactions of the people around me to see how they’re going, so I wouldn’t expect to know for sure based on what I observe while in a club, who went home with who. You learn that after the fact, if your friends tell you they hooked up.
I also saw a lot of guys sitting on the sidelines and drinking, trying to build up the “liquid courage” to initiate a conversation with someone they might like the look of, and a lot of women dancing in groups, so that they can be visible without being too vulnerable.
If you don’t like alcohol but can act disinhibited anyway, does that work too? (Also there’s the issue of whether your partner is too intoxicated to give consent...)
I am not the right person to ask about what works well in clubs, as I wouldn’t say my experiences at clubs were particularly successful or enjoyable, but I very much doubt anyone would kick you out of a club for not drinking or anything like that, so give it a shot and see how it goes? You get to decide what “works” for you, in this situation, and if you had a good time that’s a success.
As for the issue of consent while very intoxicated, yes that is an issue.
I very much doubt anyone would kick you out of a club for not drinking or anything like that, so give it a shot and see how it goes
I got in a few dance battles in clubs while sober, was pretty fun. Had my first crowdsurf while sober in a club too.
The fun sober club experience very much depends on good music, being in the mood, being with friends who are very fun and you trust very deeply, etc, imo. oh, and being the kind of person who really likes music, dancing, kinda enjoys doing dumb shit, etc
This might be a cultural/region-based thing. Stop by a bar in Alabama, or even just somewhere rural, and I think there might be more use of bars as matchmaking.
I liked the explanation as provided in “Mate: Become The Man Women Want”.
Chapter 17 has a whole section on bars and clubs. In particular:
There are virtually no cultures in history that expected their young people to find mates by throwing them randomly together into dark, noisy, threatening environments, with no structured activities or reasons for interacting, and hoping they’d sort themselves out into viable pairs. Bars and clubs present the exact opposite of a safe, easy, stress-free way to meet potential mates, to display your traits and proofs, and to work your way through a normal courtship process.
Probably very true on one level (but the young need some of that type of random experience to even learn what they want or who they want to be or be with).
But I’m not sure that is relevant for John’s question, but perhaps have taken his query incorrectly and it’s not about just meeting someone new for some unspecified level of commitment, e.g., just a short-term hookup, but is asking about where to meet his next long-term partner.
My primary motivation was actually just to understand how the world works; I didn’t necessarily plan to use that information to meet anyone at all. I just noticed I was confused about something and wanted to figure out what was going on.
TBF I always felt that if you wanted to find someone, “place where you have to make your throat hurt to speak even a few simple words” ain’t it, but I’m not known for my social prowess so I guessed maybe it was just me.
Continuing the “John asks embarrassing questions about how social reality actually works” series...
I’ve always heard (and seen in TV and movies) that bars and clubs are supposed to be a major place where single people pair up romantically/sexually. Yet in my admittedly-limited experience of actual bars and clubs, I basically never see such matching?
I’m not sure what’s up with this. Is there only a tiny fraction of bars and clubs where the matching happens? If so, how do people identify them? Am I just really, incredibly oblivious? Are bars and clubs just rare matching mechanisms in the Bay Area specifically? What’s going on here?
that trope is heavily out of date
I get the impression that this is true for straight people, but from personal/anecdotal experience, people certainly do still pair up in gay bars/clubs.
Yeah, feels like the current zeitgeist in Anglo countries and upper middle class environments at least is that it is simply bad manners to ever approach anyone with romantic/sexual intentions lest it’s a context where everyone has explicitly agreed that’s what you’re there for (speed dating, dating app, etc).
I think this is exaggerated fwiw.
Well, I don’t have much recent experience of dating myself, so it’s second-hand. But also, this user specifically is talking about Bay Area, and if there’s a single place and single social circle in the world where I expect this to be closest to true, “educated well-off tech people in the Bay Area” is it.
I’m not saying this is a truth anywhere and with everyone. Also, even if it’s not out of an actual social custom, I think at this point lots of people still resort to the internet as a way of looking for dates simply because the possibility is there and seemingly more direct (and lower effort). IIRC there’s data showing that the number of couples that started on the internet has dramatically increased across the last years, leaving almost all other methods behind.
I think people use the internet/apps for dating due to a combination of convenience in sorting/search, because it’s less awkward to be rejected online, and because it’s the path of least resistance, not because asking people out in person is considered rude.
