NYC singles are playing ‘Love is Blind’ in real life — ditching dating apps to connect in literal darkness

Bad dates are a fact of life in NYC — from agonizing, job interview-esque nights out with unchecked egomaniacs, to marathon get-togethers that wind up leaving you both deflated and ghosted, it’s no secret that making connections in today’s Big Apple is a toxic, metropolitan mess.

Exhausted by the swipe culture of the apps and the pressure to perform when you actually do manage to get to meet someone in person, some New Yorkers are hanging up their hat on romantic connections altogether — favoring taking their AI partners out for a night on the town, instead.

While I’ve not quite sunk to falling-in-love-with-a-chatbot levels of desperation myself, my Gotham dating resume has been filled with memorable disasters — like the aspiring writer who explained his bad screenplay to me for an hour and a half, or the poor guy who suffered a full-blown, two hour panic attack in the middle of dinner. (Was it something I said?)

So when I recently came across an Instagram ad for an event touting a new way to date in real life — where participants are blindfolded until a proper connection has been established, like in the hit Netflix reality show, “Love is Blind” — the still-single lady in me was more than a little intrigued.

My Hoang Nguyen, 38, is the co-founder of Unseen Connection, a popular gathering that made its initial debut in Lisbon, Portugal, last year. The point, she told The Post, is to help people get over today’s looks-obsessed digital dating culture — and facilitate actual sparks.

“We both (loved) ‘Love Is Blind,’” Nguyen told The Post — referring to her co-founder/best friend Martina Grüber. “So we said to each other, ‘Why not host our own event and bring the concept of “LIB” to real life?’ We wanted to make dating more fun and exciting again, without being so superficial.”