You're Dating Too Much

How many first dates does it take? I recently saw a New York Times piece called “40 First Dates and Still Searching.” The lead-in described a man investing in pricey matchmaking services as he searched for The One, and asked: Would it help him find love?

My first thought was: Maybe, but probably not. For two reasons. 

First, you’re your own best matchmaker.

Nobody knows you as well as you do. Nobody cares more than you do about getting this right. And you can learn to fish for yourself instead of having it done for you—for far less money, and usually quicker and better too. I know, because I’ve been helping clients with their fish-finders, bait, and tackle—aka their clarity, selection, and commitment choices—for 30 years. You can do this.

Second, I got stuck on the other part of that headline: Forty first dates.

There’s a popular idea that finding love is a numbers game. Get on two or three apps. Keep meeting people. Keep getting out there. Go on another date. And another. Eventually, surely, one of them will be The One.

I knew a woman who believed this so much, she went on 800 first dates and still hadn’t recognized her person. I knew a man who dated for five decades and thought he had never met someone right for him—until he understood his patterns and changed his process. 

And I know someone who at age 52 met only four people, and married one, and they’re very happy.

So while it’s necessary to encounter other people, you don’t have to personally meet everyone who’s pleasant with a pulse. Dating isn’t a numbers game—it’s more about what you know and how you apply that. 

The problem? People routinely confuse volume with progress.

You can work very hard at dating without getting any better at choosing. Forty first dates certainly represents effort. It may represent persistence, optimism, and an impressive dry-cleaning bill. But if most of those 40 people were never genuinely viable candidates for you, or one was but they got lost in the shuffle, you haven’t necessarily gotten 40 steps closer to finding your person. You may simply have gone on 40 first dates. 

The antidate to fishing every pond is this: stop treating the first date as the start of screening. It should be where screening continues.

However you find each other, you can often learn quite a bit before your first date, from whether they smoke, to whether they’ve got kids at home, to whether they want the same kind of relationship you do. If you’re online, that information is usually right there on the profile!

Of course, you won’t yet know whether this person is Your Person; that takes time. But knowing they aren’t can be the work of moments to minutes—it does not need to take weeks, months, or years. Usually, it does not even need to take a date.

So the purpose of that initial before-the-date screen is to decide whether to have the date at all. Is this person a sufficiently promising candidate that you’d like to learn more? Date time!

Now you can find out what happens when you’re sitting across from each other. Do you enjoy talking with them? Do they listen? Are they kind to the server? Do you feel comfortable? Curious? Is there a baseline attraction that could become more? It could be time to set another date and learn even more.

So ignore some popular advice. Don’t date ‘em till you hate ‘em. Don’t give everyone a chance. Don’t set the goal to More Dates (unless you have No Dates. In which case, yes, you’ll need more than zero.). You don’t need a vast number. You need quicker, better screening, so your dating time is spent on real prospects. 

Of course, sometimes you’ll still go on a first date that goes nowhere. Some important information, like whether you can tolerate their scent (which is a thing!) can’t be known until you’re in their presence. And sometimes you’ll find a dealbreaker. And that’s ok. That’s what the date taught you. 

But there’s a difference between discovering incompatibility that couldn’t reasonably have been known beforehand, and repeatedly going out with people whose incompatibility was sitting right there in their profile, messages, or phone call before you put on real pants and left the house.  

I know this can sound a little theoretical, so remember the 52-year-old who met four people for a first date, and married one of them? 

That was me. 

When I was dating, I screened carefully before meeting anyone in person. I used what I knew about my own personality, history, and patterns, what I needed and wanted in a partner, and specific strategies for finding out whether someone was likely to be a good candidate before agreeing to a date. 

It worked because it works. 

Now, I’m not promising that if you follow the process, Person Number Four will become your forever mate, or that total clarity will arrive by the end of  Date 1; even in my case, I knew Kerry seemed like an amazing match, but I could not have known, so quickly, that we were each other’s person. Really knowing someone takes time even if they show up right away, and even if they’re right for you.

But you are largely in control of every factor aside from when they show up, and 40 first dates aren’t an inevitable toll you have to pay on the road to love.

This is doable with the right screening process. That process should be specific to you: your history, your patterns, your needs, your wants, and the information you need to gather before attraction has a chance to start making excuses for incompatibility.

So if you’ve been going on date after date after date, I wouldn’t automatically conclude that you need to try harder, swipe more, hire somebody to produce more candidates, or expand the pipeline. I’d ask a different question: What’s my screening process, and is it working for me? 

Because the goal isn’t to gather first dates. The goal is to stop needing them.

Dating gets a lot easier when you know whom to meet—and whom to screen out before the first date. If you’re 50-plus, I’ve made a free 15-minute training to help you find and choose the right person without settling or falling back into old patterns.

You can watch it here:
coaching.lovesciencemedia.com/freebie

Photo by Duana Welch