How to meet friends without dating apps

Millennials have, in other words, enjoyed unprecedented freedom to opt out of live or in-person interactions, particularly with people they don’t know, and have frequently taken advantage of it. And less chatting with strangers means less flirting with strangers. The weirdly stranger-free dating world that Millennials have created provides the backdrop for a new book titled, revealingly, The Offline Dating Method. In it, the social-skills coach Camille Virginia, who works with private clients and also holds workshops, attempts to teach young people how to get dates not by browsing the apps, but by talking—in real life, out loud—to strangers.

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The Offline Dating Method bills itself as a guide for single women on “how to attract a great guy in the real world,” as opposed to on Tinder, Bumble, Hinge, or any of the other myriad dating apps on the market. At surface level, you could say, it’s a guide to getting asked out Sex and the City–style (that is, by attractive and friendly strangers who make their approaches anywhere and everywhere), though at times it veers into some of the same questionable gender-essentialist territory the HBO show often trod: For example, Virginia cautions her female reader against simply asking a man out herself if he isn’t making a move, and advises readers to ask attractive men for information or directions because “men love feeling helpful.”

It would be easy to mistake a number of tips from The Offline Dating Method for tips from a self-help book about finding love in an earlier decade, when people were idle and more approachable in public, their energy and attention directed not into the palms of their hands but outward, toward other people. The first of the guide’s three chapters is all about how to become more approachable, and suggestions include wearing interesting jewelry or accessories that invite conversation, and holding the mouth open slightly to eliminate “resting bitch face.” (One of the book’s first pieces of advice, however—to simply go to places that you find interesting and make it a point to engage with your surroundings—struck me as both timeless and newly poignant.)

The Offline Dating Method also gestures only fleetingly at what some might argue is one of the chief deterrents against flirting with strangers in 2019: the fact that it’s sometimes perceived as, or can quickly devolve into, sexual harassment. But later parts of the book mark it as a hyper-current artifact of the present—of a time when social-media skills are often conflated with social skills, and when the simple question of what to say out loud to another person can be anxiety-inducing for many. In the second and third chapters, The Offline Dating Method could virtually double as a guide for how to talk to and get to know strangers, full stop.