diagnosing the dating problem
why are so many friendly, ambitious nerds lonely?
this is the first post in what i expect to be a long series dissecting the problem, explaining why i’m relentlessly optimistic about your odds, and trying to impart that optimism to readers. i’ll be focusing on heterosexuals who want marriage + kids, but i expect a lot of this to generalize.
first, a very short answer the question:
there are a lot of ingredients in this shit stew, but it all boils down to a lack of agency
if you want to get married, you need to be micromarriage-maxxing. but people…just aren’t doing this. why not?
the broad strokes:
finding The One takes effort
the process is scary
the particulars sound something like this:
i want marriage and maybe even children, but it’s hard to visualize happening to me. it’s just too many steps away.
the outcomes i can envision don’t actually feel worth the risk/effort.
like, maybe i’m not going on any dates right now, but if i worked really hard at it and made myself miserable, i could go out on a whole bunch of dates… without any mutual spark. and end up right back where i started.
what’s the point? any given person i meet is incredibly unlikely to be my future spouse anyway.
and it all feels like so much pressure. finding partnership is really important to me, and it seems to just happen to plenty of people (even assholes!) without any real effort on their part.
it’s honestly embarrassing to want something this badly. i feel like i’m failing at the fundamental human experience, and having to put so much effort into that failure is cringe and pathetic.
to make things worse, maybe you have some sort of defect that puts you at a huge disadvantage relative to your perceived competitors. and the older you get, the more disadvantages start to stack against you.
it feels incredibly lonely, even though people all around you are going through some variation on the same thing. meanwhile, your friends on the other side of this struggle come up with really banal advice like “just have fun and be yourself!”
the problem is… they’re not wrong. they just don’t know how to communicate the mechanics of the thing.
maybe it’s because once you’ve gotten good at something, it’s really hard to remember what you struggled with in the first place.
maybe it’s because they’re too embarrassed to reminisce publicly about the Before Times.1
maybe it’s because, from the perspective of someone who has found love, the sorts of thoughts people have when they’re struggling to find a relationship look a lot like mental illness, and it’s really difficult to communicate across this gap.
a lot of dating advice which is correct is thoroughly unhelpful because people have hard time communicating across this perspective shift.
the goal of this blog is to help you draw the rest of the fucking owl so you can start offering totally banal and useless advice to your single friends. ¬‿¬
thanks to austin chen for motivating + offering suggestions on the first draft of this post!
check out my website if u’d like to book a matchmaking or dating troubleshooting meeting
if this you aren’t too embarrassed to reminisce publicly about the before times, shoot me a message, i’d love to interview you about how you got from point A to point B and post it to YouTube
"it all feels like so much _pressure_. finding partnership is _really_ important to me" - I think this is actually really significant, and I'd love to hear more of your thoughts on it in future posts!
My belief is that this sense of pressure/desperation/hopelessness can act as a major debuff to both taking action, as well as how well you do on dates (for lack of better phrasing on my end). It's part of what "just have fun and be yourself!" is trying to get at, but I agree it's not being communicated effectively. And paradoxically you might have to loosen your grip on your desire to find a partner, to help you find a partner.