Modern Romance (8 page)

In the gap after “Want to meet us?” I was sure she was mad about something. Her responses had been pretty immediate, and it seemed like her pause was an indicator that something was wrong and that I should have been going to the hotel or something.

Note the time gap here as well.

Again, when she didn’t respond after “Is that a grump txt or not” I was certain she was grumpy, because why wait so long to tell me she’s not grumps? All of this change in my perception of her feelings and my own mood was purely because of the temporal differences in texting.

Even in nonromantic situations, waiting has caused uneasiness. I texted an acquaintance about reading a draft of this very book. I wrote: “Hey would you have any interest in reading an early draft of my modern romance book? Just want to get some eyes on it and I feel like you’d get the tone I’m going for and have good feedback. If you’re too busy etc, no offense taken.”

The text was sent at 1:33
P.M.
on a Wednesday and got an immediate “Read 1:33
P.M
.” But I didn’t hear back until 6:14
P.M.
the next day. During the time that passed, I worried that maybe I’d overstepped my bounds in our friendship, that it wasn’t proper for me to ask, etc. In the end I’d worried for nothing and he wrote back, “yeah, of course! sounds like fun . . .”

If the effect is this powerful for people in committed relationships and friendships, it makes sense that all the psychological principles seem to point to waiting being a strategy that works for singles who are trying to build attraction.

For instance, let’s say you are a man and you meet three women at a bar. The next day you text them. Two respond fairly quickly, and one of them does not respond at all. The first two women have, in a sense, indicated interest by writing back and have, in effect, put your mind at ease. The other woman, since she hasn’t responded, has created uncertainty, and your mind is now looking for an explanation for why. You keep wondering,
Why the fuck didn’t she write back? What’s wrong? Did I screw something up?
This third woman has created uncertainty, which social psychologists have found can lead to strong romantic attraction.

The team of Erin Whitchurch, Timothy Wilson, and Daniel Gilbert conducted a study where women were shown Facebook profiles of men who they were told had viewed their profiles. One group was shown profiles of men who they were told had rated their profiles the best. A second group was told they were seeing profiles of men who had said their profiles were average. And a third group was shown profiles of men and told it was “uncertain” how much the men liked them. As expected, the women preferred the guys who they were told liked them best over the ones who rated them average. (The reciprocity principle: We like people who like us.) However, the women were
most
attracted to the “uncertain” group. They also later reported thinking about the “uncertain” men the most. When you think about people more, this increases their presence in your mind, which ultimately can lead to feelings of attraction.
8

Another idea from social psychology that goes into our texting games is the scarcity principle. Basically, we see something as more desirable when it is less available. When you are texting someone less frequently, you are, in effect, creating a scarcity of
you
and making yourself more attractive.

WHAT WE DO WHEN WE ARE INTERESTED

Sometimes there’s another reason that people take so long to text you back: They aren’t playing mind games or busy.
They’re just GOOGLING THE FUCK OUT OF YOU.

In one 2011 survey, more than 80 percent of millennials admitted to doing online research on their partner before a first date.
9
And why not? With our expanded dating pools, we’re meeting people we hardly know, including total strangers with no existing social ties to us. Fortunately, the same technology that allows us to connect with them also helps us figure out whether they post cute pictures of baby elephants or something more malicious, like a blog chronicling their latest elephant-poaching expedition in Botswana.

Usually Internet research turns up little more than some basic biographical information and a smattering of photographs from Facebook and Instagram. Some singles said even this relatively minimal content is helpful, because it gives them clues about people’s interests and character before meeting them. That makes sense to me, since you could argue that the photos posted on an Instagram page offer a more compelling and realistic representation of someone than their carefully crafted online dating profile.

Others see the process as harmful, though, because reading too much of a person’s online history can deprive them, and their date, of the fun of discovering someone new. Some singles we spoke with described meeting a person and being unable to enjoy the date because they already had all kinds of preconceived notions that were difficult to block out.

One gentleman I met told me that the personal information we can so easily obtain online often causes him to be too harsh on people. “I’ll go through and look at their entire timeline of tweets. I’ll see one dumb thing I don’t agree with, and then I kind of mentally check out on the date,” he said.

It may be harsh to judge someone’s personality off a tweet or two, but if you’re serious about your research, the Internet offers a whole lot more information than that. When we posed the question of first-date Internet research to the subreddit, we heard some serious horror stories.

