Matt is embarrassed about his reasons for joining a running club. He’s joined it in the hope of meeting someone, in either a platonic and romantic sense, because he’s sick to death of dating apps. “Despite being cliche I do think it’s a sound tactic because you’re immediately surrounded by people broadly like you,” he explains, “whereas on the apps you’re fishing in the absolute broadest pool so the chances of happening upon someone similar, or even similar-ish, are quite low. It becomes draining and demoralising.”
What Matt, who is 26 and has been single for multiple years, doesn’t realise is that he’s unwittingly engaging in 2024’s newest dating trend: NATO dating. Of no relation to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, NATO dating actually stands for “not attached to the outcome”, and it’s the latest technique to grip Gen Z's increasingly ephemeral attention spans. While Matt would like to meet someone via his running club, whichever route it takes there-on-out is out of his hands, and he's okay with that. Serious, not serious — he’s breezy.
NATO dating's online seeds were first planted years ago, way back in 2016, as part of the dialogue in Amazon Prime series Transparent, starring Jeffrey Tambor and Hari Nef. The character Vicki, when asked what she wants in a relationship, explains that she’s NATO: not attached to the outcome.
Now, eight years on, the trend has become prime fodder for Gen Z and millennials who are so done with obsessing over outcomes that they've decided to become a new kind of hopeless romantic: the fun kind.
Kimberley, 29, is exactly that. After two long-term relationships, five and seven years respectively, she says she's finally enjoying the "joy of dating" in a long term way. "I feel like I am a NATO dater in that I'm not attached to the outcome," says Kimberley, who has been NATO dating for the best part of a year, "because I've been in these long term relationships, right now I'm just trying to enjoy what's out there [...] If things develop, great, and if they don't, then I had a nice time."
It's this passiveness and enjoyment that are key to NATO dating, which means it can often be incongruous to the dopamine-fueled carrot and stick system of dating apps. “I’ve deleted two of my three apps and am being more passive about them, going less on the remaining one, which is Hinge,” says Matt. He notes the need for a new app in straight dating that is less about finding and end destination and more about having a no-expectations good time, like Grindr. "The gay community seem much more capable of that separation, of not adding weight to absolutely everything," Matt says.
Many NATO daters like Matt are reducing their dating app screen times, but Kimberley uses Hinge as a tool in her NATO dating arsenal to keep things easy and diversified (your mutual friends might prove a fertile pool to begin with, but they could prove pretty homogeneous, and skipping through them like a tasting menu might eventually piss someone off). "I usually go on five to six dates a month," she explains, "and I keep it quite varied because I'm not that interested in anything long term. If I do get on with them and have a good time, I'd see them again. We tend to do drinks, dinner and then I'll go back to theirs. It's quite clean, quite no strings."
So what's fueling young peoples' new NATO dating mindset? “Dating app culture is just particularly dire at the moment,” believes 22-year-old NATO-dater Emily, who says that she and her single friends have given up on apps, deciding that none of them are truly “built for purpose” in 2024. “It’s come to feel meaningless,” she says, “there’s no end point to using dating apps anymore. I think most young single people have almost become nihilistic — like it doesn’t really matter anyway. There’s romanticised anecdotes like ‘Yeah, my friend met his girlfriend on Hinge and they’ve been together for four years’ but then there’s the reality of it for most people, which is actually just racking up matches and not doing anything about it, rarely going on dates.”
This is supported by relationship therapist Dr Emily May, who says that choice paralysis has crippled peoples’ dating habits. “Endlessly swiping and being pressured to make quick decisions can be quite overwhelming,” Dr May explains. “It’s easy to become conditioned to the instant gratification of swiping, matching and messaging. The initial excitement can trigger a release of dopamine, but over time this response can diminish as the repeated cycle can lead to dissatisfaction from the reward not living up to expectations.”
And it’s not just the apps that have shortened our attention spans. “We’ve also become more impatient when it comes to relationships developing,” says Dr May. “The immediate gratification gained with app interactions has made the slower paced traditional dating feel less fulfilling and more frustrating. We’re more likely to give up on potential relationships that don’t instantly deliver.” Basically, we’ve Pavlov’s dogged ourselves into quick wins and rewards, but NATO dating is seeking to correct that pathway. Dating for sheer enjoyment, or out of a complete disregard for wherever it goes. This kind of nihilism can seem depressing, but also deeply liberating.
"I know now that I'm perfectly happy with who I am, what I do and how I live," Kimberley says on this point. "If I meet someone who complements that, brilliant, but I'm not putting any pressure on it. I'm going with the flow, taking it easy, seeing how it goes." She sums it up neatly: "If I get anything else it's a bonus, but it's not essential."
And so she, and Emily, and Matt, will continue on their NATO dating voyage. There is an end point to NATO dating — the point is that it doesn't matter where this end point lies. "You end up in sadness holes much less," says Matt. "If it was a line chart, there'd be less troughs." He also notes that it's not necessarily all the fault of dating apps — more the expectations we tie to them. "I think it'll be interesting to watch whether more apps like Feeld take off. Maybe people will realise that dating apps are bad for proper dating but can serve a purpose for short term things. Maybe they aren't all that bad inherently, we just want something from them they can't really offer."
So bon voyage, NATO daters. Or, as the NATO motto says, “animus in consulendo liber” (a mind unfettered in deliberation).
