Category Archives: Dating Advice

Slow Dating Is the French-Invented Hack That Will Save Your Love Life

  Dating Advice, Relationships

Getty ImagesRoc Canals Photography

I was standing in my friend’s apartment when she looked me dead in the face and shared the strangest dating advice I’ve ever heard: only use Tinder when you’re on the toilet.

It’s not a weird and slightly gross efficiency hack—this was her way of limiting the amount of time she spent perusing the catalog of humans on the app. Like so many others, she developed severe dating app fatigue and was sick of wasting hours per week on obligaswiping her way into an anxiety spiral. In an effort to swipe less and with more intention, she put strict parameters on her app usage. Only swipe while on the potty.

Advertisement – Continue Reading Below

I didn’t know it at the time, but she’d essentially created her own form of “slow dating.” It’s a concept that sounds exactly like what it is—literally slowing down and spending more than .024 seconds on a profile before flicking your finger right or left.

Coined by the French creators of Once, a dating app that launched in France and recently made its way stateside earlier this year, slow dating is pretty much exactly what it sounds like: Instead of passively swiping through 50 “eligible” partners in one toilet session, Once employs slow dating to introduce each user to only one person, per day. The person you see on your screen also sees you on their screen, and if you both like each other, you start a conversation and see where it leads. If not, you have to wait until the next day to meet someone new.

Basically, Once literally forces everyone to slow the eff down by eliminating swiping altogether. Simple, genius, and so very ~French~.

image

The Best Dating Apps for Your Ultra-Specific Taste

That being said, there’s one obvious problem here: What if all your potential matches are bad? Cutting down on swipe time is great, but if you’re getting duds day after day, slow dating is just the regular disappointment of dating apps in slow motion (bleak).

Jean Meyer, CEO of Once, says making good matches is a concern, obviously, but he’s more focused on cutting down absentminded app time.

Advertisement – Continue Reading Below

“Even if your match of the day is crap, it’s okay,” Meyer says. “Maybe you’re not going to talk to that person, but at least you’re going to put the app away, and you may even put your phone away and do something else with your day. You can put 100 percent into another task that’s not swiping on ten-thousand profiles.”

Hack your own version of slow dating

◻️ Use your iPhone settings to limit screentime allowed on dating apps

◻️ Designate certain times or places you’re allowed to browse the apps

◻️ Give yourself a “twenty seconds” rule: you can’t swipe until you’ve spent at least 20 seconds on their profile

◻️ Only allow yourselves 20 total swipes per day

◻️ Download Once, and force yourself to slow TF down

What Meyer sees as the big issue driving up everybody’s swipe rate is the idea that there’s always something (or, in this case, someone) better out there. The mentality that you should always be looking for a better job, a better apartment, a better going-out top—whatever—has seeped into the dating mentality. “People have way too many options, they try to optimize everything,” Meyer says.

The League, which only serves users a few matches per day, operates on a similar premise as Once. And when Hinge redesigned to eliminate swiping and force people to slow down a bit, users grew by more than 400 percent, according to the Wall Street Journal. Once takes the slow dating premise Hinge decided to focus on to the absolute extreme, and unlike The League, it doesn’t come with an application process or waiting list. You just download, and then wait.

If you’re a dating app developer, the slow dating approach feels almost counterintuitive. Why encourage people to use your app less, when there are countless options out there to lure them away? Meyer hopes the thing that keeps people joining Once (as seven million already have, according to the Wall Street Journal) is the app’s dedication to building the best matches possible. “We’re trying to recreate the feeling of when you see two people in the street, and somehow you know they fit together,” Meyer says.

Whether you download Once or employ slow dating in some other way, the laissez-faire approach could be the long-needed refresh your love life needs. Who better to trust with romance than the French?

Follow Hannah on Twitter.

Agreeing not to text could build a better relationship

  Dating Advice, Relationships

Last month, New York Magazine’s website The Cut ran a story by Clara Artschwager about a new, promising relationship that was nearly sabotaged by texting — Artschwager was too busy to text, so her date assumed she wasn’t into him — and saved by an agreement to just not text each other, minus logistical communiques. No dinging good nights and good mornings; no interrupting check-ins. Artschwager described the new paradigm as “thrilling.”

Isn’t it? It’s like when I think I might have lost my phone, before I find it in my hand or my pocket: I’m thrilled. To be without the phone, and its most disruptive function, is as daydreamy as a crush.

Texting way less is both a practical return to the point of everything and a dating power move, argues Kate Carraway.  (dreamstime)

The best dating advice I ever got, long before I started dating at all, was “When in doubt, don’t call.” I now dispense the smartphone-updated version “When in doubt, don’t text.” I feel embarrassingly qualified because my own era of casual dating coincided with my first smartphone, and I can now review huge online archives of messages that represent time — hours; years — that I could have spent building a self-sustaining feminist utopia, instead.

