One week ago, Sienna Jones, an assistant in television writers’ rooms, was surprised to receive an alert on her phone saying that she had a secret admirer.
“I just got a notification like, ‘Someone has a crush on you,’ and I’m like, ‘OK?’” she recently recalled.
In December, Partiful, an events and invitation app popular with Gen Z, rolled out a new feature that allows users to anonymously identify a “crush” at a party they have already attended or plan to attend. The way it works is pretty simple: If two people choose each other as a crush, it’s a match, and both are notified.
Since Partiful debuted in March 2020 (“an interesting time to start an IRL party company,” one of its founders deadpanned), the app has become the engine of many a social calendar. It’s where a user might receive an invitation to a birthday party, a networking mixer or a bridal shower. While reporting other dating stories over the years, I’ve had a few singles tell me they were already stealthily using the app to scope out romantic matches. But did Partiful need to formalize one of the oldest functions of parties: setting people up?
Ms. Jones, 29, said the feature wasn’t for her — she prefers being pursued in real life.
“If I’m feeling them, they need to ask for my number or my Instagram, so we don’t even need to go to the Partiful app,” she said. “I need the ones that are going to pull up to me like, ‘Hey, what’s up, nice to know you, let me buy you a drink, let me take you out.’”
For Virginia Leopard, 28, a designer at an architecture firm who lives in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, the new feature had actually led to a surprising reconnection.
In December, while at a holiday party she hosted with friends at a cocktail bar, Ms. Leopard ran into a man with whom she had matched on Hinge about eight months earlier. Aside from a few messages exchanged, nothing materialized from that first connection, but at that party, the pair ended up talking for nearly half an hour.
“It was nice to finally meet him, even if it was an accident,” she said.
Not long after the party was over, she received an alert on Partiful that someone from the event had marked her as a “crush.” Although around 70 people were in attendance, it didn’t take long for her to deduce who it could have been.
“I wasn’t flirting with anyone else there, so I figured it might have been him,” she said. “So I guessed and crushed him back.”
Since matching on Partiful, the pair have gone on a few dates, including meeting up for drinks at a bar in Greenpoint, taking a yoga class together and going to a concert at the Bowery Ballroom. After that experience, she sees the crush feature as an easy, “lower stakes” way to show interest.
“On dating apps, you list out all your stats, like, I went to this school, I have this job, this is my height,” she said. “Versus a crush on Partiful, it’s just based on how you interpret this person at this party.”
According to Shreya Murthy, the platform’s chief executive, Partiful isn’t turning into a dating app. The crush feature, she said, exists “within the context of a broader social app that is designed to get you off your phone and spending time in the real world.”
She explained that she and her team were seizing on an opportunity to help people meet through mutual friends and mutual interests.
“If you’re both in a run club together that’s on Partiful, or you’re attending an interesting workshop or talk that you found on the Partiful Discover feed, there’s some point of shared connection that already exists before you decide to then take that in a romantic direction,” Ms. Murthy said. “And I think that that’s a really powerful way to date — on the basis of some pre-existing connection.”
Currently, 1 in 5 crushes on Partiful ends up in a match, Ms. Murthy said. Like the app itself, the crush feature is free to use.
During our call, I was picking up more than a bit of ambivalence from Ms. Jones, the television writers’ room assistant, as she weighed the pros and cons in real time. She allowed that the feature could be great for shy types, or as a novel, low-stakes way to show interest, but she also argued that it shouldn’t be used as a crutch when it came to dating.
“I mean, rejection is good, it’s good to get rejected, it builds character,” she said. But, she added in the same breath, “maybe someone’s future husband, wife or partner is on the Partiful app, so I’m not mad at it.”
Partiful users can send up to 10 crushes a month. If a user — say, someone who likes to go out but is in a relationship — wants to opt out of the feature, there’s an option to do so in the app’s settings.
Ms. Leopard was happy to hear about the option to opt out because, upon receiving another “crush” alert from a different person she met at a different event, she tried to reciprocate, only to end up guessing incorrectly.
“There were two people at the party with this person’s name, so I sent the crush to the wrong person,” she said. “So that was a little bit embarrassing because the one I sent it to was, like, married.”
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Gina Cherelus covers dating, relationships and culture for The Times and writes the weekly dating column Third Wheel.
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