One woman recounted canceling a date after a brief bit of research:

I googled my date who had a very distinctive name. According to a weekly synagogue newsletter, he and his wife were hosting a Torah class for children in their home the same day as our date.

This has also been recorded as the only time in history someone has said, “Whew, I’m glad I read that weekly synagogue newsletter.”

Other stories were even more horrific.

One woman wrote:

[A] friend from work met a firefighter in a bar a few months ago. They talked a lot that night/exchanged numbers and were texting back and forth for the next week while setting up a first date. He told her he didn’t have a facebook and when she mentioned that to some other people, they told her she should be concerned that he might be lying and actually have a girlfriend or be married. So she google searched his name + LA fire department and found that there was a news story on him (with a video!) about how he AND HIS MOTHER beat up an elderly woman who was feeding stray cats on their street. She immediately stopped talking to him.

This is why I always say: If your mother asks you to come beat up an elderly woman on the street for feeding stray cats—JUST SAY NO. It’ll always come back to haunt you.

WHAT WE DO WHEN WE AREN’T INTERESTED

If you are just plain not interested in someone, you have a whole other conundrum to deal with.
How should you let this person know you aren’t interested? From our interviews, it seems there are three big approaches: pretend to be busy, say nothing, or be honest.

In every stop on my tour, from San Francisco to London to Wichita, I asked audiences which method they used. In total, this was more than 150,000 people, and in every audience, a sample size of a few thousand, the response was always the same. Overwhelmingly, most people practice the “pretend to be busy” and “silence” methods. Only a small sliver of the crowd would say they were honest.

However, when I flipped the situation and said, “Okay, now pretend the situation is reversed. Someone else is dealing with
you
. How do you prefer
they
handle the situation? Clap if you prefer
they
pretend to be busy.”

A smattering of claps.

“Clap if you prefer they say nothing, that they give you silence.”

A smaller smattering.

“And finally, clap if you prefer that they are honest with you.”

Basically, the whole audience would applaud.

Why do we all say we prefer honesty but rarely give that courtesy to others? Maybe in our hearts we all want to give others honesty, but in practice it’s just too damn hard. Honesty is confrontational. Crafting the “honest” message takes a lot of time and thought. And no matter how delicately you do it, it feels cold and mean to reject someone. It’s just easier on many levels to say nothing or pretend to be busy until people get the picture.

Do we really prefer to get the cold, hard truth when someone is rejecting us, though? We don’t respond well to rejection, especially when we’ve put ourselves out there and shown interest in another person, and it’s painful to read a message saying that someone doesn’t want to date you.

If we’re honest with ourselves, we realize that, however bizarre, we actually prefer to be lied to. If someone lies and says they are dating someone or they are moving to another town soon, you don’t feel rejected, because it’s no longer about
you
.

This way, our feelings aren’t hurt
and
we aren’t left confused or frustrated by silence or “pretend to be busy” issues. So I guess what I’m saying is the next time someone asks you out and you aren’t interested, the nicest thing you can do is write back: “Sorry, can’t do dinner tomorrow. I’m leaving on a secret mission with the space program! When I return to earth, I will have barely aged at all, but you’ll be seventy-eight years old. I just don’t think it’s a good time for me.”

WHAT HAPPENED WITH TANYA, THOUGH?

The thing to remember with this nonsense is, despite all your second-guessing about the content or timing of your message, sometimes it’s just not your fault and other factors are at play.
When I was dealing with the Tanya situation, one friend gave me the best advice, in hindsight. He said, “A lot of times you’re in these situations and you second-guess the things you said, did, or wrote, but sometimes it just has to do with something on
their
end that you have no clue about.”

A few months later I ran into Tanya. We had a lot of fun together and she eventually told me that she was sorry she didn’t get back to me that time. Apparently at the time she was questioning her entire sexual identity and was trying to figure out if she was a lesbian.

Well, that was definitely not a theory that crossed my mind.

We ended up hooking up that night, and this time she said there would be no games.

I texted her a few days later to follow up on this plan.

Her response: silence.
*

A
s a public figure, I have never considered doing any online dating. I always figured there was a chance someone who was a stalker type would use it as an opportunity to kidnap and murder me.

I’m not sure how the scenario would go. Maybe my stalker (probably an Indian dude) sees my profile and thinks,
Oh, here’s that comedian guy on OkCupid. FINALLY, I have a way to reach out to him and slowly plot his murder.
He sends me a message pretending to be a woman. I see the profile. “She” likes tacos and
Game of Thrones
. I’m very excited.