The problems of “texting and dating” are just “texting” and “dating.” Really, “texting” is a straw app for social technology that connects people so easily that we unfairly expect constant accessibility, attention, and interest from each other — dates, friends, whoever. “Dating” is a vanilla milkshake of a word that really means the entire sphere of potential, of love, of relationships, and mostly, of sex, and how they slide around the sociosexual continuum without much formality or differentiation. This is especially true for millennials and gen zers (zed-ers?) who get together, get off, and fall apart over waves of Wi-Fi. Together, “texting and dating” are responsible for accommodating enormous swaths of the 2018 human experience, but they’re both mostly bad at it.

What texting and dating need, in this moment, is to be “less.” Texting is great when it’s limited to details, updates and check-ins, but when it goes long-form or gets constant, it undermines its own utility. (It also means that an entire generation, those Z-ers, arrive at their first jobs not knowing how to make a phone call.) Dating wants intimacy alongside curiosity, expansiveness, distance, tension and mystery — none of which is possible when you’re updating a potential makeout bud on the boring-er vagaries of your workday.

Article Continued Below

This, to me, is the real problem, the one Artschwager writes of solving: daters have traded in the acute, excruciating pleasure of desire, of literal and figurative “wonder,” for a dopamine one-hitter.

Texting endlessly and mindlessly in that liminal, maybe-maybe-not phase stems and generates anxiety about dating. When you want to know what someone is like, and what someone is thinking, and what they think about you, and what your relationship is — and obviously, you want to know — there’s this way to just be around, to be available without being vulnerable, and to know that even if the texting drifts away, it is, or was, something. It’s dating by playing small, just one of a million other ways humans refuse pleasure to avoid pain. This is also crazy because texting — less — can also be an ideal conduit for tension that skews toward “arousing” (rather than “annoying”) while a sexual dynamic establishes itself.

Texting way less is both a practical return to the point of everything and a dating power move. Maybe too powerful. You need to clarify that your disinterest in texting too much isn’t disinterest in your date. Even if it doesn’t work out, extricating dating from tech restores maybe-dating to a sexual ecosystem where butterflies can survive for more than a day.

Last week, using Twitter’s Advance Search to hunt down a compliment from an ancient love interest, I instead found a piece by the late, great writer A.A. Gill, about the movie Before Sunrise, where he describes the main characters, who are “sharing an imaginary phone conversation of charmed humour with a great deal of 18-karat sentiment and love” as “in love with each other, but they’re also in love with being in love on the phone.”

Texting, like phone calls or handwritten love notes, aren’t incidental to dating; they’re forums for intimacy, as essential to love as the language we use, as the feeling behind it. Using them well usually means using them less.

Kate Carraway is a Toronto-based writer and a freelance contributing columnist for the Star. Follow her on Twitter: @KateCarraway

Well-off boyfriend rages about the homeless

  Dating Advice, Relationships

Dear Carolyn: I’ve been dating this guy for about five months. I live in the city, he lives in the suburbs. Since I live where there’s more to do, and don’t own a car, he usually drives into the city to see me.

Since we’ve become more comfortable with each other, he now arrives at my apartment and expresses a great deal of annoyance at the homeless people he passed on his drive, often for asking for money in an aggressive way or wandering about the road unsafely.

His annoyance verges on anger and really bothers me. I understand that harassment or unsafe driving situations can be very distressing and frustrating, but his anger seems to zero in on the homeless population, and I wouldn’t devote time and energy to being angry at a group of people so obviously less fortunate than me. My boyfriend is very well off and had a comfortable middle-class upbringing. I see it as a reflection of his values that he can’t seem to have any empathy toward this group just because they are causing mild annoyance.

Lately I’ve just been letting him vent, because we all need that sometimes and also because it has caused intense arguments when I’ve protested. But I can’t shake the discomfort I feel when he complains about this group.

How can I approach this without seeming like I am dismissing his feelings of being harassed or unsafe?

– Comfortable in the City

If he is irritated by panhandlers but not equally so by some Bimmer riding his tail for being in the passing lane for a nanosecond too long, then you might well have a classist jerk for a boyfriend.

But that’s neither here nor there.

What is important:

– You question his character;

– But have learned not to do so out loud;

– Because his annoyance “verges on anger”;

– And he fights off your questioning with “intense arguments.”

Do you see it?

The specific issue could be anything. Let’s say, for argument’s sake, he rages equally at 7-Series drivers, so it’s not about empathy for the downtrodden. You still have a dynamic where you have legitimate concerns – his entitlement and his regular, carryover anger – that you choose not to talk about because he makes you pay too dearly for speaking up.

Read more:

Sibling doesn’t respond to good news

Survivor wants to confront abuser from years ago

That is at best a recipe for misery, and at worst dangerous. He has become comfortable enough around you to start showing his true self, but you have actually become less so, by your own account of how you’ve learned to hold back, deliberately suppressing your discomfort. You cannot say, “When you vent about panhandlers, I hear a lack of empathy, and that bothers me.”

