Lectures on Tap - Dating Apps, Endless Choice, and Why Modern Love is Hard

Professors, experts, and storytellers giving thought-provoking lectures in Chicago bars.

🧠 Lecture: "Dating Apps, Endless Choice, and Why Modern Love is Hard"

🎤 Speaker: Dr. Megan Dowd

You can know someone’s politics, job, dating history, and attachment style before you’ve ever heard them laugh. You can swipe through hundreds of potential partners in a single evening. And the people you almost dated? They rarely disappear completely. Modern dating has given us unprecedented access to romantic possibility—but what is all that possibility doing to the way we choose, connect, and commit?

Drawing on current research in communication and relationship science, Dr. Megan Dowd looks beyond the usual complaints about dating apps to explore the stranger consequences of dating in the age of the algorithm. From evaluating people before we meet them to back-burner relationships and romantic options that never quite fade away, we’ll examine how technology may be changing not just how we find love, but how we experience it.

Dr. Megan Dowd is a communication scholar who studies how people create, manage, and complicate relationships. Now a business strategist, she brings relationship research out of academic journals and into conversations about the complicated ways people actually connect.

The Den Theatre and comedy club is pleased to host Lectures on Tap on September 22, 2026 at 1331 N. Milwaukee Ave. in Chicago’s Wicker Park neighborhood.

Tickets are currently available at thedentheatre.com or by calling (773) 697-3830.