NYC singles are turning to bars to beat the loneliness curse but some venues are struggling to profit from the boom

Stop, in the name of love.NYC’s digital dating-weary singles are increasingly leaning on Big Apple bars to help them facilitate conversations with strangers — there’s a reason why every watering hole from the West Village to Williamsburg seems to suddenly be hosting “love science experiments” or handing out “intention bracelets” at the door.But this sharp increase in demand for matchmaking assistance is far from a sure-fire financial win for already-pressed businesses across the city — with owners claiming that profiting from loneliness is actually a lot harder than it looks.Your average speed-dating event run by a third-party promoter may have satisfied the market before — but those don’t always do well for venues, which struggle to get the right mix of people in and don’t deliver much of a bump to their bottom lines, operators say.Even newer, trendy events like Pitch-a-Friend, where singles sit through PowerPoint elevator pitches from their friends about why they’re dateable, or Lectures on Tap, which bring in professors and experts to give a presentation lesson on a specific niche topic, hoping these conversations will lead to something romantic, can be a risky proposition for a bar.Logistics like gender ratios, drink purchases and financial deals with third-party event planners mean a lot of trial and error for bars and breweries trying to score in the singles market.Christopher Connors is the marketing director for Sound & Fury Brewing in downtown Brooklyn — which jumped into the fray by bringing in a Pitch-a-Friend event, but margins were thin.

Third-party planners handled the marketing and set-up, but in the end, the event was too stationary and people weren’t buying rounds.Connors then took matters into his own hands by planning an event called “Love Taps” — rebranding the brewery for the night as “Sound and Flirty.”Patrons were assigned numbers while Connors and drag queen Prima co-hosted in lab coats as “lov...