Dan Slater - A Million First Dates: Solving the Puzzle of Online Dating

STRAPPING IN

I met my wife in the most modern of ways: a yoga class. After a week or three of hemming and hawing, I collected my courage and asked her out. I was thirty-one, licking the wounds of a recently failed relationship, and about to be laid off from my job. Who wouldnt want to date me?

Yesbelieve it or notshe declined this incredible opportunity. She had a boyfriend. Rats.

So I began dating people, some of whom I met online, and started working on this book. Time passed. Then, one sunny day, my wife-to-be popped up in that right-hand column on Facebook as A Person You May Know. As it turned out, the boyfriend had since been banishedmuch to my delight!and eighteen months later we were married.

Hardly any of that was predictable or formulaic, particularly when you add those other relationships that came before. Were those other relationshipswith all their joy and scarringnecessary for this one to work out?

When this book was published, the most common question I got was: Why a book about online dating? Id explain that the book was really about modern relationships and how theyre affected by all this technology were using to find new relationships and keep old ones going. Okay, fine. But why? And the answer I never gave, maybe because it seemed so unsophisticated, but would like to give now is this: I wrote a book about relationships because I never understood books about relationships.

Not novels. I love a good romance. Im talking about all those how-to books, the ones with lots of peppy lists and cheery chapter titles. They tell you what youre doing wrong, how to improve your appeal, and are general enough to apply to pretty much anyone. A lot of the advice makes sense. For instance, brush your teeth before a date. Thats helpful. But once you get past the common-sense stuff, these books usefulness sort of ends. Why is that?

My opinion is that relationship manuals fail because they start from the premise that finding a good relationship is reducible to a formula of dos and dontsone that worked for the author or for the authors friends and is guaranteed to work for you, too, if only you can learn to do it right.

The reality of dating, of course, is far from formulaic. Its more like riding a rollercoaster, blindfolded, while the track ahead is still under construction. The original plans for the track were abandoned, and now the engineers are working with whatever materials they can get, hoping to finish the next loop-the-loop before you fly off into orbit. Your stomach drops when youre plunged into a horrifying encounter one day and you scream to be let off. But wait. That memory is quickly erased when the dating rollercoaster rockets you up to a moment of hopefulness the next day, a peak of joy that was so unforeseeable but makes perfect sense! Except... maybe it doesnt make sense. Because another plunge awaits, the worst kind of sinking feeling: that no call back (or text back) after the date that seemed to go so well. You swear youll never ride that fucking rollercoaster again. But you will.

I think the rise of online dating heightens the impression that finding love is a formula, that love is literally a matter of filling out lists and doing a bunch of mechanical things on your laptop or phone. Youll know youve mastered the formula when your dating site spits out the perfect mate.

The dating rollercoaster is moving fast these days, along with the other aspects of life that have been accelerated by the Internet. A new mate is always, potentially, a click away. But its not all sunny days. This unprecedented efficiency in the dating market solves some old problems and raises many new ones. If its become easier to move on from relationships, should you? If you can use the Internet to meet people in foreign countries, should you? If dating sites promise to find you the perfect mate (if only you follow their formula!), should you believe them? If you can monitor a new boyfriend 24/7 on Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and Match.com, should you? How can you make this new efficiency work in your favor?