Cuffing season is an excuse. Here’s a better one.

Dark by five

The evening stops being optional

Sunday the clocks go back. By the time most people leave their desks on Monday it will already be night outside, and London will do the thing it does every year without any ceremony — stop pretending the evening is optional.

This is also, not coincidentally, the exact moment cuffing season gets serious. The term is a joke that stopped being a joke. There’s the Google Trends spike that lands every autumn, without fail since 2016, the TikTok countdowns, the slightly panicked energy of people who were perfectly happy being single in July and are, by November, asking their flatmates if they still have that one person’s number. Dark by five does something to a city of people who already work too much and see each other too little. It doesn’t create the want. It just removes the cover story.

The excuse

It was never about the relationship

Here’s the bit nobody says out loud: cuffing season isn’t really about wanting a relationship. It’s about wanting a reason to leave the flat on a Tuesday in November when it’s been dark since before you finished your last meeting. The apps know this. Every autumn the ads arrive on cue — find your person before the cold, be sorted by Christmas. What they’re selling isn’t connection. It’s an excuse with a push notification attached, and a match by Thursday who you’ll have forgotten about by February.

The apps also know the maths doesn’t survive contact with a cold Tuesday. A match is not a plan. A plan, in late October, means agreeing on a venue neither of you has been to, working out if it’s worth the walk from the station in the wind, and showing up anyway for someone you’ve only seen through a filter. Most people don’t. The conversation goes quiet somewhere around week two, right when it would have had to turn into an actual evening, and everyone involved blames the other person instead of the hour.

The room

A better excuse

What changes the maths isn’t a better app for the season. It’s removing the bit that was never the problem — finding someone who might be interesting — and putting the effort where it was always going to be spent anyway: in a room, on a Tuesday, in the dark, with people who already said yes to showing up. Cuffing season is six months of wanting an excuse. The room is the excuse. The app was never going to be.