If wellness is the new nightlife, could the gym be the new date hotspot? Across the UK, bars and members’ clubs are rebranding themselves in light of the global wellness boom: later this month, legendary nightclub Tramp is due to launch a wellness sister club, Tramp Health, around the same time that Long Lane, a Sussex-based no-alcohol members club, will open its doors. Across the Atlantic, meanwhile, there is a new wave of wellness-first socialising: dating apps. 

As the old dating app model is dying, the prospect of endless options at your fingertips is no longer as marketable as it once was. New ventures are tapping into specificity: ‘high-alignment’ singles for whom ‘health is a way of living’. Examples include the AI-powered Sitch, which allows users to filter matches by lifestyle compatibility, and Lunge, a ‘IRL’ dating app which combines exercise with a post-activity bar trip, and has just launched its singles’ run club in the UK. Marketed to a global ‘health and fitness community’, these apps tap into a growing wellness economy while retaining the allure of exclusivity. But if ‘health’ is a club for the few, who gets left out? And what does it really imply if an app is screening for ‘fitness’?

The most recent addition to this group of apps is ATEAM, a US-based, invite-only dating app-cum-members club for the fitness community, launching this month. In an effort to cut out the high volume and high variety nature of traditional dating apps, members are selected by a 40-person committee comprising personal trainers, models and ‘cultural tastemakers’. Love, the team believes, is integral to longevity; they are explicit about their goals to foster lasting connections (both romantic and platonic), rather than ephemeral situationships or one-night stands. “Human connection is health”, a banner emblazoned on its website reads. It’s an understanding of human relationships rooted in a Silicon Valley-esque view of self-optimisation and efficiency.

“Compatibility used to be framed around values, attraction, career or family goals Those still matter, of course. But now lifestyle is a much bigger part of identity,” Dan Ilani, a former media executive and the co-founder of ATEAM, with his wife Megan Baldwin, tells Dazed. In particular, more and more people are pursuing a healthy lifestyle: as of last August, the number of Americans who consume alcohol reached an all-time low of 54 per cent, and reports in Britain revealed a parallel trend. As things like sobriety, training routines and sleep schedules increasingly become part of how we define ourselves, it makes sense that lifestyle similarities and discrepancies increasingly shape our relationships, too.

Oscar Song, a 29-year-old East London-based strategist, tells me that – since moving to London from Sydney last year – he has struggled to find people with similar lifestyles on the typical dating apps. Fitness is a key aspect of Oscar’s life: he walks 10,000 steps a day, trains three to five times a week, and eats healthily. “Among the general gay population in London, surface-level connections usually surface as sex or intense short bursts of connections,” he says. “But I think more and more gay people, at least those around me, are looking for deeper connections and monogamy.” He would use a fitness-focused dating app, he says, but only if “it captured a diverse group – otherwise it might become incredibly toxic”. 

This is the central danger of treating ‘wellness’ or ‘fitness’ as a criteria for dating: the factors by which it is judged are difficult to separate from physical appearance, but also socioeconomic status: there are major disparities in who can afford personal trainers, and in who has the time to cook healthy meals or spend long hours at the gym, with one 2024-2025 survey by Sport England finding that those from lower economic backgrounds are significantly less likely to be active. As such, the fitness industry is notoriously dominated by wealthy, slim and white people (there are plenty of Black and Brown fitness influencers, for example, but they tend to earn less than their white counterparts.) There is also an extensively documented and longstanding relationship between wellness and racism,  from the 20th-century fascist endorsement of yoga to the carefully curated Instagram feeds of blonde-haired, apron-wearing “Granola Nazis”. 

Building an app around the idea of fitness risks streamlining the fatphobia that already exists in the dating marketplace, creating a space where users may never have to confront the biases behind their preferences. Of course, it‘s possible to be both fat and interested in fitness (many people are!), but is that what anyone has in mind when they sign up to this new breed of apps? Framing ‘fitness’ as the criteria for being a desirable partner arguably carries the suggestion that larger people are less worthy. At a time when both women and men are facing increasing pressure to slim down and lose weight, this kind of language can feel like a dog whistle, and it begs the question of who will actually be accepted into these private communities, and under what exact criteria. 

Some wellness clubs are predicated on subverting these prejudices, by fostering an intentionally inclusive ethos. For example, Get Gayns hosts queer runs and socials throughout London; For Brothers That Talk hosts runs, pilates classes and sauna sessions for Black men, and many fitness spaces and run clubs host female-only iterations. When I ask Ilani how ATEAM plans to redress industry imbalances, he says, “inclusivity does not mean removing standards. It means making sure the standards are the right ones.” The committee does not yet offer much public detail on what this looks like in practice, claiming instead that they will prioritise mindset and intentions over the “image” of wellness. According to them, ATEAM will be about “a shared orientation toward life… people who are active, intentional, socially curious, and looking for relationships that reflect the way they actually live“. 

Nneoma Anosike, a model, Pilates instructor and founding committee member of ATEAM, takes this a step further. “As a Black woman in the wellness and fitness space, I’ve personally experienced how intimidating or inaccessible these spaces can sometimes feel,” she tells me. “For me, true wellness is about inclusivity, representation and community. That means being intentional about who gets invited into the room, whose stories are highlighted, and what wellness is allowed to look like.” This attitude is important in a wellness culture that, alongside its language of longevity and self-improvement, has also absorbed darker currents: looksmaxxing, extreme beauty routines, the resurgence of ultra-thin ideals, and online spaces where fitness, purity and racial politics can blur.

There is a large body of evidence which shows the positive health impacts of good relationships, whether romantic, platonic or familial. But the mobilisation of ‘health’ as a facet of identity has a more sinister potential. Exclusive groups – whether dating apps or members clubs – are predicated on categorisation, which is especially questionable when it comes to a term as nebulous as ‘wellness’, which can mean anything from an extreme workout routine to spiritual fulfilment. Without intentional inclusivity, these apps run the risk of reinforcing deeply ingrained prejudices about who is deemed worthy of love, and why.