HANOVER — On a chilly night last November, Sawtooth Kitchen, Bar and Stage looked like a mix between a restaurant and a school dance.
Silver garlands hung from the DJ booth, and baskets of potato wedges and handwritten icebreaker cards were set out on tall tables.
“Give me your best pick up line,” read one card.
“Ideal first date?” asked another.
Purple lights cast shadows on the floor, and a few men lingered by the stage, waiting for more people to arrive.
These were the early moments of “Singles Night,” a social mixer that Sawtooth owner Kieran Campion has been hosting regularly since last summer.
Customers and staff often tell him about how difficult it is to be single in the Upper Valley, and holding a mixer seemed like a simple way to help people “meet like-minded folks who might be potential partners,” he said.
Indeed, there are aspects to living in a rural area like the Upper Valley that can make dating especially challenging, namely the low population.
Of that population, there’s an even smaller pool of eligible singles.
In the Twin States, at least a quarter of residents are off the market, with 26% of both men and women currently married, according to census data from 2024.
“I’ve lived in New York and Chicago, and I think the difference (in the Upper Valley) is that you’re running into the same people over and over again,” Campion said.
On top of that, many young professionals who move to the area often only stay for a few years while they complete the requisite training or study to further their careers.
The ubiquity of dating apps has also played a part in transforming people’s approach to dating. They’ve made it easier to connect with people outside of one’s immediate social circle or neighborhood, a useful tool in an area with sprawling geography like the Upper Valley. But the apps also have contributed to a sense of fatigue among users who are fed up with swiping with no end in sight.
At the same time, finding someone to build a relationship with isn’t just a challenge in the Upper Valley; it’s an age-old conundrum, one that’s inspired innumerable rom-coms, pop ballads and works of literature.
Sexuality, whether or not someone wants to have kids, personal values and career ambitions, not to mention having chemistry with someone, are all factors that make it difficult to find the right match, irrespective of where someone lives.
Small pool
For Charlie, a Dartmouth College librarian who declined to give his last name, the Upper Valley’s small dating pool and transient population have made it difficult to find a partner.
Since moving to the area from Chattanooga, Tenn., in 2022, he’s had success “building community” through groups such as a Spanish language club that meets a couple times a week in the Hanover area.
But finding a long-term partner has been another story.
Even though he’s had more success getting matches through the apps here than in Tennessee, they haven’t materialized into something serious.
And while he plans to live in the Upper Valley long term, postdoctoral candidates and medical residents — people who could be a good match — often only stay here for a few years while completing their studies.
It’s become such an issue that he’s started asking people if they want to stick around the Upper Valley before considering them as a serious option.
Without a partner, it feels like there’s “a void” inside, and as more people around him couple-up, he can’t help feeling like “the odd one out,” he said.
At age 41, he’s never been in a long-term relationship.
“It’s frustrating,” he said. “I feel behind my peers.”
Still, he’s doing his best to keep an open heart.
Last Sunday he attended a mixer at COVER Home Repair and Store in White River Junction.
The event was an opportunity for single people to meet each other, and perhaps spark a connection, while organizing the store’s secondhand stock.
In general, he’s trying to go “with the flow and hopefully it will happen organically,” Charlie said.
Willie Johnson, a 39-year-old educator who attended the Sawtooth singles mixer in November, is also well aware of the Upper Valley’s small number of eligible singles.
He noted that he’d already gone out with one of the women in attendance that night at Sawtooth, the second or third mixer he’d attended at the restaurant.
He felt burnt out from using the apps, mainly Bumble, but he found that people rarely “want to go up to each other in person.”
Dating online is “the only way people believe they can meet each other anymore,” he said.
“I come to these because I think it’s important that I keep trying,” he said.
Limited dating options isn’t just a frustration for the Upper Valley’s straight residents. At another Sawtooth singles mixer in January, a group of friends bemoaned the lack of queer people to date in the area.
“It’s like ‘I’m bi(sexual), but I have a boyfriend,’” Miavictoria Velez, of Hanover, said.
Or “I’m bi when I’m drunk,” her friend Kristov Bardales, 22, chimed in.
Finding women who are actually interested in a queer relationship is a lot harder, she said.
“It’s a very specific type of gay culture,” Bardales said. “It’s very, like, hippie…one with earth…you know, Birkenstocks.”
“I feel like people get forced into that,” he said.
The culture feels much more restrictive than in New Orleans, where he went to college. Since moving back to his hometown of South Strafford, he’s felt like, even subconsciously, he’s had to conform to the Upper Valley’s limited queer aesthetic.
Personal factors
While the Upper Valley’s small population can make it difficult to date here, personal preferences and life plans also play a part in what makes it challenging to find a partner.
That much was true for Charlie, who noted that not wanting kids made his options even more limited.
Kristyne McFarlin, a 32-year-old medical assistant at Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center, has had the opposite problem.
