Every city has a dating culture. Most people who live in one assume theirs is normal.
It isn't, particularly. It is the product of the city's specific character — its pace, its social architecture, its relationship to ambition and openness and the particular way its inhabitants have learned to be strangers to each other. Spend enough time hosting structured social evenings across enough cities, and these differences become not just visible but legible. Patterns emerge. Tendencies repeat.
Since 2014, Relish has hosted structured social evenings across more than 50 cities in the US, UK, Canada and Australia. What follows is not a ranking. It is an observation — drawn from 19,000+ evenings — about what is genuinely different about how people in different cities approach the specific experience of meeting someone new.
London: high competence, high guard
London guests arrive well-dressed and well-prepared. The city produces people who are exceptionally good at the early stages of a social introduction — articulate, composed, capable of being charming without revealing very much. The British instinct toward understatement is alive and present in the room.
What takes longer in London than almost anywhere else is the dropping of the guard. The managed presentation — witty, capable, giving very little away — is so well-practised that it can sustain an entire introduction without a crack. The conversations are excellent. The depth arrives later than it might elsewhere, and sometimes not at all within the structured format.
When it does arrive, though — when someone in a London room decides to be genuine rather than impressive — the quality of what follows is remarkable. London guests who match tend to match significantly. Something was established in the room that both people take seriously.
The city rewards patience within the format. The guests who do best in London are the ones who are not in a hurry to be liked.
New York: fast, direct, genuinely open
New York guests move faster. The conversational pace is higher, the willingness to get to the point is greater, and the tolerance for pleasantries before substance is lower than almost any other city Relish operates in.
This is not rudeness. It is efficiency — the natural social product of a city where everyone is busy and time is the scarcest resource. New York guests ask direct questions and expect direct answers. They will tell you what they do, what they are looking for, and what they think about something within the first two minutes, and they expect the same in return.
The result, at structured social evenings, is that the conversations that are going somewhere get there faster than in most cities. The introductions that aren't going anywhere are also apparent faster. The filtering is efficient, which means the matches that emerge tend to be based on something more substantive than surface compatibility.
New York guests are also, in our experience, among the most genuinely open to the format. The city has a pragmatic relationship with the idea of meeting people deliberately — there is less ambient embarrassment about being at a structured social evening than in cities where the same activity carries more social self-consciousness.
Sydney: warmth first, everything else second
Sydney operates on different social physics from London and New York. The warmth is immediate and largely genuine — Australian social culture produces people who are at ease with strangers in a way that guests from other markets sometimes find disarming.
The conversations at Sydney Relish evenings tend to open quickly and stay warm throughout. What takes longer is the movement from warmth into anything more specific. Sydney guests are sociable in a way that is not always, immediately, interested — the friendliness is real but it is also, in some sense, the default register, which means it is not always a signal of anything in particular.
The guests who do best in Sydney are the ones who can match the warmth without mistaking it for more than it is in the early stages, and who bring enough genuine curiosity to move the conversation from pleasant to substantive before the introduction ends.
Sydney evenings also tend to be among the most enjoyable in the network for the open period — the social ease that defines the city produces a room that is genuinely fun to be in, which is not nothing.
Toronto: thoughtful, considered, slower to commit
Toronto guests share some qualities with London — a certain social carefulness, a tendency toward understatement — but the texture is different. Where London's guard is polished and performative, Toronto's is more genuinely reflective. Guests think before they speak. Answers are considered. There is a quality of genuine deliberateness that runs through the room.
This produces excellent conversations that occasionally lack momentum. The thoughtfulness that makes Toronto guests interesting to talk to can also mean that the introduction ends before either person has quite committed to the direction it was heading. Both people leave having enjoyed the conversation and remain slightly uncertain whether the other person was interested.
Relish Select handles this well in Toronto — the private matching process removes the need for a conversational commitment that the city's social temperament sometimes makes difficult. Toronto matches frequently surprise both parties: two people who each assumed the other was merely being polite discover that the interest was mutual and simply understated.
Chicago: direct, warm, unpretentious
Chicago has the directness of New York without the edge, and the warmth of Sydney without the deflection. It is, in many ways, the most straightforwardly enjoyable city in the Relish network to host in — the guests are genuinely engaged, the conversations move at a good pace, and the social register of the evening tends to settle quickly into something comfortable and real.
Chicago guests are also notably unpretentious for a city of its professional calibre. The accomplishment in the room is considerable and largely unannounced — people are interested in each other rather than in establishing their credentials, which produces exactly the quality of conversation that the format is designed to facilitate.
The city also has a strong instinct for community — for the particular pleasure of a room that feels like it belongs somewhere. Chicago Relish evenings tend to produce guests who come back, which is, in the end, one of the more useful indicators of whether an evening was worth attending.
What the differences reveal
The variation across cities is, at one level, simply interesting — a record of how place shapes the way people relate to each other.
At another level, it is an argument for the format itself.
A structured social evening in London produces different conversations from one in New York or Sydney or Toronto. The guests are different, the pace is different, the social temperature is different. What is consistent is the underlying dynamic: a room of people who have chosen to be there, a format that manages the logistics and removes the social risk, and the recurring discovery that genuine connection — when the conditions are right — is less rare than contemporary dating culture has led most people to believe.
Cities date differently. People, it turns out, are remarkably similar in what they are actually looking for.
Relish hosts structured social evenings for driven professionals across 50+ cities in the US, UK, Canada and Australia. Find an evening in your city →
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