The first thing he noticed was her smile — and her solid squat form. It was 2019 and Jacob Davis had just moved to San Diego, joining a gym in an effort to make some friends when he spotted Alexis Hill, who seemed to light up the Fit Athletic club with bubbly radiance. He was smitten. For two and a half weeks, he would tell friends and family about this new girl he was infatuated with but had never actually spoken to, not wanting to break an unspoken rule for guys at the gym: don’t be a creep.
When he did finally summon the courage to say hello — in the parking lot, which felt to him like neutral territory — a friendship soon developed between the then-24-year-olds. They’d run into each other at the gym, then spend hours chatting and exercising together. Alexis would surreptitiously take photos of Jacob working out and send them to her sister, each of them marveling at his biceps. Soon, gym sessions turned to hangouts, and eventually dates. “It’s just so crazy that we met at the gym,” Alexis says. “But I feel like it was a really good place because we align on everything when it comes to health and wellness, which is such a big part of our lives.”
As their officiant — Alexis’s brother-in-law, Dustin Damron — told their guests at their 2023 wedding by the San Diego waterfront, “It was love at first sweat.”
Alexis and Jacob’s fitness fairytale is the successful culmination of what began as a very minor yet decidedly modern relationship: the gym crush. It’s that cute person — or people! — you regularly spy across the weight room and whose presence serves as a highlight of your otherwise mundane workout. Sometimes these crushes are reciprocal; more often, they’re not. Sometimes these crushes inspire people to work out harder; often, they go nowhere, end poorly, or even cause people to have to change gyms altogether.
A gym crush can strike any person of any age, sexuality, or gender identity. TikTok is home to countless videos in which people dish on their gym crushes or offer advice on how to approach your own. (Some people say never to talk to them, while others insist you have to do the talking.) There’s now even a dating app, Lunge, that’s designed to help romance-seekers connect with people at their gym. But whether or not these gym crushes ultimately become gym marriages, like Alexis and Jacob’s, their ubiquity hints at just how strangely important these relationships can be to many people.
“I go to the gym five times a week,” says Cassy, a 28-year-old personal trainer in Toronto who asked, like others interviewed for this story, to be referred to only by her first name so as to speak freely about her gym crushes. “I might see these people two to four times a week, and I might see my friends in person once a month.”
“I’ve been doing this for almost 30 years. If I had a dollar for every time somebody said, ‘I know this sounds weird, but there’s somebody at my gym…’”
For Cassy, crushing on someone at her GoodLife Fitness feels more authentic than what she’s used to from the digital romance market, with people finding that dating apps can feel tiring and impersonal. “It’s almost like I’m a human again,” Cassy says. “You’re so used to being bombarded by people online if you are on dating apps. But it’s almost this hope that you can meet someone in person again and they’re gonna have similar values to you.”
The prevalence of gym crushes today also speaks to the simple fact that it’s now increasingly common for people to visit a gym to begin with. In 2008, when “gym crush” was first added to the Urban Dictionary, roughly 45 million Americans belonged to a health club — a number that’s risen by more than 25 million in the years since. Almost 1 in 4 Americans now have a fitness facility membership, according to the Health & Fitness Association, a trade group representing U.S. gyms. And Gen Z and millennials (i.e., those most likely to be on the hunt for a romantic partner) account for 80% of memberships, according to one survey. For many young people, gyms have become something of a default “third space,” a zone outside their home or professional lives where they can find their people.
“The gym is almost like a community that you build as if you were to go to a church,” Alexis says. “I feel like it’s hard in our generation to have areas like that where we feel connected to a community, especially in big cities.”
It makes sense, then, that people would develop feelings for someone who shares their routine. “Seeing the same people at the same times every day creates a sort of bond,” says Anisha, a 24-year-old queer woman in California who estimates she’s developed as many as 20 gym crushes over the years based on the simple fact that they were fellow regulars at her local Crunch Fitness.
But beware: this proximity might create a false sense of reality — something Max, a 24-year-old in New York, learned the hard way. After six months of swapping glances with a blond beau he kept seeing at his VITAL Climbing Gym, a flustered Max bumped into him without warning. “I was walking by and turned to him without thinking and said, ‘Oh my God, hey! How’s your week?’” Max recalls. “Not in a cute way, like, Wow, I finally broke the ice, but as if I had just caught my neighbor in the hallway or a co-worker on the train. It was 0% smooth, 0% flirty — just pure delusion that I knew this man.”
Sadly for Max, his gym crush returned only a confused look, then kept walking. “I guess I’d gotten so used to seeing him that in my head I’d been joking to myself like, ‘Well, he’s obviously also thinking about and observing me as often as I’m observing him.’”
