Storybooking, and what Bumble got right about Australian dating

A woman I had coffee with last Saturday had just deleted Hinge for what she said was the third time this year. She’d started keeping a tally on the back of an envelope, which I told her was unhinged, which she didn’t disagree with. She was 28, works in publishing in Sydney, and described her last six dates as variations on the same evening. A pub. Two pints. A bloke who didn’t book the table, didn’t ask many questions, and texted around midnight to ask if she was “down for something low-key.”

That phrase keeps showing up in my notes app. Low-key. It’s the lazy patron saint of Australian dating right now and most of the women I speak to on my podcast about modern singledom have stopped pretending it’s charming.

I might be wrong about how big this is. But I think we’re at the back end of the low-key era, and a Bumble study released a few months back put numbers on something my listeners have been saying for a while. More than 80 per cent of single women told the app they wanted more romance in their lives. About two-thirds said they wanted the kind of love depicted in period dramas, which I read and then giggled and then read again. Seven in ten said they were more confident setting boundaries than they were a few years ago. Bumble has christened the trend storybooking, which is one of those words I’m half-charmed by and half-rolling my eyes at, partly because by Christmas it’ll be a Hinge filter and a TikTok genre.

The cultural timing is on the nose. Bridgerton is back on Netflix. Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi are filming a Wuthering Heights adaptation. The slow burn is in, and so, apparently, is the audience for it.

What women keep telling me

The Bumble research is led by Australian sexologist Chantelle Otten, who told News.com.au more or less what my listeners already know. “Our dating culture is notoriously laid back,” Otten said. “We need to bring romance back into dating, especially for Aussie men.”

The thing women in the survey said they wanted, specifically, was clear communication, emotional safety and the kind of mutual effort that doesn’t dry up two weeks in. Four in five of them said those qualities can feel just as exciting as the mystery you get in early dating, which I had to sit with for a minute. The thing women apparently find sexy now is a man who books the table, sends the address ahead of time, holds eye contact in the actual restaurant and texts back when he says he will. The villain isn’t a lack of charisma. It’s a lack of effort.

Otten’s line is the one I’ve been chewing on for a week. “People haven’t stopped wanting romance. They’ve just redefined it.”

A 30-year-old woman from Melbourne in the research, who goes by Alejandra, told the researchers something I’ve heard ten different ways from women I know. “Men rarely approach women anymore unless they’re intoxicated,” she said. “I often find men dodging eye contact only to find me later on socials and message me.” Then the line I’ve watched land in three different group chats since I read it: “It just feels really lazy.”

Eva, 21, splits her time between rural Victoria and Sydney and said the same thing in different words. “There’s a lot of potential, but not enough effort. There’s also widespread burnout from mixed signals, ghosting and emotional inconsistency.” The Bumble write-up sets her up as the Gen Z voice, but honestly she sounded like every woman I know in her thirties.

I don’t actually think there’s a generational gap there, just louder permission now to say it.

What storybooking actually looks like

The branding is twee, fine. Bumble has obvious commercial reasons to put a bow on a trend they want to own and sell back to us via push notifications. But strip the marketing off and what women in the research are describing is unfussy and unromantic in a literary sense, more about adult logistics than candlelight.

Alejandra’s version is the one I keep coming back to. “Picking a great restaurant and making the booking,” she said. “Offering a genuine compliment. Holding eye contact and being fully present.” She isn’t asking to be swept up. She’s asking for someone who notices her in a slow, observable way that doesn’t demand she do all the noticing back.

“Consistency and pace is key,” she added. “Romance should feel calm and grounded.” Not, she clarified, the dopamine spike of love bombing, where you get three texts a day for six days followed by ten silent ones. The distinction matters because most of my listeners can describe getting bruised by the love bombing pattern in detail. The grand gesture without the data behind it. The text bomb that goes quiet the moment anything is asked in return.

Otten put it neatly. “Romance isn’t the problem. Intensity without attunement is.”

That phrase, intensity without attunement, has been doing laps in my head since I read it. It’s the dynamic the apps reward, the dating personality you can almost engineer if you optimise for swipes, and the thing my listeners describe most often when they tell me they took a break.

The Bridgerton question

A friend of mine, a former English literature postgrad who now writes brand strategy for a beauty company, has a theory I find half-convincing. She thinks period drama is the genre women keep reaching for in 2026 because the constraint of the form does something dating apps actively undo. “The whole point of Bridgerton,” she told me last week over a wine, “is that you watch a glance happen across a room and then nothing else happens for forty minutes.” The characters can’t text. They can’t bail at the last minute. Writing a letter and waiting two weeks for an answer is structurally built into the romance, not an obstacle to it.

Otten said something close to News.com.au. “These stories offer anticipation and intentionality. They slow romance down and make it feel meaningful.”

The funnier truth, which both Otten and my brand strategist friend talked around, is that anticipation costs nothing. You don’t need a country estate. You need to not double-text someone you matched with on Tuesday. You need to plan a Wednesday lunch and actually book the venue. The rarer thing, the thing women keep telling me is the bar now, is being one of those adults who follows through on a Friday plan they made on a Sunday, on a date that isn’t a casual drink at the same Surry Hills bar where everyone else has been having casual drinks for the last six years.

What I’m still working out

I’m a natural sceptic of trend names by professional trade, so I want to be careful here. Storybooking will be commodified within months, the term will start cropping up in dating coach reels, and a beauty brand will run a campaign with quill pens by autumn. But the underlying read does seem right to me.

Women in their twenties and thirties have spent a decade being told that the cool stance is the chill stance. That wanting things is a vulnerability tax. That a man who texts back is somehow a red flag for being too keen. I’m not sure that worldview is fading because women suddenly got more demanding. I think it’s fading because women got bored.

Eight in ten of them want more romance. Most of them know precisely what that looks like, and it’s not Jane Austen. If you’ve been on the apps in any Australian capital city in the last two years and quietly noticed that the women you talk to are less available and less interested than they used to be in lukewarm plans, this is what’s happening on the other side of the conversation. They’re not playing harder to get. They’ve stopped showing up for the kind of dating that wasn’t getting them anywhere.

Storybook it or don’t. The romance is the part you bring yourself.