Or: why "PB or La Jolla" is doing more filtering than your actual type ever has.
Somewhere in a trend report meeting in 2026, someone said the words "chemRIZZtry" out loud, in a professional context, and got a nod instead of a raised eyebrow. It joins "curveball-crushing" as this year's official term for a phenomenon that is, respectfully, as old as attraction itself: you meet someone who is not your type, on paper, at all — and then you like them anyway.
San Diego has its own extremely specific version of this problem, and it starts with a sort most locals do almost automatically: which beach are you actually from. Pacific Beach reads as loud, young, and a little chaotic. La Jolla reads as old money and quiet wealth. North Park reads as craft beer and creative. Gaslamp reads as downtown nightlife for people who don't mind a cover charge. None of that is a personality. All of it gets treated as one anyway, sorted before a single wave has broken.
So we ran the numbers.
📋 The Trend, As Reported
Nationally, 42% of singles report connecting with someone genuinely outside their usual checklist — the "curveball-crushing" stat. In San Diego, we'd argue the real number is quietly higher, for a very San Diego-specific reason: the "type" most San Diegans describe out loud isn't a personality. It's a coastline zip code, plus one factor almost no other major dating market has to account for at this scale — whether or not you're active-duty.
"He's such a PB guy" isn't a comment on someone's character — it's a comment on a beer-pong-adjacent, close-to-the-boardwalk lifestyle. "She's very La Jolla" carries the opposite weight — polished, private-school-adjacent, unlikely to be found at a Gaslamp bar past 10pm. Underneath both of those runs a filter unique to San Diego's identity as one of the country's largest military hubs: military versus civilian, an entire separate axis of sorting that shows up in local dating conversation constantly and rarely gets named directly.
🌊 Why the Coastline (and the Military Divide) Make This Worse (Or Better, Depending)
Every city we operate in has some version of this. San Diego's runs on two filters stacked on top of each other instead of just one.
The beach-neighborhood sort is the more obvious layer — a genuinely outdoor-lifestyle city where which stretch of coast you frequent says more about your social circle than almost anything else, and where local daters increasingly describe the apps as repetitive after enough years of the same small, self-selecting pool. The military-civilian layer runs quieter but deeper: deployment schedules, base assignments, and the honest reality that a service member's dating timeline doesn't run on the same clock as a civilian's, all filter people apart long before "type" ever consciously enters the conversation. A dater who's ruled out "military" as a category, or ruled out "civilian" for that matter, is doing sorting most other major cities simply don't require.
📊 What the Data Actually Shows
This is where it stops being a vibe and starts being a dataset.
At every MyCheekyDate San Diego event, attendees privately rate each conversation on a five-tier scale, with selections staying open until midnight and zero visibility into who picked whom in the moment. Nobody is performing "sufficiently PB" or "sufficiently civilian" for anyone else in real time, which produces something a self-reported "would you date outside your usual type?" survey never can: honest, revealed behavior, uncontaminated by the desire to sound consistent to a stranger with a clipboard.
Across our full national Smart-Card dataset — 26,000+ verified events, 65+ cities, 19 years, with San Diego among our established West Coast markets — the same pattern shows up every time we look: 86% of attendees leave with at least one mutual match, averaging 2.3 per event, and a meaningful share of those matches are people the attendee would not have predicted from their stated preferences at the door. This mirrors the exact mechanism we've documented in our age-preference data, where the tightest stated filters produced the lowest match rates, and "open" attendees consistently beat the average.
Our own San Diego events consistently draw a slightly older, more settled crowd than the citywide reputation might suggest, alongside a genuine, recurring theme of app fatigue — daters describing years of swiping before finally trying something more direct, and admitting afterward they're glad they showed up even when the couch felt like the safer bet that evening. The room format solves a specifically San Diego version of the chemRIZZtry problem: it's the only structure in this city built to override both the coastline sort and the military-civilian sort in the same four minutes, without requiring anyone to disclose their zip code or their duty station before the conversation's even started.
🏖️ The San Diego-Specific Cases Where It's Real (and Where It's Just Good Weather Doing Its Job)
In fairness to the skeptics: not every San Diego "curveball" is profound. Some of it is just two people at the same event being pleasant to each other because it's 72 degrees in February and the entire city is, structurally, in a good mood most of the time. That's not evidence anyone's type theory was wrong. That's evidence San Diego's weather is doing quiet, uncredited work on everyone's patience, which, arguably, is also a very San Diego insight.
The distinction our hosts notice across thousands of San Diego rotations: a genuine chemRIZZtry moment produces a mutual match both people are visibly surprised by — the "you're active-duty and I'm about as civilian as it gets, and I still want to see you again" conversation on the way out, or the La Jolla-meets-PB version of the same thing. The good-weather version produces a pleasant four minutes nobody selects afterward, coastline or duty station be damned. The Smart-Card only records the former, because it only records what people actually chose once the beach, the base, and the "I'm just very La Jolla" instinct were all set aside for four real minutes.
(Honest caveat, the way we treat every number we publish: we can tell you the aggregate pattern holds across our San Diego events — stated preferences diverge from revealed selections, consistently. We can't tell you, for any single match, whether it was genuine chemRIZZtry or just perfect weather making everyone more agreeable than usual. Strong compass. Not a script.)
💛 One Last Cheeky Thought
Somewhere in this city right now, someone is telling a friend over fish tacos that they "never" date military, using the word "never" with the total conviction of a person whose situationship for most of last year had, provably, a base ID and a deployment calendar.
That's not a personality flaw. That's just what a "type" is in a city organized by coastlines and duty stations: a story assembled from geography and service status, told with total confidence, updated only when a real conversation — in a room that didn't ask your zip code or your rank — forces the update. San Diego has more opportunity than most cities to get that update, given how genuinely good the weather and the underlying dating math both are here. Most San Diegans just never end up in the room where it happens.
Call it chemRIZZtry if you want. We'll call it a 72-degree evening doing exactly what it's supposed to do.
Curious what your own San Diego "type" is quietly getting wrong? MyCheekyDate runs real, host-led speed dating events across San Diego — no filters, no pre-screening by neighborhood or service status, just real conversations and a Smart-Card that only counts the ones where you both actually meant it. Find a San Diego event at mycheekydate.com.
A Note on Methodology
National baseline figures (86% mutual match rate, 2.3 average matches per event) reflect the full Smart-Card dataset across all markets, weighted toward the most recent 24 months where sample size allows; San Diego is included as one of MyCheekyDate's established West Coast markets, but the figures above are presented as national, not San Diego-isolated, numbers. Stated-versus-revealed preference patterns are drawn from comparing pre-event stated attributes against private Smart-Card selections. San Diego-specific cultural and demographic figures (neighborhood identities in Pacific Beach, La Jolla, North Park, and Gaslamp; San Diego's status as a major U.S. military hub and the resulting military-civilian dating dynamic; reported dating-app fatigue among local daters) reflect third-party 2025–2026 journalistic and lifestyle reporting alongside MyCheekyDate's own observational Cheeky Dating Index for San Diego, and are cited as general market context rather than the proprietary Smart-Card statistics presented separately above. MyCheekyDate was founded in 2007 and has run 26,000+ verified events over the last 10 years across 65+ cities, including San Diego. Full Smart-Card methodology available at mycheekydate.com/smart-card.