“Think of it like a man in uniform. They’re attractive in their uniform, but once they’re out in regular clothes that attraction is gone.”
While sparks may not be flying for everybody across treadmill row, they certainly are for some gymgoers. One 2017 survey of 1,000 people who had been to the gym at least 10 times found that 43% of women and 21% of men said they had been hit on while there. Almost three-quarters of the guys surveyed admitted to staring at others while working out, as did more than half of women who were quizzed. In promising news for single people, the survey found that two-thirds of people who did hit on someone at the gym ultimately hooked up with that person, while almost a quarter even ended up in a relationship.
Christy Wise, a psychologist and life coach in San Diego, has lost track of the number of clients she’s worked with who have fallen for someone on a nearby treadmill. “I’ve been doing this for almost 30 years,” she says, “and if I had a dollar for every time somebody said, ‘I know this sounds weird, but there’s somebody at my gym…’” (She advises anyone who does ultimately date their gym crush to be sure they have other shared interests outside of exercise.)
Some of what makes gyms such ripe locations for crushes comes down to science. Exercise releases those feel-good hormones known as endorphins in your body, and when you experience this rush at the same time you spot someone attractive, you might begin to associate that feeling with the object of your interest. Studies have also found that people can become “emotionally aroused” when performing activities that release adrenaline into their body, and this leads them to feel more attracted to others around them. Because the symptoms of physiological arousal we get from exercising — a racing pulse, sweaty hands, feeling short of breath — mirror the butterflies-in-your-stomach excitement we feel from romantic attraction, it’s easy to get confused about what we’re feeling. In psychology, this phenomenon even has a term: “misattribution of arousal.”
Wise says gyms also enable peacock-like behavior where people flaunt their bodies and skills, which can trigger reactions in others. “We kind of spread our feathers for each other, and that does cause a physiological response,” Wise says. Some gymgoers take peacocking more seriously than others, of course. Cassy in Toronto admits she has different “tiers” of outfits she might wear to the gym — Tier A being true matching sets of the same brand and color, Tier B being a mix of brands or colors — depending on whether she knows her gym crush is likely to be there. “I want to look good for myself, but also I want to be noticed,” Cassy says.
“I turned to him without thinking and said, ‘Oh my God, hey! How’s your week?’ Just pure delusion that I knew this man.”
Both Cassy and Anisha also say having their gym crushes nearby inspires them to achieve better workouts, you know, just in case the other person notices. “It makes me push myself harder in the gym and whatever I’m doing automatically turns into a good workout,” Anisha says.
But if they’re being honest, for both women, their gym crushes are mostly just fantasies they allow themselves to have with no real intention of ever acting on them. It’s part of an effort Anisha says she’s made to “romanticize daily life” and add an extra bit of spice. “Gym crushes are more fun from a distance,” she says. “I don’t actually want to speak to them. The idea of them is more fun.”
“It’s almost like having multiple gym crushes is your own little fantasy universe,” Cassy said. “95% of the time nothing is going to come out of any of it.”
One married man in his 40s in New York, who asked to remain anonymous, admitted to crushing on a “ridiculously hot” young woman who has recently started attending his gym. But he said his marriage is secure enough that he and his wife frequently talk about their workout crushes. “She’s not concerned — correctly — that I would do anything,” he says. “She was particularly interested in [hearing about] the hot guy who I see all the time.”
“The gym is almost like a community that you build as if you were to go to a church.”
Though for someone like Maya, a 24-year-old in Texas, these mixed bags of intentions can be confusing. For weeks, she played “eye tag” with an attractive guy at her gym, eventually learning his name and swapping smiles and waves. But when she finally built up the courage to ask for his Instagram handle, he sheepishly replied that he was married. “I was laughing and embarrassed because I made sure to check for a ring which he didn’t have on, I guess because he works out [and doesn’t want to scratch it],” Maya says. “I wanted to crawl into a hole and die.”
But Maya’s bummer didn’t end there. Two weeks later, her crush, his wife, and their newborn baby suddenly turned up at the restaurant where she works, sending her into hiding in the back. The whole experience made her question the wisdom of ever crushing on anyone at the gym, lest the reality not match the fantasy. “Think of it like a man in uniform,” Maya says. “They’re attractive in their uniform, but once they’re out in regular clothes that attraction is gone.”
Of course, for a couple like Jacob and Alexis, now both 29, the gym proved the perfect place to fall in love and even plot out their lives — both now work as personal trainers. “We have worked really hard to be that workout power couple,” Alexis says. “We are a ride-or-die team.” Their team has gotten bigger since that first day meeting in the gym parking lot: their baby girl, Lily, arrived in early January. As their officiant said when he married them, “Today is a special day when you join forces as the ultimate workout partners for life.”
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