It’s true that in middle-class/upper middle class circles, professional events/workplace is now considered ~off-limits for dating, which wasn’t true 30 years ago. However, that’s a big difference from what you originally said where only dating-specific events are okay.
People also do professional networking online + in dedicated networking events, but I don’t think it’s considered impolite to (eg) incidentally network in a ski lodge. Less effective, sure, but not impolite.
I’m also in the general Bay Area/tech/educated milieu, so I do have relevant anecdotal experience here[1].
eg I recently went on a few dates with a leftist girl I asked out at a stargazing thing. Neither of us thought it was impolite, I think. That said, it didn’t work out, and I guess I should’ve been able to figure that out a priori from stargazing not being the type of thing that’s sufficiently indicative of relationship compatibility.
The best relationships don’t go from zero to romantic in the first exchanged message[citation needed][original research?]
I don’t quite see how this comment connects to the comment you’re responding to.
TLDR: People often kiss/go home with each other after meeting in clubs, less so bars. This isn’t necessarily always obvious but should be observable when looking out for it.
OK, so I think most of the comments here don’t understand clubs (@Myron Hedderson’s comment has some good points though). As someone who has made out with a few people in clubs, and still goes from time to time I’ll do my best to explain my experiences.
I’ve been to bars and clubs in a bunch of places, mostly in the UK but also elsewhere in Europe and recently in Korea and South East Asia.
In my experience, bars don’t see too many hookups, especially since most people go with friends and spend most of their time talking to them. I imagine that one could end up pairing up at a bar if they were willing enough to meet new people and had a good talking game (and this also applied to the person they paired up with), but I feel like most of the actual action happens in clubs on the dancefloor.
I think matching can happen at just about any club in my experience, although I think . Most of the time it just takes the form of 2 people colliding (not necessarily literally), looking at each other, drunkeness making both much more obvious than usual and then them spending a while making out with each other. Sometimes things go beyond that point. Mostly not, in my experience although a friend recently told me that he rarely kisses girls in clubs and instead directly asks them home (apparently successfully).
I’ve seen enough people making out in clubs before to be confused as to why John hasn’t seen this sort of behaviour. I don’t know in what ways clubbing in the Bay Area is different from the UK, so I won’t speculate on that but I think that there is sometimes a difference in attitude depending on the music being played. In particular, I think people are more likely to make out to pop/classics than to e.g house. It may also just be that I’m more likely to kiss people when listening to music I enjoy.
Additional advice for clubs (heterosexual male):
Go there to enjoy the music (this may sound weird but enjoying clubs is very much a skill)
Don’t worry about pairing up with someone too much, this will remove opportunities to have fun (although you can still take actions which improve your odds)
Drink enough that you have no issues with dancing badly
When dancing, do literally any movement in time with the beat (ideally make the motions as varied as possible)
Humour is king, if something funny pops into your head do it.
Good examples: Miming the lyrics of a song (depending on the song), dancing with another guy (the more exaggerated, the more obvious it is you’re being funny), miming sex positions (you’d be shocked how many people in clubs are completely cool with this, and just find it entertaining)
If someone else does something entertaining support them (apart from anything else the more funny stuff is happening around you the more you have to bounce off of)
These tips do tend to require some extroversion—I don’t know how good this advice is macroscopically but in the clubbing scene this tends to be achieved via alcohol
If getting with girls really is the priority, then be obvious (there’s always the caveat not to do things likely to upset people, but I think that in the context of a) LessWrong b) clubs, the advice is overwhelmingly on the side of being far more forward and less worried about misdemeanours)
Pick one girl and single her out, don’t hedge your bets. Read body language (it’ll be more obvious when everyone else is drunk, and hearing each other can be a pain)
If rejected, brush yourself off and try again (probably in another part of the club, although remember having fun is the main thing so don’t abandon a good group)
The centre of the circle is centre stage—go nuts here, this is your opportunity to entertain people with the dumbest idea that just occurred to you
Caveats: this is what works for me. I have found that people consistently commenting they enjoy nights out with me significantly more than average, and I have found I enjoy nights out more when I employ these methods. I have not tried this everywhere and there have been places where I’ve felt a bit out of place (although I’d still argue I was having more fun than those around me).
I expect introverts to be scared by many of the ideas here, but I also feel like there are situations in life where acting more confident is universally better (public speaking is another example). Personally I’ve found this becomes easier with time and practise. Good luck all.