What I imagine my Indian dude stalker looks like.
*

We plan a date. I’m nervous, but in a fun way. I go to pick “her” up. He, wearing a wig, answers the door. I immediately realize this is wrong, but he knocks me out before I can react. When I wake up, I’m in a dark basement filled with dolls, and a creepy song like “The Chauffeur” by Duran Duran is playing. He then performs a face-off surgery and takes over my life.

I scream in agony and think,
I knew this would happen
.

Okay, this is probably a highly unlikely scenario, but still, you understand my hesitation. The truth is I’ve always thought online dating is great.

I once met someone who found his wife by using Match.com and searching—and this is a direct quote—“Jewish and my zip code.” I joked that that’s how I would go about finding a Wendy’s. “I’d type Wendy’s and my zip code and then I’d go get some nuggets.” It is a little silly that that’s how this guy found his wife, but to me it honestly is a beautiful and fascinating thing that this goofy search led to him finding the person with whom he will share his life.
*

It’s an amazing series of events: He types in this phrase, all these random factors and algorithms come together, this woman’s face comes up, he clicks it, he sends a message, and then eventually that woman becomes the person he spends the rest of his life with. Now they’re married and have a kid. A life. A
new life
was created because one moment, years ago, he decided to type “Jewish 90046”
*
and hit “enter.”

Connections like this are now being made on a massive scale. OkCupid alone is responsible for around forty thousand dates of new couples every day. That’s eighty thousand people who are meeting one another for the first time daily because of this website. Roughly three thousand of them will end up in long-term relationships. Two hundred of those will get married, and many of them will have kids.
1

THE RISE OF ONLINE DATING . . .

Online dating has its origins in the 1960s, with the emergence of the first computer dating services.
These services claimed that they could leverage the new power of computers to help the luckless in love find their soul mate in a rational, efficient manner. They asked clients to fill out long questionnaires, the answers to which they would enter into computers the size of living rooms. (Well, not all the services did this. Apparently one, Project Flame at Indiana University, got students to fill out computer punch cards and then, rather than put them in the computer, the scientists shuffled the deck and created a faked match.) The computer would chew on the data and, based on whatever primitive algorithm had been entered into it, spit out two theoretically compatible clients, who would then be sent on a date.
2

These services hung around in various forms throughout the 1980s, but they never really caught on. There were a few good reasons for their failure. One was pretty simple: Not many people had personal computers at home, or even at work, and the idea that some strange machine was going to identify the perfect partner was just weird. After thousands of years of dating and mating without electronic assistance, most people resisted the idea that the answer to finding true love was to consult a bulky IBM. There was also another big reason people didn’t flock to computer matchmakers: The companies that ran them couldn’t show that they knew what made two people good romantic partners, and no one had evidence that the systems actually worked. Finally, there was a strong stigma attached to computer dating, and most people considered using machines for this purpose a sign of romantic desperation.

Classified ads, not matchmaking machines, were the medium of choice for singles looking for new ways to connect during the 1980s and early 1990s. The genre was actually invented in the 1690s, and by the eighteenth century matrimonial advertising had become a flourishing part of the newspaper business.
3
The ads really took off after the sexual revolution of the 1960s, when men and women alike were emboldened to seek new ways to meet people. Decades before Craigslist, the “Personals” sections of daily and, especially, weekly newspapers were full of action, particularly in the “thin markets” such as among LGBT folks and middle-aged (usually divorced) and older straight people.

The ads were very brief, generally under fifty words, and would lead with a bold, all-caps heading that would attempt to grab people’s attention, anything from
STRAWBERRY
BLONDE
to
LONELY
GUY!
to
SURPRISE
ME
or even just
MY
NAME
IS
WILLIE!

Then the person would quickly describe themselves and what they were looking for or in search of (ISO). In order to save space, people used abbreviations, like SWM (single white male), SJF (single Jewish female), SBPM (single black professional male), and, of course, DASP (divorced Asian saxophone player.)

You would usually get a certain amount of space for free and then would have to pay for more space. For instance, in the
L.A. Times
you got four lines for free and then paid eight dollars per line afterward.

