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Dating apps if you can mentally survive them.
If not, then something like meetup app, find stuff you already like to do and go to events with like minded people. Make friends and maybe something more will come along.
Either way be patient. You can't rush something like that.
Dating apps are useless for any man who isn’t stupidly handsome or parasitically wealthy. The bottom 90% of men on dating apps are routinely completely ignored. For every swipe an average woman makes that gets a response from a man, the average man has to swipe right somewhere between 500 and 1,000 times to get an equivalent response from a woman, depending on how he presents himself on that platform.
Your best bet is social events IRL, and networking through friends. Aim for connections and friendships over relationships, with at least ⅔ of all new connections being other male friends, as you cannot be seen as “thirsty” under any circumstances. If you come across as desperate, you will be either ignored or manipulated and taken advantage of as a “useful idiot” with nothing to show for it.
Another good tactic is to become intrinsically motivated. When you focus on yourself, cultivate your own personality to benefit only yourself, and adopt a stoic mindset, companionship of any kind shifts from a requirement to a value-added proposition. You need to be completely happy and satisfied with your own solitude and existence apart from others in order to be a good judge of how others are best suited for you.
And many men are abandoning relationships altogether because the juice is just no longer worth the squeeze. After all, why be with someone who hates you for the gender you are? Down that path lies pain and suffering, and it is better for your mental, physical, and financial health to go your own way.
Dating apps are at best a crapshoot. They’re more interested in prying money out of you than anything else.
Like others have said, doing things you enjoy is a good way to meet people who enjoy the same things. Maybe you won’t meet your next bf/gf/etc directly, but perhaps someone you’ll meet has a cute single friend.
Being in a positive and healthy relationship is better than being single, but single-hood is better than being in an unhealthy and dysfunctional relationship.
Dating seems a bit like working on your mental health, in that both imply working on self-improvement (which ultimately should be done for intrinsic reasons, not just because it may get you laid).
Like the quote from the Bojack season 2 finale: “It gets easier. Every day it gets a little easier. But you gotta do it every day. That’s the hard part. But it does get easier.”
If you know you’ll be in a confusing area, there’s location sharing on cell phones. Most of em are good about giving you the opportunity to turn it off. What’s better for if they’re not always gonna have a working phone or might forget it is some kind of tags. No matter how you feel about em, airtags work best for this in the United States because they use apple stuff as a mesh network and there’s more Apple stuff than anything else.