Edit: I just remembered I first got together with my ex-girlfriend at a bar. However we already knew each other and decided to meet up just the 2 of us, which is a somewhat different situation from most occasions I go to the bar.
How do you find good places and times to go? You just described exactly the sort of clubbing experience I most enjoy, but I’ve never had many close friends into it so I don’t really know where to look.
Yeah having the right friends to go with is important. I’ve recently finished university so that’s been easier for me than most, but in general I think it’s easier when going to an event with a decent number of people (I play ice hockey and so team/club dinners are a good example). With more people there’s a greater chance of there being a critical mass willing to go.
Aside from that I’ve recently been backpacking around Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand and I’ve found that being in a hostel makes it incredibly easy to meet people and go out locally. This does require being comfortable in that environment though.
I think that all you really need is one friend who is willing to go with you, and they then become the main point of contact when you want to go.
It’s also possible to go alone, especially in communities like the backpacker community where it’s incredibly easy to meet people. This is generally a lot more sketchy in many places though as you have no backup if you e.g get spiked or drink too much.
Oh I have no problem going clubbing alone, I can have plenty of fun dancing with strangers. The hard part is finding the right club on the right night; AFAICT most of them are dead most nights. How do you solve that problem?
Oof honestly I feel like I mostly just kind of go and find a place with decent music that’s open. I normally find there’s at least one (or maybe my standards are just low), but I’d imagine that in places where that isn’t the case you’d be able to look on the good clubs websites to see when they have events.
I know that in Oxford clubs often have weekly theme nights, such as this one https://www.bridgeoxford.co.uk/wednesday. I’d imagine that a quick browse of your favourite clubs’ websites would give you a good idea of where to go when.
I’ve not done this myself* (my clubbing days were long ago now) but a few approaches:
If you live somewhere where some areas specialize in nightlife—bars, clubs, restaurants and even cool street scene—then just be a tourist there for a bit. You’ll see/find something that seems to fit for you.
Used to be “City Papers” that tended to focus on social life and what was happening during the week/month for people to learn about. So you’d hear about live music or popular DJs and where they were playing.
2a. More current take I assume would be online versions of this.
Social apps that are about meetups (One is called that) but I suspect even FB has something along these lines, which have group you can join or are open to the public that talk about what activities, where and when the get together is occurs. So will specifically state they are NOT about any hookup possibility but other are about meeting others for more than the specific activity (activity is more about the introduction and something to so rather than the whole reason for going).
Last, you might check for any pub crawls going on. Some of the stops will be good clubs to check-out and even sometimes joining the crawl will offer opportunities. Particularly true if you’re good at joining in with some new group of strangers—very good social skills required as the group needs to want you to join.
* Well, I have used Meetups for getting together with others but that was language based for learning and practicing so anyone that seemed more interested in meeting and other activities were discouraged or kicked out if overly obvious.
What’s the age range on clubbing? I’m newly single at 43 and I might have aged out of it, and a 43 year old trying to dance the way he did in high school usually looks stupid. (Or at least my late wife thought so.)
I think with enough enthusiasm anyone can go clubbing, and tbh imo stuff which looks stupid in a club just becomes entertaining. If you really feel embarrassed about it, one way to go about this is to play into the stupidity by really overexaggerating the moves to play into the humour.
I think with age the ick comes from older guys who come to look at young girls and nothing else. I have a mate who’s 49 and comes out clubbing with us, and is more enthusiastic than any of us on the dance floor and everyone loves it.
My late wife in particular thought my dancing was bad, which is why I brought it up; I mentioned the term “dad dancing” to her and she thought it was an appropriate description. (She happened to be nine years younger than I was.)
The point about making out is very valid, I’ve seen that plenty of times, and that should count as “pairing up sexually”. For whatever reason/no good reason, it didn’t occur to me to mention it in my longer comment.
From the perspective of someone who has never actually enjoyed the clubbing experience before, the above advice sounds like good advice for how to have a better time. :)
I heard it was usually at work, school, or a social group, church. This is not fully captured by How Couples Meet: Where Most Couples Find Love in 2025, but bar is higher than I expected.
My brother met his spouse at a club in NYC, around 2008. If I recall the story correctly, he was “doing the robot” on the stage, and then she started “doing the robot” on the floor. They locked eyes, he jumped down and danced over to her, and they were married a couple years later.