A mother of two boys ages 11 and 13, she’s had a tough time finding someone who wants a partner with kids, noting that she briefly dated someone who “had no desire to be anybody’s dad,” she said while sorting through piles of lamps at the mixer at COVER.
McFarlin has been married before, but the relationship ended after her husband fell into drug addiction and became physically abusive.
Since then, she’s cautious about who she brings into her children’s lives.
While working at DHMC, she’s also taking classes online to finish her bachelor’s degree in behavioral science so that she can go to law school and eventually represent women who have experienced domestic violence.
Trying to find a partner who shares her ambitions and her progressive values, especially in her hometown of Bradford, has proven difficult.
She’s tried her luck on the apps, but she got bored of receiving the same “Hi, how are you?” message from guys week after week.
Sometimes it feels “easier to stay single,” she said.
Family planning can play a part in the challenge of finding the right match, but dating later in life also comes with its own difficulties.
Among them is that “men tend to look for younger women,” said Joice, a 68-year-old Cornish resident who declined to give her last name in an interview at the COVER event.
It’s exasperating, but she’s also learned to love being single, investing time in playing music, painting and doing construction on her home.
Largely single since her 40s, she’s developed a self-confidence that was missing when she was younger.
“I feel like I know who I am,” she said.
These days, she’s not actively trying to date, but she’d be interested in a relationship with a close friend.
“If I can make a good friend with somebody, great,” she said. But “I don’t want to date someone for the sake of it.”
Christen Townsend, 60, isn’t actively trying to date at the moment either. Her husband Bill Townsend died in October and she’s still working through the grief of losing him.
For now, she’s focusing on nurturing her friendships and growing her community through events such as the event at COVER.
At the same time, she imagines she’ll be open to someone new eventually. “I don’t want to go through life alone,” she said.
She and Bill connected on Facebook Dating, a feature of the social media platform that connects potential matches based on their interests and mutual friends, when she was single from a divorce.
She had tried a number of dating apps by then, but she found that “people (were) pretty reluctant to put themselves out there,” she said.
Someone might chat with her online for a bit, but those conversations rarely turned into a date.
But Bill was different. He was “eager to meet,” Townsend said in an interview at the COVER mixer. New to online dating, “he wasn’t jaded yet.”
“From the first date, we were just smitten.”
The pair met a few months before the coronavirus pandemic, and while many slogged through months of isolation, the couple basked in the opportunity to get to know each other.
The pandemic “gave us a lot of time to hunker down together,” Townsend said.
When Townsend does start dating again, she doubts she’ll use an app. It might have led her to Bill, but he seemed to be the exception, not the rule, and she wasn’t sure if she had the patience to see if lightning would strike twice.
‘Consider being single’
For some, finding a long-term partner is among their biggest priorities, but for others, different aspects of life are more important.
From age 8, Lesley Koenig, 69, of Weston, Vt. knew she wanted to direct operas, a dream that led to a 30-year career at the Metropolitan Opera.
She’s never really been interested in a long-term partnership, or having kids.
“I dated a tenor, a baritone and a bass, and I decided that was enough,” she joked, sitting among a few boxes of lamps.
She’d decided to come to the COVER event after meeting one of the organizers on vacation.
Staying mostly unpartnered allowed her to focus on achieving the professional success she’d dreamed of.
“People should think before they go and get married,” she said. “Consider being single.”
‘Meet-cute’
Finding the right partner is too complex and personal a process for any kind of prescriptive advice, but having an open mind and putting yourself in the right environment to meet people seem to be part of the recipe for success.
That’s what worked for Betsy Vereckey, anyway, who, newly divorced, left New York City at 37 for a fresh start in Hanover, where her beloved Glen of Imaal terrier Ronan hailed from.
She gave herself time to be on her own, but she was also eager to start a family.
“I never lasted on the apps,” she said in a recent interview. “It just kind of felt like it was a little bit of a cruel game.”
Plus she was married to the idea of finding her partner in person. “I just really wanted a meet-cute,” she said.
So instead of swiping, she took to going to bars, either by herself or with a friend, and telling friends and acquaintances that she was single, in case they knew of an eligible match.
One night, she and her friend stopped into Pine, the upscale Hanover restaurant, for a drink. Her friend ushered her into a seat next to a man with “quirky glasses” and a maroon-colored Patagonia fleece who was “absolutely my type,” as Vereckey writes in her new book “Moving to My Dog’s Hometown.”
When their drinks arrived, the man leaned over and remarked that there was a fly in Vereckey’s glass.
“Impossible,” she thought.
What transpired between them over the next few days and years was not always simple, but Vereckey had gotten her meet-cute.
She and Andrew Winter, now her husband, have been together for eight years.
Chance encounters like the one they had might not happen everyday, but the experience does underscore something Townsend said at COVER:
“If you see someone in the supermarket who you think is cute, say something.”