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.
New York has its own extremely well-documented version of this problem, and it starts with a number that should, on its face, make "type" irrelevant: an estimated 57% of New Yorkers are single, in a city of roughly 8.5 million people, per 2026 matchmaking industry data. That's not a shortage of options. That's arguably the largest dating pool on the planet. And yet ask most New Yorkers what they're looking for and the honest answer has less to do with humor or values than with a single, load-bearing qualifier: does he live in Manhattan.
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 New York, we'd argue the real number is quietly higher, for a very New York-specific reason: the "type" most New Yorkers describe out loud isn't a personality. It's a commute.
"I just don't really do Brooklyn" is not a preference about someone's character. It's a preference about the L train. "He's great, but he's in Jersey City" is not a red flag about the person — it's a red flag about a PATH schedule. With average one-way subway commutes sitting around 42 minutes across the five boroughs, per 2026 NYC dating research, the honest version of most people's "type" is really just a maximum acceptable travel time, dressed up as a personality preference so it sounds less petty out loud.
🚇 Why the Subway Makes This Worse (Or Better, Depending)
Every city we operate in has some version of this. New York's is unusually literal, because it's a five-borough system most people quietly reduce to one.
The city doesn't really have "neighborhoods" the way the phrase implies elsewhere so much as it has fiercely defended micro-territories — the Manhattan finance and media crowd who "just don't leave the island," the Brooklyn creative scene treating the East River like a genuine border, the Queens and Jersey City singles who've made peace with being systematically overlooked by both. A "quick date" that technically requires two subway transfers and a signal delay can eat 90 minutes round trip, which means most New Yorkers' actual dating pool isn't "New York." It's whichever borough, or half-borough, they've unconsciously decided is worth the trip.
That radius does more filtering than any stated "type" ever could. If your actual chemistry lives in Astoria and your entire dating life has quietly organized itself around the L train, the algorithm didn't reject that connection — the MTA did, silently, before either of you existed to each other. A room that pulls people from across all five boroughs breaks that filter entirely by accident, which is precisely the shift NYC matchmakers are now reporting: singles rethinking convenience-first dating in favor of actual compatibility, borough be damned.
📊 What the Data Actually Shows
This is where it stops being a vibe and starts being a dataset.
At every MyCheekyDate New York 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 "would you date outside your usual type?" survey never can: honest, revealed behavior, uncontaminated by the desire to sound flexible to a stranger with a clipboard.
Across our full national Smart-Card dataset — 26,000+ verified events, 65+ cities, 19 years, with New York 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 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 researchers now rank the #2 state in the U.S. for dating opportunity nationwide, with online dating adoption among active singles running as high as 40–50%, the room format solves a specifically New York version of the chemRIZZtry problem: it's the only structure in this city built to override both the industry-checklist and the borough-loyalty filter in the same four minutes.
🌉 The NYC-Specific Cases Where It's Real (and Where It's Just the L Train)
In fairness to the skeptics: not every New York "curveball" is profound. Some of it is just two people at the same event being pleasant to each other because they'd both already mentally written the night off the moment the app said "12 min delay, this is due to train traffic ahead of us." That's not evidence anyone's type theory was wrong. That's evidence the MTA occasionally functions as a matchmaking service by process of elimination, which, arguably, is also a very New York insight.
The distinction our hosts notice across thousands of New York rotations: a genuine chemRIZZtry moment produces a mutual match both people are visibly surprised by — the "you live in Jersey City and I still want to see you again" conversation on the way out. The delayed-train version produces a polite four minutes nobody selects afterward, borough crossover or not. The Smart-Card only records the former, because it only records what people actually chose once the commute, the borough pride, and the "I don't really leave Manhattan" 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 New York 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 an $8 iced oat matcha that they "never" date anyone outside Manhattan, using the word "never" with the total conviction of a person whose situationship for most of last spring lived, provably, in Bushwick.
That's not a personality flaw. That's just what a "type" is in a five-borough city organized by subway lines: a story assembled from commute tolerance, told with total confidence, updated only when a real conversation — in a room you didn't have to plan a transfer around — forces the update. New York has more opportunities than almost anywhere on earth to get that update, given the sheer size of the pool. Most New Yorkers 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 staying anyway.
Curious what your own NYC "type" is quietly getting wrong? MyCheekyDate runs real, host-led speed dating events across New York City — no filters, no pre-screening by borough or industry, just real conversations and a Smart-Card that only counts the ones where you both actually meant it. Find an NYC 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; New York is included as one of MyCheekyDate's longest-running and highest-volume markets, but the figures above are presented as national, not NYC-isolated, numbers. Stated-versus-revealed preference patterns are drawn from comparing pre-event stated attributes against private Smart-Card selections. NYC-specific demographic and market figures (57% single population; ~8.5 million residents; ~42-minute average one-way subway commute; New York's #2 national ranking for dating opportunity) reflect third-party 2025–2026 matchmaking industry, demographic, and journalistic 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 New York City. Full Smart-Card methodology available at mycheekydate.com/smart-card.