(Funny to think we’re siblings, when we have such different personalities!)
Go to a bar and ask a bartender how it works! I have tried pulling the autist card on a stranger to ask for social advice and it worked.
In my experience, bars these days (in the era of dating apps) are less a place where straight people pair up with strangers, and more a place where they:
Go on a first/second/third date with someone they know from a dating app or mutual friend or interest group, and maybe hook up with that person
Go with a friend group, and meet someone through a mutual friend, and maybe pair up with that person
But fwiw, it still seems reasonably common for people pair up with strangers in bars/clubs where I live. I don’t think bars/clubs are the perfect solution to meeting people romantically/sexually, but they have some advantages:
Alcohol makes people more willing to approach strangers, open up personally, and judge potential partners less critically
Bars/clubs (at least in major cities) are mostly filled with strangers you won’t see again, reducing the (perceived) costs of rejection or committing some faux pas
Bars/clubs being dark and noisy makes it easier to approach someone without a lot of other people observing you
In bars and especially clubs, (good) music creates an atmosphere where people (who like that music) feel mildly intoxicated
Clubs in particular involve quite a lot of moving around (across/to/from dance floors, bars, toilets, and chill-out areas) that create opportunities to meet/interact with strangers
That said, I think 10+ years ago bars/clubs were more of a place where people paired up with strangers. My sense is that this has changed largely due to dating apps, not by making it less acceptable to approach strangers, but more that dating apps offer an (often superior) alternative way of getting dates, which means people go to bars/clubs less to meet strangers and more to spend time with friends/partners. And even if a person is still interested in going to bars/clubs to meet strangers, it is harder when most other people are just there with their friend groups and not interested in interacting with strangers.
(Bars/clubs for gay people, and especially gay men, are different. There, it is still pretty common with random hook-ups, I should think.)
Personal experience—in uni, went to bars/clubs, I was generally pretty incompetent at the flirting thing, but danced with a bunch of girls, got numbers and didn’t really know what to do after that.
A handsome, charismatic friend of mine got together with a number of women, went home with a few, etc.
As did a couple other friends.
Location: scotland, dundee
Years: 2021-2022
also, was pretty common from a lot of friends stories to get with people after meeting them in the club. not relationships though
also, clubs in general are very animalistic, eq driven places that i think most rats/lesswrong users dont understand
Sitting on a long table (or bar itself) is a signal that you are open to connect with other people.
A quick search found this chart from a 2019 study on how couples meet. It looks like the fraction of couples who met at a bar has actually been going up in recent decades which is not what I would have predicted. But I don’t know how reliable this study is.
A member of my family (rather normie-ish) met his current girlfriend in a bar. A similar story with an EA acquaintance. But I don’t hear stories like that very often, and also caveat that these were in Eastern Europe (Poland and Estonia, respectively).
It’s out of date given how much dating has moved to apps.
And before apps, it was friends/families, and various communities like church, more than it was bars.
Whether cause or effect, alcohol interest has gone down, so it’s only weirder to picture meeting someone in a bar.
There’s some moral panic that Gen Z doesn’t know how to talk to people in person which interacts with your question somehow. Like people will excessively mourn the loss of bar dating, when actually meeting dates while drunk sort of sucks. I’m sure there’s a kernel-of-truth here, but generational moral panics are pretty much the default.
It’s extremely sitcom-friendly in a way that staring at phones and computers isn’t.
By the time it’s in TV/movies, it’s already heavily romanticized. The best example is “Cheers” which is a bar-as-church show. But the show is made when that type of community is already bygone.
When I was dating 10 years ago people still romanticized “meeting someone organically,” but not in any serious way that would stop them from app dating.
Related (and hilarious): Why You Secretly Hate Cool Bars from WaitButWhy
My model is that the primary service the Cool Bars provide is gatekeeping, so if you’re not the kind of person big spenders want to be seen with (pretty girls and impressive men) it’s going to be a hassle.
I can’t make strong claims here, as I go to bars and clubs fairly rarely. But I second the observation that it might be different in urban vs. rural areas, or (I add) different based on type of club. For example, the bar in my dad’s family’s extremely small hometown is the local gathering spot for those who want to have a beer with friends, which is very different from the loud, confusing, crowded dance clubs where you’re packed in like sardines with people you don’t know and can’t even see clearly. I think a valid analysis has to segregate by type of bar/club. The small-town bar I’m thinking of does have live entertainment and dancing (also darts, which wouldn’t work in a darkened environment where many people are quite drunk), but it’s a very different scene.
