When 32-year-old Meg (who asked that her last name not be used) planned her first-ever trip to the Hamptons, finding love was not on her mind.

She was more focused on spending some low-key time with friends who have a house in Bridgehampton. “It wasn’t a girls’ weekend,” she said. “I was staying with a married couple who is expecting their second baby, and another couple.” Plus, she’d just moved to New York from Australia for work five weeks earlier, prompted by a breakup with a long-term boyfriend. Finding a serious relationship so early in her arrival was out of the question. But when she boarded Blade’s pricey new Hamptons-bound bus, the Streamliner, at Hudson Yards, her curiosity was piqued. As she walked down the aisle to find a seat, she thought, “He’s cute,” of a fellow passenger, who had an open seat beside him. “But the whole bus was empty, and I didn’t want to be that person that sits next to him. I wanted to be respectful of space.”

Meeting a mate in real life, seemed at one point, to have gone the way of the dodo, extinguished by online options and apps. But as of late, some have predicted that the dating-app bonanza is ending. About one-fifth of dating Gen Z-ers, citing app fatigue, have stopped using them, according to Savanta. Many are reverting to the once almost unheard of old-school, in-person alternatives, like running clubs (Dirty Bird is apparently one of the hottest in the city) or the pickleball circuit.

Pickleball has proved a fruitful dating ground for 30-year-old Ben Friedman, who on a different night from Meg, was also on a Streamliner taking his inaugural trip to the Hamptons. “Pickleball,” he tells Vanity Fair, “has been working out better for me than dating apps.”

“There are some issues with the apps. I’ve tried to get away from them. You see a few pictures but you don’t know the true personality. You have to do activities where you can organically meet someone,” he says. “Thirty-year-olds remember before dating apps.” According to him, they want to get back to that way of connecting.

So what better place for a meet-cute than Blade’s new offering? The bus, which launched this spring, charges $275 one way for a ticket on the one-seat row of the bus, and $195 on the two-seat side. Blade didn’t set out to create a matchmaking service on wheels. For the most part, the bus was envisioned as a quick solution for when weather grounded Blade’s helicopters to the Hamptons, or for situations like last month when President Joe Biden was in town, which meant helicopters couldn’t fly after 2 p.m. The west-side pickup is near the west-side helipad.

Since getting a seat on the LIRR to the Hamptons in the summer can feel like an elbows-out, kill-or-be-killed scenario, and the Jitney can feel like Boomerville, something unexpected happened.

“The crowd we’re seeing is the younger crowd,” said Christiana Weller, Blade’s marketing director. “They have enough disposable income to spend a few thousand dollars on a house rental.” They can afford the price of the bus ticket to the Hamptons, but maybe not the $1000-plus it takes to ride the helicopter.

While the Streamliner isn’t exactly a party bus, the geriatric ward that is the Hamptons Jitney—or the higher-end, $70-ish each way Jitney Ambassador—it is not. “It’s a more vibrant crowd than the Jitney,” said Grace Farley, 29, who spends most summer weekends at her family’s home in East Hampton and has taken a couple trips on Blade’s new bus. “On the Jitney everyone keeps to themselves. It’s the Upper East Side crowd.”

And while the free bag of Goldfish crackers and water the Jitney provides will do in a pinch, the pricey Streamliner ticket comes with premium amenities, like soft blankets hanging on the back of each motion-sickness-prevention seat, and gourmet sweet-and-salty popcorn. Another is the by dria dopp kit given to passengers when they board, filled with fancy goodies like Kiehl’s sunscreen, Saie Glossybounce lip gloss oil, Symbiome serum, and hangover-curing Superieur Electrolyte powder, all packed in a Paravel toiletries bag. The kit also includes a three-pack of condoms—intentionally or accidentally setting the Streamliner up for success as this summer’s new place to find love (even the temporary sort).

As they’ve been dubbed, HENRYs—High Earners Not Rich Yet—are Blade helicopter passengers-in-waiting. Weller says the CEO of Blade, Rob Wiesenthal, calls the bus “Blade for kids.”

