Dating Minefield vs. Dating Playground

Imagine you want to improve your performance. You're offered a choice between two courses. Which one would you pick?

Imagine you want to improve your performance at some task: a hobby, a job, whatever. You're offered a choice between two courses:

Course A is vague and undefined, with no clear program. You don't get graded on your performance, but it’s broadcast to your community, so everyone can silently judge you every time you fail. Your early choices are locked in, and you can't radically change your approach without raising many eyebrows. And the course is long. Really long.

Course B, in contrast, offers clear performance indicators, tight feedback loops and legible intermediate milestones. You wouldn't become a master on day 1, but you get told what you’re doing wrong and what you need to improve. You could play with different approaches to the problem and face no lasting judgement if something goes wrong. "Move fast and break things" works here.

Which course does it make sense for you to attend? There's no catch here, the answer I intended to be correct was course B. And this, I think, is why online dating has a pretty strong edge over trying to navigate the IRL dating scene.

Here’s how I’m thinking about it. A lot of my online and offline friends who don't have much romantic experience are avoiding online dating with an almost religious fervor. I remember when a particle physicist friend visited me in France and lamented his lack of romantic life. Yet when I suggested him to install an online dating app, he became incredibly anxious and refused to have anything to do with it. Even after I asked him for his phone and installed Tinder on it, he was so on edge, the first notification about a match sent his phone flying across the table.

When I ask these friends how they imagine IRL dating, I rarely get a coherent response. There's some vague notion of "meeting someone at school/work/hobby" and "developing a relationship". This may sound wonderful, but to me it seems that this approach is fraught with difficulties – especially for newcomers to the dating scene.

The overarching motif here is that attempting to date people you already know IRL is a minefield in more than one sense.

Minefields are poor teachers. When you step on a mine, you don't learn much from your failure unless you're already experienced. Sure, you messed up somewhere, but was it a wrong footstep, a mine with a different target detection mechanism, or a special stealth mine impervious to metal detectors? You don't know, and the lessons from previous encounters often don't translate to the next. Similarly, when you get rejected by your classmate or colleague, you often don't get any idea why they rejected you and what you could've done better. Was it the clothes you wore? The smell of your breath? The wording of your confession? Or you're just not her type? You know that this particular interaction didn't work out, but that insight offers precious little for the next similar situation.

Contrast that with online dating—which I see more like a dating playground.

Playgrounds are excellent teachers. Playground tests your skills individually, so you can isolate weak spots and work on them. Imagine an obstacle course through various playground equipment. You fall off monkey bars? Need to work on grip strength. Throw up at the merry-go-round? Poor balance, and so on.

Similarly, online dating consists of many separate stages, and your success rate at each stage gives you information about your skills. Not enough matches? Bad photos. Many matches but few replies? Poor opening message. A lot of texting but few dates? Subpar date planning, and so on. By finding a bottleneck in your online dating experience and focusing on improving it, you will likely see results more quickly than by blindly trying random stuff in the hopes of solving all your problems at once.

Minefields can hurt you badly or even kill you. Figuratively, so can attempts to flirt with students or coworkers, especially where power dynamics are in play. Even if you don't get ousted for sexual harassment, your social standing in your community might be ruined by one clumsy flirting attempt.

Playgrounds are designed to minimize damage. Sure, you can get injured or even die if you're careless or unlucky, but the chance of this happening is vastly smaller than dying on a minefield. Dating strangers has a much higher threshold for disaster, and with a couple of modifications (not revealing your place of work and social media) you can make it even safer for yourself.

Minefields take a lot of time and care to traverse. Dating IRL, you might feel forced to lock in your attention on one person at a time, and you might think you only have one chance to impress them. This causes a lot of people to spend years trying to intuit when is the best time for a confession, be overly cautious because of the fear of rejection, and force themselves into so-called "friendzones" that waste huge amounts of time with slim chances of success.

Playgrounds are quick and straightforward. Dating online, you can just follow a series of steps until you either get what you want or get rejected. Learning from online dates can feel like living in Groundhog Day – everyone can become a master if they have a chance to relive the same event multiple times and find an optimal sequence of actions, and "the first date with a stranger" is one of those events.

Crossing minefields is stressful. Trying to arrange a perfect opportunity to ask out your friend is an anxiety-inducing prospect, and figuring out how best to do it will lead to massive overthinking that will hurt your prospects even more. I'd have saved myself a lot of nerves if I’d started online dating much earlier rather than clinging to my "friend" from university.

Playgrounds are fun. I enjoy meeting new attractive people, hearing their recommendations on places to visit, foods to try and media to check out. Doing activities for the first time together is always fresh. The people I meet are more diverse than my regular circle of friends because I'm not constrained by my previous community. Just because I'm a STEM PhD doesn't mean everyone I date will be PhDs, or even STEM – I've been on dates with entrepreneurs, artists and models, and had fun with all of them.

So is avoiding online dating all that sensible? For an inexperienced dater, I would argue that it is not. It's hard to think of another alternative that can get you up to speed on basic dating dynamics quite as efficiently. Besides, there are probably not that many dateable people at your school, job or hobby – certainly fewer than there are people on dating apps. And nowadays, most people in the US meet through online dating, so it must be working in some way for the majority.

Source: https://www.pnas.org/content/116/36/17753.short

And what happened with my physicist friend? Well, the week after I installed the app on his phone and took some photos of him with my camera, he went on a date with a girl in Paris and had, as he reported to me, "a lot of his firsts". He's been dating for four years and is currently dating his second girlfriend. Seems like online dating might be useful after all.