With respect specifically to the loud, dark, crowded places, lots of people find those off-putting and don’t go, or go rarely. It is fairly common advice to look elsewhere rather than at bars/clubs for dates. But: for someone who is young and anxious and not very sure how to meet people for dates/sex, going out with friends and getting moderately to very intoxicated in a place where you will also meet people you don’t know who are in a similar situation, is a way to overcome that barrier. And the fact you can’t really tell what’s going on 10 feet away, can’t hear what other people are saying very well, and everyone is expecting this to be an environment where people are drinking, means this is a more forgiving environment to do/try things that might be judged inappropriate and/or unacceptable in other environments. If you do something very obvious to indicate your sexual interest in someone in most public places, security may be called, but on the dance floor of a club, standards of acceptable behaviour are more lax, and behaviours themselves are less consistently observable. Also, if you try something with one person and get rebuffed, few to none of the other people will know it happened, so you can try again with someone else shortly thereafter. So my sense is that there are (or, were last time I checked, which admittedly was a few years ago) a lot of young (late teens to early 20′s) people bumbling their drunken way through social interactions in clubs. I’m sure plenty of them do leave the club together and have sex, but it’s hard to know for sure. Another thought: By reputation and it seems by design, clubs are places where bad decisions are made, and so if you want to stress less about your decision-making around sex and just go have some with someone fairly random who you don’t know well (many people will not want to do this, but some do), clubs give you license to do so. Or you think of yourself as not particularly worthy of the attention of those you may be interested in and so you figure you might have a better short if everyone’s drunk and can’t see each other very well, a club is a place where this will be true.
I started this whole train of thought by considering the sentence “Yet in my admittedly-limited experience of actual bars and clubs, I basically never see such matching?”, and thinking that that’s true for me as well, but I do (did, when I went) see people trying to get laid—and by its nature, the environment of a club is not conducive to my monitoring the social interactions of the people around me to see how they’re going, so I wouldn’t expect to know for sure based on what I observe while in a club, who went home with who. You learn that after the fact, if your friends tell you they hooked up.
I also saw a lot of guys sitting on the sidelines and drinking, trying to build up the “liquid courage” to initiate a conversation with someone they might like the look of, and a lot of women dancing in groups, so that they can be visible without being too vulnerable.
If you don’t like alcohol but can act disinhibited anyway, does that work too? (Also there’s the issue of whether your partner is too intoxicated to give consent...)
I am not the right person to ask about what works well in clubs, as I wouldn’t say my experiences at clubs were particularly successful or enjoyable, but I very much doubt anyone would kick you out of a club for not drinking or anything like that, so give it a shot and see how it goes? You get to decide what “works” for you, in this situation, and if you had a good time that’s a success.
As for the issue of consent while very intoxicated, yes that is an issue.
I got in a few dance battles in clubs while sober, was pretty fun. Had my first crowdsurf while sober in a club too.
The fun sober club experience very much depends on good music, being in the mood, being with friends who are very fun and you trust very deeply, etc, imo. oh, and being the kind of person who really likes music, dancing, kinda enjoys doing dumb shit, etc
This might be a cultural/region-based thing. Stop by a bar in Alabama, or even just somewhere rural, and I think there might be more use of bars as matchmaking.
I liked the explanation as provided in “Mate: Become The Man Women Want”.
Chapter 17 has a whole section on bars and clubs. In particular:
Probably very true on one level (but the young need some of that type of random experience to even learn what they want or who they want to be or be with).
But I’m not sure that is relevant for John’s question, but perhaps have taken his query incorrectly and it’s not about just meeting someone new for some unspecified level of commitment, e.g., just a short-term hookup, but is asking about where to meet his next long-term partner.
My primary motivation was actually just to understand how the world works; I didn’t necessarily plan to use that information to meet anyone at all. I just noticed I was confused about something and wanted to figure out what was going on.
TBF I always felt that if you wanted to find someone, “place where you have to make your throat hurt to speak even a few simple words” ain’t it, but I’m not known for my social prowess so I guessed maybe it was just me.
It probably works better if the people you’re trying to hook up with aren’t total strangers—consider a high school dance, or a college frat party...