How To Date in the Internet Age.
How To Date in the Internet Age.
Swiping less and dating better.
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Dating is a bit broken today.
People are on the apps constantly swiping left, right, again and again, flipping thru a menu of people faster than competitive eaters going thru a hot dog challenge.
And when people do match, the convos begin with a Hey :).
Oh boy.
If some turn into first dates, they’re just meh or fizzle out after a few weeks or months of some weird situationship.
Back to swiping I guess.
When I talk to a bunch of people, the apps work for some but it doesn’t strike me that most are having a good time. Why is dating like this and how can we date better?
Let’s hop in.
How Do We Make Friends?
Great relationships tend to be downstream of great friendships and many friendships are kickstarted from casual, repeated interactions. It’s the person you keep seeing here and there that when you finally meet, you find out they have a great sense of humor, you exchange numbers, hang out again and jump a few months down the line, they’re planning your birthday party.
So when the ability to make friends decline, it’s no wonder relationships decline as well.
Dating is tougher because meeting people non-intentionally & making friends is tougher, post-college especially.
In college, due to everyone living incredibly close together, being around the same age group, sharing the same schedules and traveling across the same campus, opportunities to meet people are abundant.
For example, all freshman students probably take a required beginner math course & there’s probably only two buildings on campus where most beginner math classes are held. Or everybody goes to the same dining halls or joins the same clubs. There’s a very high chance you’ll bump into same people again and again in different places.
Unlike the bump-into-a-cute-girl-on-the-way-to-class Hollywood cliche, when people graduate and head to the cities, they realize that there’s not as many avenues to meeting new people.
How We Get Around
Part of the challenge is the design of American cities; they rely on the car and therefore are by nature, point-to-point. You leave home in your car, drive to the grocery store, park, shop and drive back. Everything from shopping to going to the gym is like this; there’s a pre-determined destination in mind with little room for serendipity.
We’ve hyperspecialized how we get around to the point where permitting others to enter, even potential friends or lovers is challenging.
I’m not sure what you’re supposed do to meet people, but I don’t think it’s hanging out in the fresh produce section of Safeway, timing when to grab a lettuce so as to reach for it at the same time as someone else & have your “moment” to meet them.
Consider the alternative: fixed route, such as trains or buses. In Japan, train stations dotted the cities of Osaka and Tokyo, encouraging joint travel. Once on the train, even during rush hour, you felt comfortable chatting with the person next to you; plenty of room for serendipity to enter.
Very comfortable vinyl seating 🙂
Also, cars need parking. Roads + parking swallow up a healthy chunk of land in cities, removing space for sidewalks, casual seating, parks, benches or simply avenues to stroll on; all places where you could bump into others.
A regular Japanese sidewalk!
Aside from car-centric design, American cities lack 3rd spaces.
What Are 3rd Spaces?
The first space is the home. It’s where you go to relax, sleep, procrastinate on your phone while you take a doo-doo so much so your legs fall asleep.1 The second space is work. Work is where you go to so you can build something cool for the world, get paid so you can afford the 1st space and buy nice things like this cute pixel art bluetooth speaker. You can really enjoy your work & colleagues but making friends is not what you’re hired for.
The third space is the place outside of work and home for people to gather; it’s where people mingle, celebrate and chat. When you’re in college, you’re constantly surrounded by 3rd spaces. It’s the libraries, the classroom, the grass outside the lecture hall, the paths to the dorm, your dorm room, the bus; everywhere.
In cities, it’s bars, restaurants, clubs, squares, and parks; it’s MacLaren’s Pub in How I Met Your Mother where Ted, Barney, Robin, Lily and Marshall crash after work & start all their shenanigans from.
While each of these are cool places to hang out with friends, they don’t necessarily encourage new relationships.
People don’t really hang out at restaurants. Rarely you hear, “I met her at a restaurant.” You typically go to a restaurant with others and meet a friend of a friend. Not great for meeting someone new if you know no one in a city.
It’s hard to get to know someone when Drake is blasting. Both bars and clubs can be OK for conversation but the dynamic of such places are generally hookup/party and it’s loud as hell in some of these joints. Also, bars & clubs don’t always encourage repeated visits (i.e. people check them off their list) so you can always have a revolving group.
Squares and parks suffer from crime, homelessness and social fear. In San Francisco particularly, homelessness, drug addiction & an exceedingly high tolerance of theft by law enforcement have led to some public spaces being wholly unusable. It’s not helpful if I have to check if there’s human or dog shit in the grass before I sit or always be on-guard for my stuff being stolen. And similar to restaurants, most people go to hang out; not to meet new people.
The vast majority of people need an excuse, a reason to meet someone. It’s the equivalent of a name tag at a networking event or sharing the same class in college; it gives people just enough familiarity to prompt a conversation & not feel weird. You can tell people to just walk up the strangers and strike up a conversation (which I enjoy) but most people feel comfortable doing that. Most of our 3rd spaces don’t provide enough familiarity for people to get to know each other so everyone ends up walking around with their Airpods in.
So unless you know someone, intend to walk up to strangers & introduce yourself or want to hang out in a bar hoping for someone to come over, you’re gonna struggle to make new connections, romantic or otherwise.
Dating Apps: Optimizing for the Wrong Things
Enter dating apps. The simple, low friction way to meet new people and date.
You have your bio, your interests & your filters of what you’re looking for. But what stands out the most are the images; people are visual creatures.
Ok, let’s say you swipe right on that person with great pictures. Maybe they’ve got a great smile, or just look popping in that dress.
Welcome to the texting game.
Consider any real-life connection you’ve had. That one close friend from high school or college. That guy you clicked with at a party. Whoever.
What stood out about them?
