Modern Romance (16 page)

“I agree,” said James, twenty-four. “There’s still gold here. You just have to look hard enough.”

It was a beautiful thing to hear. The attitude of these guys was to give people a chance. Instead of sampling a bunch of jams, they had learned how to focus on one jam and make sure they could appreciate it before they walked away.

The more I thought about that approach to dating, the more appealing it became. No matter how many options we have, the real challenge is figuring out how to evaluate them.

After my conversations in Monroe and Wichita, I thought about how popular online dating is in New York City and L.A., how almost everyone in all the focus groups there used the sites, and the stories like the woman who was Tindering on her way to a date to try to find a better date afterward.

Maybe we are turning into the people from the job study, trying to find a crazy, unattainable job.

Maybe we are trying to meet every single person in order to be sure we have the best.

Maybe we have it all wrong.

Maybe we need to have a little more faith in humanity, like our positive buds in Wichita and Monroe.

 • • • 

Look at my dad: He had an arranged marriage and he seems totally happy.
I looked into it and this is not uncommon. People in arranged marriages start off lukewarm, but over time they really invest in each other and in general have more successful relationships. They are more invested in the deep commitment to the relationship, rather than being personally invested in finding a soul mate, which can tend to lead to the “Is there something better out there for me?” mentality.

ANALYZING OUR OPTIONS

Even before deciding to go on a date, our ways
of analyzing our options are getting brutal.
As a woman in L.A. told me about the flood of options she saw as an online dater, “It’s fun, but it also opens up this door to be more and more and more picky and analytical. I was exchanging messages with a guy, and he mentioned that he listens to
Kevin &
Bean
in the morning. And it was like, okay, you’re done.”

One radio-show choice had killed any chance of this relationship prospering. Somewhere that guy is sitting alone in his car listening to
Kevin & Bean
, staring at his last conversation with this woman and wondering,
Where did it all go wrong?

Of course, these kinds of deal breakers end up making their way into the picture even if a contender does make it to a first date. “One of the problems with the first date is that you know very little about a person, so you overweight those few things that you do know,” the anthropologist and dating guru Helen Fisher told me. “And suddenly you see they’ve got brown shoes, and you don’t like brown shoes, so they’re out. Or they don’t like your haircut, so they’re out. But if you were to get to know each other more, those particular characteristics might begin to recede in importance, as you also found they had a great sense of humor or they’d love to go fishing in the Caribbean with you.”

OUR BORING-ASS DATES

How do we go about analyzing our options?
On dates.
And most of the time, boring-ass dates. You have coffee, drinks, a meal, go see a movie. We’re all trying to find someone who excites us, someone who makes us feel like we’ve truly made a connection. Can anyone reach that high bar on the typical, boring dates we all go on?

One of the social scientists I consulted for this book is the Stanford sociologist Robb Willer. Willer said that he had several friends who had taken dates to a monster truck rally. If you aren’t familiar with monster truck rallies, basically these giant-ass trucks, with names like Skull Crusher and The ReJEWvinator,* ride up huge dirt hills and do crazy jumps. Sometimes they fly over a bunch of smaller cars or even school buses. Even more nuts, sometimes those trucks assemble into a giant robot truck that literally eats cars. Not joking. It’s called Truckzilla and it’s worth looking into. Frankly, it sounds cool as shit, and I’m looking at tickets for the next one I can attend.

This is a monster truck that goes by the name Grave Digger. If you are a thug or gangster, please note that Grave Digger’s graves are dug exclusively for trucks it is in competition with, and it does not dig graves to hide bodies from the authorities.

Anyway, for Willer’s friends it started as a plan to do something campy and ironic, since they weren’t big car and truck fans so much as curious about this interesting and kind of bizarre subculture. It turned out to be a great date event: fun, funny, exciting, and different. Instead of the usual boring résumé exchange, the couples were placed in an interesting environment and got to really get a sense of their own rapport. Two of the couples he mentioned were still together and happily dating. Sadly, another one of the couples was making out in a small car that was soon run over and crushed by a monster truck named King Krush. Very unfortunate.

In one of our subreddit threads we asked people to tell us about their best first dates, and it was amazing to see how many involved doing things that are easy and accessible but require just a bit more creativity than dinner and a movie.

One gentleman wrote:

I took her to an alpaca farm after she said she thought they were the cutest thangsss. After sweet talking the farm owner, he let us walk into the barn where all the lil guys overcame their initial trepidation and then surrounded us in the most adorable way possible. After nuzzling with them for an hour, we went to Taco Bell. I burned myself horribly on an apple empanada, but it got her to laugh so I’ll chalk that one up as a win. I was 18, the whole date cost about $7, and I got her to smile a bunch, so yeah, that was great.

Here’s another animal story:

His parents both work in media, and every year
he goes to the Westminster Dog Show at Madison Square
Garden and finds his way backstage through a combination of
walking with a purpose and flashing media credentials his parents
help with. Talk about impressing a first date! We then
bought wine, which they served out of sippy cups, and
made a drinking game out of the dog show. (Take
a drink every time a dog jumps when it’s not
supposed to, and so on.)

Dating aside, I’m definitely playing a Westminster dog show drinking game ASAP. That sounds fun!

And here’s one that involved the most typical activity imaginable, but with a simple wardrobe twist that transformed everything:

It was just dinner and drinks . . . I showed up to the restaurant and he was in a FULL beekeeper’s suit, just sitting/chillin’ at the table waiting for me.