Since Google and HSBC headquarters are both close to the Hudson Yards pickup spot, Weller said they’re seeing a lot of repeat customers from those demographics—young women and men working in tech and finance. One of those young guys was so hungover last week that he missed the bus. Weller offered to upgrade him to the helicopter for $500, which he accepted.

Friedman, who works in finance on 42nd Street, laughed at the mention of this summer’s TikTok-inspired anthem. “Now it’s cool to be in finance again apparently,” he says, adding that proximity to the stop, a guaranteed seat, and an okay price, prompted him to try the Streamliner. He aspires to one day fly via Blade, but until then, given the bus’s young demographic, he said he’d consider the bus again.

To be clear: The Streamliner is still, at the end of the day, a bus, and from a luxury-service standpoint, it has some kinks to work out. Like the Jitney, it can also get stuck in soul-sucking weekend Hamptons traffic. But, as for the bus being better than a dating app, Weller said it organically cultivates the prospects—like-minded people who enjoy the beach, the Hamptons scene, and have enough money to skip the LIRR in favor of “free” espresso martinis, Sweetgreen salads, and warm cookies.

Young people in the Hamptons used to meet their future partners and one-night stands in person, at share houses—home rentals that were parceled out by quarter, half, and full share that often put a dozen renters under one roof. Susan Spungen, Susanality newsletter and cookbook author, had a rather famous one in Sagaponack that she coordinated for seven years in the ’90s.

“It was an affordable luxury then,” she said, as Amagansett had a lot of old, unrenovated “cheap rentals.” She said young people, many of whom are priced out of this kind of communal-living situation today, could come out on the train and bike and walk everywhere without a car. “There was a lot of hooking up. It was easier if you were young to come out then and be part of the scene. It was less expensive.”

Kristin Guattery, who bought in as a weekend guest at a share house in the ’90s, also remembers the scene being about hooking up, though she recalls a couple of people who paid for a share one summer specifically to find a spouse. “I think it was a viable option in those days,” she said. “The irony is that my future ex-husband was at the same house a different weekend, and we met at work at the copy machine.”

But with the share house essentially dead thanks to new regulations and the pandemic’s Hamptons real estate boom, dating in the Hamptons has become more challenging. Most of those old houses on the lanes in Amagansett that used to be affordable share houses were gutted and mansions put in their place. Farley said the apps aren’t a great option out East either. On Hinge, for example, she had to widen her radius to find matches that led to dates. But that feature tracks the way the crow flies. “You have to go far and wide,” which means that, while she may be in the Hamptons, she’s being served matches who are in Connecticut.

As for that cute guy Meg saw on the Streamliner? Turns out he was a 30-year-old from the Midwest. A man who works in—you guessed it—finance (hazel eyes, no trust fund), who was also visiting the Hamptons for the first time. He asked that his name not be used, but said he noticed Meg immediately.

“I saw her walk by me, and I said, Oh, who is this?” he says. He even considered changing seats and kicked himself for not waiting to board so he could have sat next to her.

Fate intervened. He was supposed to ride the bus to East Hampton, but it was running late and he thought he could meet his friends, with whom he’d rented a house for the weekend, at the restaurant faster if he jumped off one stop early in Bridgehampton. As he and Meg both tried to figure out transportation, they serendipitously got to chatting and eventually exchanged contact information. By the next evening, they were messaging each other and arranged to meet up in Montauk.

Love connection? “I would like to see [him] again,” said Meg.

Her Midwestern busmate feels the same.

“We kind of hit it off,” he said. “It was nice. We’re planning on seeing each other when I’m back out.”

Apparently, he’d already felt optimistic after their first meeting. Meg asked him what he was doing with all the swag he got on board. She said he told her that when he hopped into his Uber after they initially went their separate ways, he rifled through the dopp kit, placed the condoms in his pocket, and ditched the hundreds of dollars worth of cosmetic products.

“I did take some moisturizer,” he clarifies. “Meg thinks I ditched it all, but I accidentally left it in the Uber.”

So did the condoms come in handy? Meg’s response: a laughing emoji.