Or: why "I don't really cross the river" 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.
London has its own, extremely well-documented version of this. Plenty of Fish's ninth annual UK trends report — based on 2,000 UK singles — has already handed 2026 a full glossary: RetroMancing, Turbo Dating, Fur-casting. Londoners, specifically, are apparently leading the charge on one of them — nearly half say showing up "unapologetically themselves" from the start has directly improved their dating lives, the highest success rate of any UK region surveyed.
Which raises a question none of the trend pieces actually answer: if Londoners are getting more honest with each other, why does "type" still survive as a concept at all? 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 London, we'd argue the real number is quietly higher, for a very London-specific reason: the "type" most Londoners describe out loud isn't a personality. It's a postcode.
Ask someone in Clapham what they're looking for and the honest answer is rarely about humour or values first — it's "someone who isn't all the way out in Zone 6," or the borough-line version of the same instinct: north of the river, south of the river, and a faint, unspoken judgment about whichever side you didn't grow up on. That's not a preference. That's a transport-map constraint wearing a preference's clothing.
🚇 Why the Tube Makes This Worse (Or Better, Depending)
Every city we operate in has some version of this. London's is uniquely literal, because it's drawn directly onto a map you can buy at any station.
The city doesn't really have "neighbourhoods" the way people mean it elsewhere — it has zones, and a genuinely fierce cultural loyalty to whichever side of the Thames you already live on. A "20-minute journey" that actually involves two tube changes and a Northern line delay can eat 50 minutes each way, which means most Londoners' real dating pool isn't "London." It's whichever zone-and-side combination they've quietly decided is worth a Tuesday-night journey.
That combination does more filtering than any stated "type" ever could. If your actual chemistry lives in Walthamstow and you've built your entire dating life around a five-stop radius from Clapham Junction, the algorithm didn't reject that connection — the Victoria line did, silently, before either of you existed to each other. A room that pulls people from across the city breaks that filter entirely by accident, which is exactly why "unapologetically themselves" is landing so well with Londoners specifically: it's not really about honesty. It's about finally being in a room the Tube map didn't pre-select for you.
📊 What the Data Actually Shows
This is where it stops being a vibe and starts being a dataset.
At every MyCheekyDate London 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 open-mindedness for anyone else in real time, which produces something a self-reported "have you ever fancied someone outside your type?" survey never can: honest, revealed behaviour, uncontaminated by the desire to sound broad-minded to a stranger with a clipboard.
Across our full international Smart-Card dataset — 26,000+ verified events, 65+ cities, 19 years, with London among our longest-running 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.
In a market where UK-wide surveys show 65% of singles are actively trying to banish game-playing in 2026, and where Londoners specifically report the highest success rate from simply showing up honestly, the room format solves the same problem the trend pieces are circling without naming it: it's the only structure in this city built to override the postcode-as-personality filter, not just the personality one.
🌉 The London-Specific Cases Where It's Real (and Where It's Just the Northern Line)
In fairness to the skeptics: not every London "curveball" is profound. Some of it is just two people at the same event being pleasant to each other because they'd both already accepted the night was a write-off the moment the Central line went into a delay. That's not evidence anyone's type theory was wrong. That's evidence Transport for London occasionally functions as a matchmaking service by process of elimination, which, arguably, is also a very London insight.
The distinction our hosts notice across thousands of London rotations: a genuine chemRIZZtry moment produces a mutual match both people are visibly surprised by — the "you're not even from my side of the river, and I still want to see you again" conversation on the way out. The Northern-line version produces a polite four minutes nobody selects afterward, postcode crossover or not. The Smart-Card only records the former, because it only records what people actually chose once the journey time, the zone, and the "I don't really do south of the river" 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 London events — stated preferences diverge from revealed selections, consistently. We can't tell you, for any single match, whether it was genuine chemRIZZtry or just two people relieved to be off the platform. Strong compass. Not a script.)
💛 One Last Cheeky Thought
Somewhere in this city right now, someone is telling a friend over a flat white that they "never" date south of the river, using the word "never" with the total conviction of a person who has, in fact, done exactly that within the last twelve months and simply filed it under "exception."
That's not a personality flaw. That's just what a "type" is in a city organised by zones and postcodes: a story assembled from transport logistics, told with total confidence, updated only when a real conversation — in a room you didn't have to plan a journey around — forces the update. London has more opportunities than almost anywhere to get that update. Most Londoners just never end up in the room where it happens.
Call it chemRIZZtry if you want. We'll call it getting off at the wrong stop and not minding.
Curious what your own London "type" is quietly getting wrong? MyCheekyDate runs real, host-led speed dating events across London — no filters, no pre-screening by zone or postcode, just real conversations and a Smart-Card that only counts the ones where you both actually meant it. Find a London event at mycheekydate.com.
A Note on Methodology
National (international) 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; London is included as one of MyCheekyDate's longest-running markets, but the figures above are presented as network-wide, not London-isolated, numbers. Stated-versus-revealed preference patterns are drawn from comparing pre-event stated attributes against private Smart-Card selections. UK trend figures (42% curveball-crushing nationally; Londoners' "unapologetically themselves" success rate; 65% banishing game-playing) reflect Plenty of Fish's ninth annual UK dating trends survey of 2,000 UK singles and related 2026 UK dating coverage, not MyCheekyDate-collected data, and are cited as general market context rather than proprietary findings. MyCheekyDate was founded in 2007 and has run 26,000+ verified events over the last 10 years across 65+ cities, including London. Full Smart-Card methodology available at mycheekydate.com/smart-card.