This Valentine’s Day, maybe it’s time to look up

Every Valentine’s Day, we have the same debate.

Are dating apps ruining romance?
Are young people incapable of commitment?
Has technology made us lonelier?

It’s an easy narrative. Swipe culture. Ghosting. Endless options. No one settling down.

But I don’t think the issue is that people don’t want love.

I think the issue is that we built a dating culture optimized for scrolling instead of meeting.

And that difference changes everything.

Less than a year ago, my co founder Roi and I were talking about being single and going to events.

Weddings. Conferences. Parties. Festivals.

The kinds of places where you know, statistically, there must be other single people in the room.

And yet, we kept noticing the same pattern.

You show up.
You scan the room.
You wonder who’s single.
You hesitate.

Then you stay with your friends and leave having met no one new.

Not because you didn’t want to.

Because you didn’t know.

Later you find out, “Oh, she was single.”
“I had no idea he was single.”
“You two should have met.”

It felt ridiculous.

In a world where we can track food delivery in real time and FaceTime across continents, we still walk into rooms full of potential matches with zero clarity.

That was the friction.

Not desire. Not effort. Uncertainty.

Singles don’t have a motivation problem.

They have an information problem.

There’s something else we rarely admit.

Rejection feels public.

Approaching someone at a wedding or a bar without knowing whether they’re single or interested feels risky. You don’t want to misread signals. You don’t want to make someone uncomfortable. You don’t want to feel embarrassed.

So instead of acting, people default to safety.

They stay on dating apps where rejection is private and invisible.

Swipe left.
Swipe right.
Repeat.

Dating apps solved one important issue. Everyone there is single and opted in.

But they created a new problem.

They pulled the entire interaction out of real life.

Now dating happens primarily on a screen, and meeting in person feels like the secondary step instead of the main one.

And somewhere along the way, we forgot that chemistry doesn’t live in a profile.

It lives in a room.

That conversation with Roi became the starting point for Hooked.

We didn’t want to build another infinite swipe app. We wanted to build something temporary. Something that existed only inside real life events.

When you attend a wedding, party, or conference using Hooked, you can join that specific event space. You can see who else is single and open to meeting. If interest is mutual, you know before you walk across the room.

And when the event ends, everything disappears.

Profiles. Matches. Chats.

Gone.

Because the goal isn’t to keep people online.

It’s to push them into real life.

Since launching in Israel, Hooked has been used at more than 70 events across six cities, generating hundreds of matches, with about 65 percent of participants actively engaging rather than just passively joining

But the real metric isn’t matches.

It’s movement.

People walking up to each other.

People staying longer at events.

People leaving with phone numbers instead of screenshots.

When uncertainty drops, courage rises.

Valentine’s Day highlights something important.

We don’t actually want better filtering.

We want to feel chosen.

We want someone to look at us, in person, and decide to walk over.

But our current dating culture often trains us to evaluate instead of engage.

Infinite choice makes everyone slightly replaceable. When there’s always another profile one swipe away, urgency disappears. Conversations stall. Energy fades.

Young people aren’t disinterested in commitment. They’re disinterested in digital courtship that rarely translates into real life.

And that’s why the next evolution of dating might not be more features.

It might be better context.

After seeing how singles responded in Israel, it became clear that this wasn’t just a local frustration.

It’s global.

We’re now expanding to the United States, starting with a college brand ambassador program launching this spring.

Why college campuses?

Because campuses are full of real life interaction. Football games. Fraternity parties. Campus events. Conferences. Social mixers.

Thousands of students physically in the same spaces, yet still defaulting to apps when they go home.

Our ambassador program is focused on bringing Hooked directly into those environments. Partnering with student leaders. Activating events. Turning existing social spaces into opportunities for real connection.

Not replacing dating apps.

Not shaming them.

But shifting the center of gravity back to real life.

When students know who else is single at the same event, something changes. The fear of approaching drops. Conversations start faster. Energy feels different.

Technology becomes a catalyst, not a container.

This isn’t an argument to delete every dating app on your phone.

It’s an argument to rethink what we’re optimizing for.

If the goal is engagement time, endless scrolling works.

If the goal is relationships, the metric should be different.

Did people meet?

Did they step away from their screens?

Did they actually talk?

Roi and I didn’t start Hooked because we believed romance was dying.

We started it because we believed the opposite.

We believed singles want to meet.

They just need clarity.

And sometimes, clarity is the difference between staying in your corner and walking across the room.

This Valentine’s Day, maybe the boldest move isn’t downloading another app.

Maybe it’s looking up.

Because no one falls in love with a profile.

They fall in love with a person standing right in front of them.

Noa Barazani is Co Founder of Hooked, a live social app designed to help singles meet in real life at events. She holds a BBA in Finance from The University of Texas at Austin and previously served as Head of Strategic Finance Israel at Pagaya. She is also the founder of Olim in TLV.

She founded Hooked alongside her co founder, Roi, after countless conversations about being single and attending weddings, conferences, and social events without knowing who else in the room was actually single. Together, they set out to redesign how singles meet, building a platform that removes uncertainty and fear of rejection while shifting the focus back to real life interaction instead of endless swiping.