Yesterday was a different type of morning than I usually have. Remy woke Elizabeth up at 7am for breakfast and I slept until 8. Elizabeth had plans in Central Park at 9, so we did some small things around the apartment and then we bundled Remy in a new stroller footmuff for the first time because it was below 50° and the three of us left the house together. My plan was to get a coffee and to ship a package for Elizabeth at the FedEx a few blocks south.
As we left the apartment, we found a note from UPS that “they missed us,” which conveniently happens to 80% of our UPS packages, so I added the UPS pickup point to my morning agenda. I pushed the stroller south until we hit a coffee shop and then split up. The FedEx didn’t open until 9, so I squatted outside from 8:50 until 9:12 when the first employee showed up to unlock the doors. While I loitered outside the FedEx and made small-talk the the small line of people who were much more upset that the FedEx was not open on time, I did some research on some books that I’ve been want to read. As I’ve been reading The Brothers Karamazov with all it’s religious debates and arguments, I’ve been thinking about Kierkegaard’s Either/Or as a follow on because I’m enjoying this train of thought.
So, after my FedEx transaction, I went to Barnes & Noble and went straight to the Philosophy section to find the translation I wanted. One can’t buy only one book, so I thought about some other books I’ve been wanting and remembered Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance which I had for long assumed was some pop psychology book to be avoided, but a public intellectual that I sort of like has mentioned that is actually worth reading, so I went to look for it. Based on my assumptions about it before, I thought it would be in Self Help. After not finding it there, a B&N employee looked it up for me and sent me back to the Philosophy section. After not finding it among Pirsig’s other books, I got a little confused until I turned around and found it on the table of popular, accessible Philosophy books like Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations. I had to grab it quickly and get out of there, because it would so embarrassing to be caught picking any book off the popular Philosophy table.
I got to the UPS pick-up spot around 9:40 and saw that it didn’t open until 10, so I walked around the corner to a bodega and ordered a bacon-egg-n-cheese on a roll, add salt pepper.1 I had twenty-ish minutes alone to think and eat my breakfast sandwich, which I spent thinking about what to write for this post. I have two working pieces in my queue, one on suffering and atonement à la The Brothers Karamazov and this other on the thought exercise of still choosing to pursue some goal or skill if you had the knowledge of all the further along you would be after how many hours you’ve put in. I still want to publish those, but they’re not ready. I also know that I can’t say anything more about parenting for a while, so I needed to think of something.
The UPS store didn’t have my package yet, so I walked home empty-handed and wrote this piece on dating. Here we go.
Elizabeth and I have been together since our first year of college, so I have no first-hand experience in the NYC dating scene unless you count the last time Elizabeth and I got Korean BBQ while our friends babysat. It’s good advice to never stop dating your spouse but for the sake of this essay I’m going to acknowledge that I really know nothing about “dating.” Tinder didn’t come to Ohio State until after Elizabeth and I met, so I’ve never swiped for a date. I don’t feel like I “missed out” on swiping nor do I think that the fact that I found a partner in the physical world makes me or my relationship any better than those who meet online. Regardless, my observations on dating are an outsider’s point of view.
As someone who has never had a “dating profile,” I love seeing the profiles of my ever-dwindling number of single friends. Years ago, I met a woman who showed me her profile and it contained the sentence “INDEX(MATCH()) is superior to VLOOKUP(), fight me on it.” Her defense of the statement was that she wanted a partner who respected her as an intelligent working professional. I thought that talking about Excel formulas on a date sounded like the first step towards a terribly boring romance, plus absolutely nobody was going to be on the side of VLOOKUP(). Maybe she found a man who liked to argue and was passionate about Microsoft’s software suite.
Many of my other non-single friends roll their eyes whenever I want to see a single friend’s profile, citing the fact that I haven’t been single since before Grand Theft Auto V came out. However, I think that more single people should be getting profile feedback from non-single friends. Why? Because we did it, folks. Yes, I have no experience in modern dating but I did in fact find a partner long ago and it’s been going strong. That must count for something.
Now, it probably crosses some kind of social line to pick out a friend who is similar to who you might want to date and ask them for a profile review, but wouldn’t that make sense? A conversation along the lines of “Hey, not to be weird but I think you’re a great person, and I’d like to find someone kind of like you. Would you mind telling me if anything in this profile directly turns you off?” might provide a lot of value.
During an MBA program, for example, it didn’t take much conversation for me to realize that I needed to drop a hint that I was off the market. I am not trying to imply that I was getting hit on any more than anybody else. I think this has nothing to do with me and everything to do with my educational attainment and socioeconomic ilk. In my MBA program, there were a lot of confident, single women and a lot more men in long term relationships. I think that says something about women in elite MBA programs not being “held back” by a man, and it also says about the level of stability or maturity a man needs in order to get into those same programs. So, being upfront about being unavailable or not is just part of social interactions in those environments. Once that dynamic has been made clear, everyone is pretty mature about it and nobody cares that one party may have been interested in the other early on. It’s only weird when someone isn’t upfront about their being unavailable. If I’ve made 20 comments about my significant other over a series of interactions and the other person makes none and it later becomes obvious that that other person is not single, then I have to cut my losses on that friendship because it feels too shady to continue. This kind of signaling is normal and important.
I think the use of those signals, at least in my social circle, strengthens my point about why talking to non-single friends, especially in environments where the available dating pool is small and/or shrinking is so important.2 It’s safe to say that men in committed relationships, in the same social circle as single women, are probably similar in many ways to the kind of men that those single women might be interested in dating. It doesn’t have to be anything specific about the man or woman, just the fact that they participate in the same social environment would be enough to make that man a useful dating-profile-reviewer. I’ve seen many profiles of perfectly normal female friends that make them sound like crazy people. I’m using single women as the example here but this holds true for however many other genders there are. Taking the advice of a friendly reviewer would probably prevent one from sounding like a crazy person.
I digress from the top-of-the-funnel, how-do-you-present-yourself part of the modern dating scene and will move on to how do you interact with a person in the beginning of a relationship. Elizabeth has a few single friends and some of them are comfortable sharing their dating experiences with us. One of Elizabeth’s friends showed me her conversation with a potential second date, which was full of logistical details and deferring to the other persons preferences for borough or cuisine. I noticed and pointed out that she should probably flirt more. None of the conversation indicated that she might actually like the man, and it was mostly about where they were going to meet for their next drink or meal.
But, the drink and meal carry seem so much baggage. Who pays? How expensive was it? I think the two most extreme positions you could earnestly have for money in early dating would be splitting every bill 50/50 at one end and having the man pay for everything on the other. To be more specific, I’m considering very early dating, probably in the first through third date. And also to limit scope, I’m talking about hetero relationships. I can’t pretend to know anything about non-hetero courtship.
To continue on spending, I know a few men who were single in New York and are not now, and they were blowing through thousands of dollars each month on dinners for different first or second dates. They usually had one or two a week. I suppose this was a winning strategy because these men are no longer single, but I think the willingness to spend that way (and the desire to be spent upon that way) can select for some negative traits. But the opposite could also be the same. The man being unwilling to increase some level of spending beyond 50/50 is not good signaling on his part, and I think it’s perfectly healthy for a woman to expect being lavished or doted upon in some way. Gifts and acts of service are love languages for a reason.
My sense about both ends of that spectrum selecting for negative traits is that money is the closest proxy for power that we have. So moving from only-the-man-spends to 50/50-equal-share also symbolizes how much power one party has or is willing to hand over to the other. As a man, the spectrum feels like a balance between signaling stability and not over-projecting a desire for power. I feel like somewhere in between feels healthy, where increased spending on the man’s part feels more aligned with speaking one’s aforementioned love languages. But how do you find another person whose thoughts about where they draw that line are close to your idea of balance? And how do you dance around each other long enough to find that out without sucking all the spontaneity out of the room by just discussing it openly? It would be no fun to realize so easily and quickly that you aren’t aligned. Maybe it would be nice to know the other person’s expectations early on. Maybe my single friends do talk about this early on with prospective partners and I’m just assuming that they aren’t.
Anyways, that’s enough on something I don’t know anything about. I don’t envy any person that who feels like they need to date as an adult because it looks stressful. You have to spend a lot of time thinking about how you want to present yourself, both broadly to the world at large and then more completely to the person you are spending time with. I’m thankful to have found Elizabeth so early in my life.
Thanks for reading.
If you don’t say salt pepper at an NYC bodega, you won’t get any.
Well-educated, career-oriented women in NYC do have a small pool if they are looking for men of equal or greater educational and career attainment. Not that these are the only ways to measure one’s dating market potential, but they are filters. Looking for a man in finance isn’t ever necessarily social-climbing, but it’s certainly not if the woman also works in finance. It’s helpful when both partners can work their own favorite Excel hotkeys into conversations.