Removing Mumbai from Datespots.city was not an easy decision.
It is one of the largest, most energetic, and most culturally significant cities in the world. It has exceptional food, historic neighborhoods, beautiful waterfronts, and millions of people building lives and relationships there every day.
But Datespots is not a directory of the world’s biggest cities.
It is a curated guide to cities where couples can spend time together freely, comfortably, and meaningfully.
After months of building the Mumbai collection, I had to admit that the city did not consistently fit that standard.
Couples should be able to feel free
A date is not only about the venue.
It is also about everything around it.
It is walking together after dinner. Sitting close in a park. Holding hands on the way to a café. Wandering through a neighborhood without feeling watched. Being affectionate without constantly calculating how strangers might react.
In Mumbai, that freedom cannot always be taken for granted.
Public affection remains socially sensitive in many parts of the city. Couples can attract stares simply for holding hands, sitting closely, or behaving in ways that would be considered completely ordinary elsewhere.
That discomfort is not limited to unmarried couples. Even married couples may feel pressure to remain restrained in public.
Of course, experiences differ by neighborhood, social circle, age, and circumstance. Mumbai is not culturally uniform. But the broader taboo around couples being openly affectionate is still difficult to ignore.
For a product built around dating, that matters.
A city may have excellent restaurants and beautiful venues, but if couples cannot comfortably exist as couples in the spaces between them, something essential is missing.
The space between venues matters
Datespots is not just about making a reservation.
The best dates often happen between planned destinations.
You leave a museum and walk to a wine bar. You find a bookstore on the way. You sit by the water. You change your plans because an interesting street or courtyard catches your attention.
Cities such as Amsterdam, Barcelona, Paris, Rome, London, Tokyo, and New York make this kind of experience possible.
Their strongest neighborhoods reward walking. A couple can move naturally from one place to another while still feeling that the journey itself is part of the date.
Mumbai is far more difficult in this respect.
The city is vast, fragmented, crowded, and heavily affected by traffic. High-quality venues may be spread across distant neighborhoods, making it difficult to build a fluid date around them.
A restaurant in one area, an activity in another, and a waterfront destination somewhere else can turn a date into a transportation exercise.
Local trains, taxis, rickshaws, and app-based transport make movement possible, but possible is not the same as easy, relaxed, or romantic.
Datespots works best in cities where two people can explore together without every transition becoming a logistical decision.
The city became harder to curate at scale
The most important editorial problem appeared as I continued adding places.
The quality started dropping.
Mumbai has excellent restaurants, cafés, bars, hotels, cultural institutions, and experiences. That was never the issue.
The problem was depth.
Once the obvious high-quality destinations had been added, expanding individual categories became increasingly difficult. I found myself considering places that were merely adequate rather than genuinely memorable.
Some venues were visually attractive but not well maintained.
Some were too inconsistent.
Some were primarily functional places rather than destinations worth building a date around.
Others looked good online but did not offer an experience strong enough to justify inclusion.
That is where a curated guide can easily become a directory.
I did not want to add weaker venues simply to make Mumbai look as comprehensive as New York, London, Paris, Tokyo, or Amsterdam.
If adding more places makes the product worse, then adding more places is the wrong goal.
Dating is still treated differently
Mumbai is modern in many ways, but social attitudes toward dating remain complicated.
For many couples, relationships still exist under family pressure, social scrutiny, limited privacy, and fear of judgment.
Unmarried couples may have to think carefully about where they meet, how openly they behave, and who might see them.
Hotels, parks, promenades, residential areas, and public spaces can all carry different forms of discomfort or scrutiny.
This does not mean people in Mumbai do not date. They clearly do.
It means dating often requires more negotiation, discretion, and caution than it should.
Datespots is built around a more open idea of dating: two adults should be able to spend time together without embarrassment, suspicion, or interference.
That freedom is not equally available everywhere.
This is not a judgment on the people of Mumbai
Removing the city is not a claim that Mumbai has no romance, no dating culture, or no great places for couples.
It has all three.
Nor is it a claim that every other city on Datespots is perfectly liberal, walkable, or socially open. They are not.
The decision is about the overall experience.
Does the city offer enough high-quality venues across multiple categories?
Can couples travel between them without excessive friction?
Can they walk, explore, sit together, and show ordinary affection without feeling uncomfortable?
Can Datespots maintain a high editorial standard without filling categories with mediocre recommendations?
For Mumbai, my honest conclusion was no.
At least not yet.
Quality over city count
It would have been easy to keep Mumbai for the sake of having another major global city on the platform.
But city count is not the goal.
Datespots is not trying to cover every city. It is trying to cover the right cities well.
I would rather feature 24 cities that strongly fit the product than 50 cities included because they are large, famous, or strategically convenient.
Curation means making decisions that reduce the size of the product while improving its quality.
Removing Mumbai felt personal, and I did feel bad about it.
But keeping a city out of guilt would have been worse.
Mumbai may return one day.
Social attitudes change. Infrastructure improves. Neighborhoods evolve. New cultural and hospitality spaces open.
But for now, Datespots needs to remain honest about what it is built to represent:
Cities where couples can discover great places, move through the city with relative ease, and feel free to be together.