Here are some ads from the
Beaver County Times
in December 1994, just months before the first online dating site emerged:

After the ads were placed, interested parties would call a toll-based 900 number and leave a message in that person’s mailbox. The cost of leaving these messages hovered around $1.75 per minute, and the average call lasted about three minutes. You would listen to the person’s outgoing message and then leave your voice mail, and you even had the option to listen and rerecord if you wanted. The person who placed the ad would go through the messages and contact those people they were interested in.

With no photos and so little information to go off of, finding love through personals could be a frustrating experience. That said, occasionally newspaper personals really did lead to love connections. As it happens, Eric’s dad, Ed, was an active user of classified newspaper personal ads in Chicago during the 1980s and early 1990s, and he remembers his experiences well. Ed published his ads in the
Chicago Reader
, the local alternative weekly. Fortunately for us, he saved the last, most successful one he ever posted:

There’s a lot in this ad that will look familiar to today’s online daters. Ed gives his status, religion, age, and personal interests. We get a sense that he’s pretty cosmopolitan, and there’s even a promise of adventure if we dare to be bold. (Nice move, Ed!)

The ad above generated responses from about thirty-five women, he recalls. Those who responded had to call the designated 900 number and type in his mailbox code. When they did, they heard his personal greeting, which he reconstructed for us:

Hello! If you’re seeking adventure and fun, you’ve come to the right ad! My name is Ed. I’m a forty-nine-year-old divorced Jewish man with two adult children. I have my own house in Lincoln Park and I’ve owned my own advertising and public relations company since 1969. I’m a longtime recreational sailor and I have a boat in Monroe Harbor. I also enjoy bike riding, hiking, running, camping, and photography. I graduated from the University of Michigan with an English degree, and after graduating from college I worked for six months, saved all my earnings, and attended the Sorbonne College. During the summer vacation I hitchhiked ten thousand miles through Europe and parts of the Middle East. Obviously, world travel is a big interest of mine! I’m active in two French-language groups and I also speak Spanish. If I’ve caught your attention and you’d like to talk to me on the phone, please respond to this message and leave a number where I can reach you. I look forward to hearing from you soon!

Damn, Ed sounds pretty badass in this greeting. Dude owns a boat and is active in not one but
two
French-language groups. Ed told us that he’d call in to check the messages about once a week—a far cry from today’s online daters, many of whom check for matches every few hours or even get instant push notifications on their phone. “I listened to each of them several times, making notes about key items of information. Then I called the women who sounded most interesting, and that time, one really stood out.”

Hello, my name
is Anne and I really like your
Reader
ad as
well as your voice introduction when I called you just
now. I’m a divorced thirty-seven-year-old woman with no children, and
yes—I am seeking adventure! I enjoy many of the activities
you listed. I lived in Colombia and in Peru for
a short time, so I speak Spanish, as you do.
If you’d like to meet in person, please call me.
I hope you do!

Ed made the call and invited Anne to meet for coffee. Often, he explained to us, these first encounters went badly, because with newspaper ads you had no idea what the other person looked like, and you were basically going off how they sounded on the phone. But he and Anne had a good vibe right away, and things quickly took off. They dated for six years before he proposed to her on a sailing trip by hoisting a self-made sail that said, “Dear Annie, I love you—Will you marry me?” She said yes, and before long they’d sailed off to California to start a new life together.

Now, the idea of meeting through a newspaper personals ad makes for a pretty great story, but for many years Anne never told it. She’s a high-achieving professional with a fancy degree from an elite university and a straitlaced family, and she knew there was a stigma attached to couples who met through newspaper ads. Anne made up a decoy story about her and Ed’s meeting being a setup, for the inevitable moments when people asked how they had met. Her own friends and family didn’t know the truth until her wedding day, when she confessed during her toast, at which point her family disowned her for being such a loser. Okay, that didn’t happen, but wouldn’t that have been nuts?

A few years before Ed and Anne found love through a newspaper ad, some entrepreneurs tried to bring cutting-edge technology to matchmaking by introducing video dating services, which gave singles a more dynamic sense of their prospective partners, including a much-needed visual component. With video dating, someone like Ed or Anne would go to a small studio, sit before a small crew, and spend a few minutes introducing themselves on camera. Every so often, they’d get a VHS cassette with short videos of prospects in the mail, and if they liked someone they saw, they could try to arrange a date.

Video dating never really caught on, but if you do some YouTube searching, you can observe some fantastic archived footage. One guy, Mike, led with this amazing notice: