Modern Romance by Aziz Ansari, Eric Klinenberg Page B
Authors: Aziz Ansari, Eric Klinenberg
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“I’m not on any dating sites,” he announced to our group that morning, looking a bit perplexed by the conversation.
“What was the last first date you went on?” I asked.
“I met a girl at church and we went to a movie just recently,” he said.
The way he said it was so confident and badass. Compared with what Arpan had just said, Dinesh’s “church and a movie” sounded like “motorcycle race and some sport fucking.”
“What about the last girl before that who you met?” I continued.
“I met her at a volunteer thing,” Dinesh replied.
The guys in the room seemed mesmerized by the fantasy of dating a beautiful girl who also does heartfelt charity work.
Before that, he reported, he’d met a girl at a holiday party. “I have a bunch of really good groups of friends, kind of across L.A., so I meet tons of people.”
The key, Dinesh said, is to have friends who hang out in different groups in different places, and to mix up the nights so that you’re spending some time with all of them. Whether it’s in church, with volunteer groups, at office parties, or on a sports field, it’s always a place where people meet organically.
“There’s a lot of cool stuff going on in L.A. at all times,” he explained. “I think it’s fun and interesting to meet new people, and if I meet people in person, they’re more willing to open up their schedules. I am too. I’m more willing to, like, go to work super early and then be home by, like, five or six to make something happen.” He looked over to consider Arpan and then turned back to us. “And no, I’m not exhausted.” Fortunately, Arpan at this point was so slumped in his chair that it blocked his ears and he didn’t even hear this.
Dinesh had a Zen vibe to him that wasn’t matched by anyone else in the room. While the other singles assembled that morning seemed jaded and frustrated, Dinesh seemed more comfortable and at ease with dating. Was it because he avoided online dating? Or was it that those who were dating online were actually pretty bad at it?
After several lengthy conversations with experts, I would guess the latter was a significant factor.
MOST PEOPLE STINK AT ONLINE DATING
Online dating is like a second job that requires knowledge and skills that very few of us have. In fact, most of us have no clue what we’re doing. One reason is that people don’t always know what they’re looking for in a soul mate, unlike when they’re picking something easier, like laundry detergent (big ups to Tide Mountain Spring—who doesn’t want their clothes to smell like a fresh mountain spring?!).
While we may think we know what we want, we’re often wrong. According to Dan Slater’s history of online dating,
Love in the Time of Algorithms
, the first online dating services tried to find matches for clients based almost exclusively on what clients said they wanted. The client would usually fill out a survey indicating certain traits they were looking for in a partner. For example, if a man said he was looking for a tall, blond woman with no kids and a college degree, the company showed him everyone who fit this description. But pretty soon online dating companies realized that this wasn’t working. In 2008 Match.com hired Amarnath Thombre as its new “chief of algorithms.” Thombre set about figuring out why a lot of couples that Match.com’s algorithm said were a perfect fit often didn’t make it past the first date. When he began digging into the data, he discovered something surprising: The kind of partner people said they were looking for didn’t match up with the kind of partner they were actually interested in.
Thombre discovered this by simply analyzing the discrepancy between the characteristics people said they wanted in a romantic partner (age, religion, hair color, and the like) and the characteristics of the people whom they actually contacted on the dating site. “We began to see how frequently people break their own
“What was the last first date you went on?” I asked.
“I met a girl at church and we went to a movie just recently,” he said.
The way he said it was so confident and badass. Compared with what Arpan had just said, Dinesh’s “church and a movie” sounded like “motorcycle race and some sport fucking.”
“What about the last girl before that who you met?” I continued.
“I met her at a volunteer thing,” Dinesh replied.
The guys in the room seemed mesmerized by the fantasy of dating a beautiful girl who also does heartfelt charity work.
Before that, he reported, he’d met a girl at a holiday party. “I have a bunch of really good groups of friends, kind of across L.A., so I meet tons of people.”
The key, Dinesh said, is to have friends who hang out in different groups in different places, and to mix up the nights so that you’re spending some time with all of them. Whether it’s in church, with volunteer groups, at office parties, or on a sports field, it’s always a place where people meet organically.
“There’s a lot of cool stuff going on in L.A. at all times,” he explained. “I think it’s fun and interesting to meet new people, and if I meet people in person, they’re more willing to open up their schedules. I am too. I’m more willing to, like, go to work super early and then be home by, like, five or six to make something happen.” He looked over to consider Arpan and then turned back to us. “And no, I’m not exhausted.” Fortunately, Arpan at this point was so slumped in his chair that it blocked his ears and he didn’t even hear this.
Dinesh had a Zen vibe to him that wasn’t matched by anyone else in the room. While the other singles assembled that morning seemed jaded and frustrated, Dinesh seemed more comfortable and at ease with dating. Was it because he avoided online dating? Or was it that those who were dating online were actually pretty bad at it?
After several lengthy conversations with experts, I would guess the latter was a significant factor.
MOST PEOPLE STINK AT ONLINE DATING
Online dating is like a second job that requires knowledge and skills that very few of us have. In fact, most of us have no clue what we’re doing. One reason is that people don’t always know what they’re looking for in a soul mate, unlike when they’re picking something easier, like laundry detergent (big ups to Tide Mountain Spring—who doesn’t want their clothes to smell like a fresh mountain spring?!).
While we may think we know what we want, we’re often wrong. According to Dan Slater’s history of online dating,
Love in the Time of Algorithms
, the first online dating services tried to find matches for clients based almost exclusively on what clients said they wanted. The client would usually fill out a survey indicating certain traits they were looking for in a partner. For example, if a man said he was looking for a tall, blond woman with no kids and a college degree, the company showed him everyone who fit this description. But pretty soon online dating companies realized that this wasn’t working. In 2008 Match.com hired Amarnath Thombre as its new “chief of algorithms.” Thombre set about figuring out why a lot of couples that Match.com’s algorithm said were a perfect fit often didn’t make it past the first date. When he began digging into the data, he discovered something surprising: The kind of partner people said they were looking for didn’t match up with the kind of partner they were actually interested in.
Thombre discovered this by simply analyzing the discrepancy between the characteristics people said they wanted in a romantic partner (age, religion, hair color, and the like) and the characteristics of the people whom they actually contacted on the dating site. “We began to see how frequently people break their own
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