It was THE total ice breaker. I laughed so hard (in an endearing way.) The staff seemed confused and some people at neighboring tables were laughing. One guy, about my age, asked if we were on a reality show. We talked about his bees and honey and the little honey business he’s starting up. He even brought little honey samples for me to try! HAHA! (And I did, and it was delicious.) We had a great dinner and great conversation. He told me he was having a great time and asked if I wanted to go for a drink sometime, I said sure. He pulled out his phone and texted me at the table, “hey, are you free for a drink tonight?” I found that so sweet and silly, I texted him back and we totally went for drinks.

Now, granted, I’m not saying that we should all show up on dates wearing beekeeper suits. The dates that are not boring are not all super eccentric things. The common thread is that they weren’t just résumé exchanges over a drink or dinner; they were situations in which people could experience interesting things together and learn what it was like to be with someone new.

THE EFFECTS OF NON-BORING-ASS DATES

There is social science that shows that more interesting dates like this can lead to more romantic success.
In their famous 1974 study called “Some Evidence for Heightened Sexual Attraction Under Conditions of High Anxiety,” Arthur Aron and Donald Dutton sent an attractive woman to the Capilano River in Vancouver, Canada.
4
The river runs through a deep canyon, across which were two bridges. One of the bridges—the control bridge—was very sturdy. It was constructed of heavy cedar, had high handrails, and ran only about ten feet above the water. The second bridge—the experimental bridge—was much, much scarier. It was made of wooden boards attached to wire cables and had a tendency to tilt and sway. The handrails were low, and if you fell, it was a two-hundred-foot drop onto rocks and shallow rapids.

Of the two bridges, only the second was, neurologically speaking, arousing. The researchers had the attractive woman approach men as they crossed each of the bridges. She then told the men she was doing a psychological study and asked if they’d take a brief survey. Afterward, she gave the men her phone number and told them to call if they had any additional questions about the experiment. The researchers predicted that men on the shaky bridge would be more likely to call, as they might mistake their arousal, actually caused by fear, for romantic arousal caused by attraction to the woman. Sure enough, more men on the shaky bridge made the call.

Must have been a bummer for those dudes, though:

“Hey, Sharon? It’s Dave from the bridge study. I know this may sound weird, but I was wondering . . . would you like to grab a cup of coffee or something sometime?”

“No, David. Sorry, this isn’t Sharon. This is Martin. I’m a lab assistant. This was actually also part of the study. We wanted to see if you’d be more likely to call Sharon if you were on the more precarious bridge, and you were! This is great.”

“Oh, okay . . . Do you know how to get in touch with Sharon?”

“No. I don’t. This is the decoy number we gave all of you guys. Man, she is something, though, huh? [long pause] All right. Thanks again. Bye, David.”

“Bye.” [sad]

Aron published another study, titled “Couples’ Shared Participation in Novel and Arousing Activities and Experienced Relationship Quality” (damn, dude, shorten the names of your studies!), where he took sixty couples who were doing okay and had them (a) participate in activities that were novel and exciting (e.g., skiing, hiking), (b) participate in activities that were pleasant/mundane (e.g., dinner, movie), or (c) participate in no activity (this was the control group).
5

The couples that did the novel and exciting activities showed a significantly greater increase in relationship quality.

Now, many of you are probably thinking that this directly contradicts a study cited by Keanu Reeves’s character at the end of the film
Speed
. “I’ve heard relationships based on intense experiences never work,” he says. “Okay,” replies Sandra Bullock’s character, “we’ll have to base it on sex, then.”

I’m not sure where Keanu’s character, Jack Traven, got his information, but if you trust that Aron and his colleagues aren’t bullshitting us, it seems like participating in novel and exciting activities increases our attraction to people. Do the dates you usually go on line up more with the mundane/boring or the exciting/novel variety? If I look back on my dating life, I wonder how much better I (and the other person) would have fared if I had done something exciting rather than just get a stupid drink at a local bar.

So maybe for your next date think it through and plan it out perfectly.

Instead of dinner at a nice restaurant, go to dinner at a nice restaurant
but
hire some actors who can do solid German accents to show up and fake an eighties
Die Hard
–style terrorist takeover of the place to create the danger effect seen in the shaky-bridge study. Then, after you narrowly escape, go outside and see that the road you have to take is super hilly and very dangerous. That’s when you say, “Maybe we should take my ride.” You point her to your car—that’s right, the monster truck Grave Digger. After that, you ride home, where you leap over dozens of cars and shoot fire from the sides of your tires.

Your date will be excited in no time.

MORE BORING-ASS DATES?

The quality of dates is one thing, but what about the quantity?
When thinking about that question, I recalled a change I made in my own personal dating policy at one point. While I was single in New York, the city of options, I found myself and a lot of my friends just exploring as many options as we could. There were a lot of first dates but not as many third dates. We were consistently choosing to meet as many people as possible instead of investing in a relationship. The goal was seemingly to meet someone who instantly swept us off our feet, but it just didn’t seem to be happening. I felt like I was never meeting people I
really
,
really
liked. Was everyone shitty? Or was I shitty? Maybe I was okay, but my dating strategy was shitty? Maybe I was kind of shitty and my dating strategy was kind of shitty too?

At a certain point I decided to change my dating strategy as a personal experiment. I would invest more in people and spend more time with one person. Rather than go on four different dates, what if I went on four dates with one person?