After I became newly single, I received a parade of well-meaning but ultimately generic pieces of advice. Only one actually caught my attention: If you want to meet someone, go to an indoor climbing gym.
From my understanding, climbing was a niche, exclusive sport for people who chased adrenaline or had the grip strength required to casually dangle off walls. I had no idea it was an activity so open to the public—let alone to someone so inexperienced and clueless like myself. But apparently, my lack of skill didn’t matter. “You have to go,” my friend insisted, as if this was common sense, a necessity to my well-being like buying groceries or lifting weights.
Indoor climbing—specifically bouldering, which doesn’t involve ropes or harnesses and tends to be more accessible for normies like me—isn’t new, despite what TikTok might lead you to believe. What is new is who’s showing up. “It very much used to be people who climbed regularly or the weirdos who worked there,” Allan Andranikian, General Manager of Central Rock Gym Manhattan, an indoor climbing gym with other locations across the US, tells me. “Climbing was incredibly niche, and most people’s experience with it was, ‘Yeah, I do this at birthday parties.’”
Now? By 6 p.m. on a Friday, the gym I visited—a bouldering-only indoor climbing facility in New York City—looked less like a fitness center and more like a full-blown social scene. The space was alive, packed with bodies, chalk dust, and the thump of early-2000s club music. A handful of people scaled the walls, but the real action was happening on the mats. That’s where groups of 20-somethings, dressed in baggy jeans and oversized tees, lounged, laughed, and chatted—so comfortably, so close together, it hinged on intimate.
Couples stood out even more clearly—at least 50 people appeared to be either in established relationships or on what looked like first dates. Some exchanged quick kisses; others wrapped each other in warm hugs between attempts (tries up the wall) or sneaky waist grabs disguised as playful “encouragement.” None of this was happening in an over-the-top, showy, PDA way, though. It was just a natural expression of the gym’s relaxed, communal energy.
“It’s kind of like a playground. Maybe more like a zoo,” one member tells me. “Everyone’s climbing, but we’re actually mostly talking.”
Indoor climbing gyms originally began as safe spaces for climbers to train when outdoor weather conditions (rain, snow, or extreme temperatures) made it dangerous. The earliest credited artificial wall was built at the University of Leeds in 1964. Since then, the sport has evolved into a mainstream phenomenon—and is projected to be a billion-dollar industry, thanks in part to “sport climbing” making its official Olympic debut at the 2020 Tokyo Summer Games, along with a growing cultural appetite for experience-driven and social fitness, Andranikian points out.
To anyone watching from the outside, climbing might look solitary, which makes its transformation into a bustling social hotspot feel almost counterintuitive. In theory, it’s just you alone on a wall covered in oddly shaped grips (technically called holds) that are designed to mimic the rocks and ledges of a real cliff, all of which are arranged into specific routes (problems) that guide you to the top. Getting up there becomes a test not just of strength, but of strategy: deciding which holds to grab onto, twisting into uncomfortable positions, even launching yourself into a one-handed leap to reach a faraway grip.