I put my love life in the hands of a New York City photobooth

Somewhere in New York City, a man I’ve never met is carrying around a vintage-style photobooth strip with my face on it. He has four tiny exposures of me smiling and pouting in various awkward poses, except he doesn’t know my full name, where I’m from, or if he will ever meet me.Meanwhile, I’m holding onto a photo strip of a smiley stranger — he’s flashing a peace sign in one frame, closing his eyes in the next.

He wears an England cap, which is a bizarre coincidence since that’s where I’m from.We are linked because sometime in the past few days, each of us stepped inside the same nondescript Union Square photobooth designed to match up singles looking for a connection.One evening this week, I joined a line of twenty-somethings — all dressed in various Y2K-style outfits — waiting for a turn inside the matchmaking machine.

The photobooth is situated on the corner of East 12th Street and University Place, right in the heart of the NYU campus; territory of the young and uber-trendy. The location is extremely purposeful. This is matchmaking for a photobooth-loving, chronically online generation.

Before entering the photobooth, we were instructed to scan a QR code and fill out a personality questionnaire about our age, sexual orientation, views on religion, how ambitious we are and whether we like to dance, scoring the answer on a scale of one to seven (one being the lowest you resonate with the statement). open image in galleryHopeful singles wait in line for the ‘Missed Connections’ photobooth on East 12th Street and University Place in Manhattan (Ellie Muir / The Independent)A tap of your card and $10 later, the photobooth churns out two physical strips of photos: one of you, and another of the stranger you’ve been paired with based on your answers. But there is a catch.

Finding them in-person is improbable among New York City’s 8.5 million residents — unless you have some impressive social media sleuthing skills and hunt them down. The flaws of this operation do make me wonder: isn’t modern dating already hard enough that single people don’t need to be frantically running around the city, holding a photostrip up to a stranger’s face, screaming, “Is this you?!

Are you my match?” Surely, we’ve been through enough?Outside the photobooth, I meet Julieana, a 22-year-old supermarket worker from the Bronx, who journeyed downtown after seeing videos about the matchmaking machine on TikTok.

She had a positive experience: she thought her match was good-looking and said she’ll attempt to track him down online.open image in gallery‘The Independent’s’ Ellie Muir was matched with a stranger at the ‘Missed Connections’ photobooth in New York City, but only knows his first name and will never actually meet him (Ellie Muir / The Independent)“If I find him, I would message and be like, ‘Hey, you’re my match,’” she laughs. “It’s a bit scary.”

Julieana is a self-professed romantic, so she would choose this vaguely analogue-style meet-cute over Hinge any day. “I’m iffy about dating apps,” she says. “I'll meet somebody, and then it doesn't work out, and then I take a break from it.

And then it's a continuous cycle. I haven’t had any luck with that.”“Not everybody wants to be in love right now,” she says.

“They're either not ready or they want other things.”It’s no secret that dating apps are pretty hellish right now. According to Forbes, 80 percent of millennials report dating app burnout, while 79 percent of Gen Z experience it, too.

The figure is slightly lower for Gen X (78 percent) and Baby Boomers (70 percent). Even when you do meet someone organically, ghosting — the act of suddenly vanishing from someone’s life in a very emotionally avoidant manner with no prior warning — seems to plague the dating scene. You may get a first date, but whether you’ll ever hear from them again is a roll of the dice.

It is so hellish that Vogue reported last month that women are even being ghosted by their long-term partners.open image in galleryA tap of your card and $10 later, the photobooth churns out two physical strips of photos: one of you, and another of the stranger you’ve been paired with based on your answers (Ellie Muir / The Independent)But I’m not convinced that this “Missed Connections” photobooth will help solve the sorry state of dating, either. It quickly becomes clear to me that this might be a thinly veiled marketing stunt.

The inconvenience of having only the first name of your match to go off has already led some participants to post about it on social media, imploring strangers online to help them track down their connection, in an “internet...do your thing” style video. A handful of these posts already exist.

I won’t be surprised if this trend goes viral next week. It’s no surprise, then, that this booth is the brainchild of those who engineer some of the internet’s most viral moments. It is a collaboration between the matchmaking service Matchbox and @meetcutesnyc, the Instagram account with 3.

3 million followers, which