Trying to meet people for the sole purpose of dating them is a spiritually toxic endeavor, with online dating being particularly bad. I had a handful of girlfriends before meeting my wife, none of whom came to me through online dating or trying to get dates with people I didn’t know.
I contend that the best path to a relationship is through community, broadly defined. What you want is to be around people with whom you can cultivate compatibility. The online dating/cold approach model relies on being able to quickly discern compatibility, which I think most people are kind of bad at.
My definition of community in this context is any circumstance that lets you repeatedly interact with people in a non-targeted way. For meeting my wife, that was a weekly bar trivia night. For past partners it was a mix of extracurricular activity groups and friends-of-friendgroups. These environments accomplish a handful of things at once; they establish shared background and positive memories, they let you display and observe positive traits that are difficult to signal on a dating profile or on a date (e.g. patience or thoughtfulness), and ideally they’re intrinsically worth existing in for their own sake. That last one is important because, to use my first example, even if I hadn’t met my wife playing that bar trivia game, I still would have had fun going and I made other friends along the way.
You can’t just show up and expect things to fall in your lap, of course. You do want to be improving yourself and putting your best foot forwards. Not all communities are created equal so once in a while you need to step back and evaluate if you need new opportunities in your life. And obviously, you still have to be ready to actually ask someone out eventually.
It’s not easy, necessarily, but it did work for me.
I disagree that that intentionally going on dates is “spiritually toxic”. You don’t really need to be able to discern compatibility quickly (you can always go on another date).
I approached dates as “doing something fun with a friend who thinks I’m hot”, and even though I didn’t end up seriously dating most of them, they were still fun experiences (having conversations at coffee shops and restaurants, hiking, paddlingboarding, etc.).
I do think dating people in your community is easier than online dating, but my experience is that finding a community is much harder than finding someone to date. Maybe this is a case of which one you’re better at though.
For what it’s worth, in my friend group, half of us are dating or married to people we met though online dating, and the other half are with people they met in college. I only know one person married to someone they met in other ways and their method isn’t helpful (be so hot that people will hit on you at the gym).
My advice would be this:
Trying to meet people for the sole purpose of dating them is a spiritually toxic endeavor, with online dating being particularly bad. I had a handful of girlfriends before meeting my wife, none of whom came to me through online dating or trying to get dates with people I didn’t know.
I contend that the best path to a relationship is through community, broadly defined. What you want is to be around people with whom you can cultivate compatibility. The online dating/cold approach model relies on being able to quickly discern compatibility, which I think most people are kind of bad at.
My definition of community in this context is any circumstance that lets you repeatedly interact with people in a non-targeted way. For meeting my wife, that was a weekly bar trivia night. For past partners it was a mix of extracurricular activity groups and friends-of-friendgroups. These environments accomplish a handful of things at once; they establish shared background and positive memories, they let you display and observe positive traits that are difficult to signal on a dating profile or on a date (e.g. patience or thoughtfulness), and ideally they’re intrinsically worth existing in for their own sake. That last one is important because, to use my first example, even if I hadn’t met my wife playing that bar trivia game, I still would have had fun going and I made other friends along the way.
You can’t just show up and expect things to fall in your lap, of course. You do want to be improving yourself and putting your best foot forwards. Not all communities are created equal so once in a while you need to step back and evaluate if you need new opportunities in your life. And obviously, you still have to be ready to actually ask someone out eventually.
It’s not easy, necessarily, but it did work for me.
I disagree that that intentionally going on dates is “spiritually toxic”. You don’t really need to be able to discern compatibility quickly (you can always go on another date).
I approached dates as “doing something fun with a friend who thinks I’m hot”, and even though I didn’t end up seriously dating most of them, they were still fun experiences (having conversations at coffee shops and restaurants, hiking, paddlingboarding, etc.).
I do think dating people in your community is easier than online dating, but my experience is that finding a community is much harder than finding someone to date. Maybe this is a case of which one you’re better at though.
For what it’s worth, in my friend group, half of us are dating or married to people we met though online dating, and the other half are with people they met in college. I only know one person married to someone they met in other ways and their method isn’t helpful (be so hot that people will hit on you at the gym).