Kate Catinella and Sam Stanton run Free Dating Advice Philly, a roving pop-up designed to make navigating dating apps and real life feel less lonely and tiresome. The duo started popping up at parks and bars around Philadelphia with a card table, a big sign, and a mission: to make navigating dating apps in Philadelphia feel less arduous and lonely by doling out dating tips, no payment required. And besides, your best friends can be the worst advice-givers.
S Census Bureau. During a recent pop-up at Meyers Brewing Company in Fishtown , Catinella and Stanton cranked out dating profile overhauls for several men, including a repeat customer who was instructed to remove a photo of his FICO credit score from Hinge.
He keeps returning mostly for the love of the game. Their advice, of course, is not a silver bullet for slogging through modern dating apps, which have become rife with scammy bots , too-good-to-be-true humble brags , and paywalls. If you are looking for 16 side pieces and you just want to have a one-night stand every night, cool. Of course, those data have caveats. In addition, only Philly proper is an outlier. The larger metro area has a marriage rate in line with its peers.
This made us wonder: Why is Philly so dang single? Or, what makes Philadelphians so noncommittal? Philly is simultaneously America's poorest big city and touted for its low barriers to home-ownership and low cost of living. Deliberately dating and marrying upward is common in economically unequal societies, said Ghodsee, noting that inequality is highly salient in Philly.
The economic precarity of dating in Philly is compounded when you factor in race. The reasons for that collapse are many, and are contested by social scientists. Black men are treated like public enemy No. The challenges facing Black singles are only part of the story. In Philly, all other major ethnic groups — white, Asian, and Hispanic — are marrying at lower rates than their counterparts in other major cities. Nearly all of the non-white singles The Inquirer interviewed noted a lack of spaces to meet other singles of color, especially if they hope to find someone from the same background.
