Or: why "he's not usually my type" is doing an enormous amount of work in a city with 503 square miles of options.
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 terminology 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.
Nowhere is this more statistically inevitable than Los Angeles, where roughly 53% of the population is single, the city sprawls across 503 square miles, and — per LA-specific dating research this year — "everyone's a creative, an entrepreneur, or both." When your entire dating pool has self-selected into two professions, "type" stops meaning much of anything by definition, whether you've noticed or not.
So we ran the numbers. On Angelenos specifically.
📋 The Trend, As Reported
2026 dating trend coverage puts the "curveball-crushing" rate at 42% of singles nationally — people who've genuinely connected with someone outside their stated checklist. In LA, we'd argue that number is structurally forced higher, for a very LA-specific reason: the "type" most Angelenos describe out loud is an industry, not a person.
Ask someone in Silver Lake what they're looking for and you'll hear "creative," "not another actor," "someone with a real job," or the increasingly common "no producers." That's not a physical or personality preference. That's occupational triage in a city where, per 2026 LA dating coverage, the honest answer to "what does everyone here do" is some version of actor, entrepreneur, or both. A checklist built out of profession, in a one-industry-town, filters almost nothing and reveals almost everything about what you actually walked in hoping to avoid.
🗺️ Why LA's Geography Makes This Worse (Or Better, Depending)
Every other city we operate in has a version of this problem. LA's is structural.
At 503 square miles, LA doesn't have neighborhoods so much as it has semi-independent dating micro-climates — the Westside professional crowd swiping on Bumble, the Silver Lake creative scene doing sunrise runs at Runyon Canyon, the Santa Monica sunset-volleyball set, each largely invisible to the others unless something forces a room to mix. A "15-minute drive" here can take an hour, which means most Angelenos' dating pool isn't actually "Los Angeles." It's whichever six-mile radius they've unconsciously decided is worth the traffic.
That radius does more filtering than any stated "type" ever could. If your actual chemistry lives in Highland Park and you've never left the Westside on a weeknight, the algorithm didn't reject that connection — geography did, silently, before either of you existed to each other. A room that pulls from across the city breaks that filter by accident, which is exactly why "curveball-crushing" reads different in LA than it does in a smaller, denser market: here, the curveball was never about personality. It was about the 405.
📊 What the Data Actually Shows
This is where it stops being a vibe and starts being a dataset.
At every MyCheekyDate Los Angeles 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 managing anyone else's ego in real time, which produces something a self-reported "have you ever connected outside your type?" survey never can: honest, revealed behavior, uncontaminated by the desire to sound open-minded to a stranger with a clipboard.
Across our full national Smart-Card dataset — 26,000+ verified events, 65+ cities, 19 years, with Los Angeles among our longest-running and highest-volume 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 walking in the door. This mirrors the identical mechanism we've documented in our age-preference data, where the tightest stated filters produced the lowest match rates, and "open" attendees consistently outperformed the average.
In a market where dating app burnout sits near 4 in 5 users, per 2025-2026 industry reporting, and where LA-specific matchmaking research this year describes singles as more intentional and more selective than ever, the room format solves a very LA-specific version of the chemRIZZtry problem: it's the only structure in this city built to override both the industry-checklist and the traffic-radius at the same time.
🎬 The LA-Specific Cases Where It's Real (and Where It's Just Proximity)
In fairness to the skeptics: not every Los Angeles "curveball" is profound. Some of it is just two people at the same event being pleasant to each other because traffic made the alternative — driving 45 minutes to a first date that might not work out — feel worse than the four minutes in front of them. That's not evidence anyone's type theory was wrong. That's evidence gas is expensive and time is finite, which, arguably, is also a very Los Angeles insight.
The distinction our hosts notice across thousands of LA rotations: a genuine chemRIZZtry moment produces a mutual match both people are visibly surprised by — the "wait, you're not even a little bit what I usually go for" conversation on the way out. The proximity version produces a polite four minutes that nobody selects afterward, industry crossover or not. The Smart-Card only records the former, because it only records what people actually chose once the traffic, the industry small talk, and the checklist were all set aside for four real minutes.
(Honest caveat, the way we treat every number we publish: we can tell you the aggregate LA pattern holds — stated preferences diverge from revealed selections, consistently, across a large dataset in this market. We can't tell you, for any single match, whether it was genuine chemRIZZtry or just a good rotation on a good Tuesday in Culver City. Strong compass. Not a script.)
💛 One Last Cheeky Thought
Somewhere in this city right now, someone is telling a friend over oat milk lattes that they "never" date creatives, using the word "never" with the total conviction of a person whose last four situationships were, in fact, all creatives.
That's not a personality flaw. That's just what a "type" is in a company town: a story assembled from occupation and geography, told with total confidence, updated only when a real conversation — in a room you didn't drive across town to pre-screen — forces the update. LA has more opportunities than almost anywhere to get that update. Most Angelenos just never end up in the room where it happens.
Call it chemRIZZtry if you want. We'll call it Tuesday in Culver City.
Curious what your own LA checklist is quietly getting wrong? MyCheekyDate runs real, host-led speed dating events across Los Angeles — no filters, no pre-screening by industry or zip code, just real conversations and a Smart-Card that only counts the ones where you both actually meant it. Find an LA 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; Los Angeles is included as one of MyCheekyDate's longest-running and highest-volume markets, but the figures above are presented as national, not LA-isolated, numbers. Stated-versus-revealed preference patterns are drawn from comparing pre-event stated attributes against private Smart-Card selections. LA population/demographic figures (53% single population; 503 square miles) and dating-app-burnout figures (~4 in 5 users) reflect third-party 2025–2026 dating industry and demographic reporting, 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 Los Angeles. Full Smart-Card methodology available at mycheekydate.com/smart-card.