Chances are it was something to do with their body language, their humor, the social context, a sense of fashion, tone, pace of speech, storytelling, how they treated others, how they made you feel; all of it put together! Text reduces all of this down to a 1-dimensional format.
People who would have been focused on how to dress better or how to land a good joke at a houseparty are now optimizing for how to pose the best for a picture or send the wittiest text.
Perhaps a well toned, athletic body can indicate valuing health and texting well can indicate a sense of humor. But do those six pack abs come from geniunely caring about wellbeing or a byproduct of deep insecurity? Does that sense of humor come from being witty or is it manufactured based on the 1000th A/B tested joke?
Don’t mistake the finger pointing for the moon.
Zen Buddhist quote
The skills that people optimize for on dating apps are not correlated with the skills needed to being a great partner. There’s no screen to hide behind in real life.
But the nature of the dating app algorithms introduce something else; you can be with anyone anywhere all at once.
Infinite Optionality
In our parent’s generation, they asked “Who can I marry? Who can I say yes to?”
And it usually shows up in some form of a simple love story, far removed from the grandiose Hollywood love scripts.
When I ask my dad how he found my mom, he says they met at work. “I liked talking to her and so we started spending more time talking. Then, we got married.”
People found someone and they just chose.
In our generation, we’re pummeled with infinite choices. You can have any variety of a person; height, weight, race, education, political leaning, drug use; it’s all a menu to choose from.
The room of potential partners is anyone with an internet connection & that seamlessness lends itself to indecision.
When you get to know someone, you are going to bump up against their rough edges (a joke that landed wrong, a character trait you dislike, an opinion that you disagree with). These rough edges are not shown online for the same reason I don’t dish out my personal life to the guy powerwashing the streets; it’s something I reserve for people closer to me.
But actually these rough edges are what make people well, people. Rough edges, how you respond to what your partner thinks about your rough edges, and the friction that may arise are part of what makes a relationship, a relationship.
Relationships, by definition, require some measure of effort to them.
But now if you don’t like your partner, you find someone just like them with a slightly different variation.
And that’s the challenge of our generation.
When we can have anyone of any size, shape or color, ours is a quest of “Who do we say NO to?”
Pre-Internet, your environment would filter for this and now you have to. Otherwise, you can get entangled with people you don’t want to be entangled with.
The Ideal
So all of this gets us away from what is most people’s ideal: To get to know their partner, well before they become partners. The friends-to-lovers trope.
But why is it a trope?
It’s because stepping into romance right away is a pretty heavy lift! It’s like forcing your two best friends to become friends the first time they meet just because they’re both friends with you; you can be forcing compatibility when it doesn’t need to happen right away.
And since the purpose of serious relationships is hopefully marriage and marriage is effectively one long hangout with someone for life, why rush it?
Marriage isn’t the honeymoon in Thailand—it’s day four of vacation #56 that you take together. Marriage is not celebrating the closing of the deal on the first house—it’s having dinner in that house for the 4,386th time. And it’s certainly not Valentine’s Day.
Marriage is Forgettable Wednesday. Together.
How to Pick a Life Partner Part 2 - Tim Urban
How are you going to know what someone is like on that 100th Wednesday unless you know them well enough?
Where We Go From Here
Dating apps are, at their core, a supplement to in-real-life dating just as protein shakes are supplement to a well balanced diet.
They amplify who you are off the apps which is why meeting people & dating irl is so important. You have to refine what you want off the apps so if you do meet someone from the apps, you’ll clear on what you want.
So, how do you meet people irl if you know no one in a city?
The best way to meet people & find potential partners is to do the things you love in a city and host things with the people you meet there.
If you enjoy salsa, make friends at a class, host a dinner party and tell them to invite their friends.
If you love climbing, head to the climbing gyms; someone who is pretty athletic will be showing up, the homebodies are at home.
If you enjoy writing, head to a local writing club; all the cool writers will be there.
It’s not to say it’s easy; your environment is not pulling for you. And you’ll probably go on less dates than you would from an app. But I bet if you do, you’ll find that there’s much more staying power in those connections. The reason for this is simple: Finding people thru the things you enjoy doing are life’s highest quality filters.
Why? Because it takes time, energy and commitment. If someone’s dancing with you, they’re not anywhere else & in a modern world where everyone is multitasking just about everything, that’s a relatively high bar.
And when you do make friends, know that you don’t need many; quality > quantity. A great close friend is an incredible filter to then find that special someone; if you resonate well with them, chances are their friends are gonna be pretty cool too.
Or who knows?
Maybe sparks will fly and that friend will become something more ;).
Good luck out there.
-Kiran
Oh is that just me? I can’t be alone in my legs falling asleep on the loo.
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Kiran’s Gems 💎
“We trade freedom not for safety, but for the illusion of safety. Illusion, because: you can’t eliminate risk. Whether we’re talking about parenting or regulation, the idea that you can is comforting. It provides a sense of control. Everyone wants their kids to be safe. But risks don’t operate in a vacuum. By trying to limit known but potentially small risks, you open yourself up to bigger but less legible risks elsewhere. It’s like squeezing a water balloon. Push on one side, the water moves to the other. Push too hard, and the balloon explodes. “ A great take by Packy McCormick on understanding risk.
"At first, I also thought it was cringe to write about my life and narcissistic to think people would actually care, but now I realize the internet is just one giant matchmaking engine… Writing about who you are and what you’re interested in is just a bat signal for finding your people." Matt Yao & how he manifests luck from uncertainity.
"He knew the right way to do it -- gather the staff, be vulnerable, accept fault, give people an opportunity to mourn, to ask questions, to rage -- but he was too emotional… Instead, Speiser hid behind his computer, a decision that haunts him still, and fired off the email saying the company was "permanently closing its doors" effective immediately.”An important lesson on how to not handle closing down a company.