You do not feel safe speaking your mind to this man.

Game over. He’s not the guy.

Even if your hunch about his economic empathy deficit is wrong. Which I suspect it isn’t, but that’s neither here nor there.

Unless you can speak freely, and unless you like what you hear in return, he is not the guy.

Dear Carolyn: Today is my older brother’s birthday (mid-30s). I did not call and do not plan to. The only time he calls is when he needs something – and even then, he calls our mother to ask the rest of the siblings. He has time only when he gets something from it. He did not call when I got married, for Thanksgiving, for Christmas, for his niece’s birth, my birthday, nor has he returned my calls.

Apparently, I’m not the only sibling who “forgot” his birthday because he complained to Mom that no one has called. So Mom has sent us each a text reminding us to call our brother, along with a guilt trip. I’m not trying to count beans, but I honestly don’t want to call him. What say you?

– “Forgot”

Call, don’t call, either is fine, and both are now beside the point given that I file in advance.

But your brother and mom, in their succession of choices, did draw a tidy diagram of what likely went wrong here.

Your brother never got the hang of the “give” part of give-and-take.

And your mother never stopped trying to insulate him from the consequences of this disconnection, scrambling to make sure he still got to “take” in spite of any deficits in the “give” column.

Chicken first, egg first, works either way.

It’s sad. It was an unforced parental error, I’d guess. It puts all his sibs on the spot. More important, though, it generates stress for your mom and loneliness for your brother.

So instead of counting beans or going silent, get at the bigger questions:

“Mom, why do you think he goes to you instead of just talking to us?”

“[Brother], I hear you’re looking for X. Why didn’t you call me directly? Even just to say hi?”

Don’t get in the middle, of course – no demanding or expecting. But you have little to lose by calling the elephant’s name.

Email Carolyn at tellme@washpost.com, follow her on Facebook at www.facebook.com/carolyn.hax or chat with her online at noon Eastern time each Friday at www.washingtonpost.com.

Read or Share this story: https://www.freep.com/story/life/advice/2018/11/04/dating-relationship-advice/1833308002/

ASK AMY: Middle-aged brother seems to be dating like middle-schooler

  Dating Advice, Relationships

‘Dear Amy: My brother was married to my sister-in-law for 29 years. Out of the blue, he announced to my husband and me that he had left his wife and was now living with “Kelly,” a girlfriend that he had met online.

I told him that I will still maintain a friendship with my sister-in-law. He said he was fine with that.

Soon after his announcement, he said he wanted to bring the new girlfriend to visit us. He said she was upset that no one in our family wanted to meet her.

We suggested that we should go on an outing together, and we all set a date.

Just beforehand, my brother said she couldn’t make it. The next thing we know, he’s texting that they’ve broken up and that she threw him out.

My husband and I went on the outing ourselves and had a good time.

Almost immediately, I got a picture from my brother stating that he and his girlfriend had actually taken this same outing a few days before we did.

I really don’t enjoy my brother’s drama, but he’s still my brother and I imagine this woman will be in his life.

He’s a nice guy, but makes some bad, impulsive decisions. I am not ready to invest in an iffy, on/off relationship at this point.

What do I say to my brother without hurting him? He seems to have no direction lately.

— Dazed and Confused

Dear Dazed and Confused: Your middle-aged brother seems to be dating in middle school. The good news is that you don’t have to do anything about it. You don’t need to respond to your brother’s strange behaviour; you don’t need to invest, or divest, in his on-or-off girlfriend. You don’t need to provide shelter, money or advice.

You should carry on, living your own life. The only thing you really need to do is to treat your brother’s choices and declarations with the appropriate amount of skepticism. Assume that he will be bouncing around until he gets his act together, and hope that he does.

In terms of “Kelly,” you should apply the Three-Thanksgiving rule. She may or may not be in his life, and if she is and you finally meet her, you need only be polite and respectful. No relationship investment is necessary until they settle down and show up for three Thanksgivings in a row. After polite conversation at three Thanksgivings, you should assume that she will be around for a while, and build your relationship from there.

Don’t let your brother gaslight or guilt you into believing that your own behavior is in question, because it’s not.

Dear Amy: I have an unusual name. I have to spell or pronounce it (or both) on just about a daily basis as I interact with lots of new people via my job.

You would think that I would know what to do about people who mispronounce the name that I’ve had for over 40 years, but I don’t!

Specifically, what should I do about acquaintances and (so-called) friends of several years who say my name wrong?

After the first two times of correcting people, I get stumped. Are they just stupid? Are they gaslighting me?

I cannot think of a polite way of saying, “Oh, my God! I’ve told you three times how to pronounce my name! What is wrong with you?!”

Instead, I say nothing, and seethe. There isn’t always someone else around who is caring enough to correct them for me. Please advise!

— Blamed for the Name

Dear Blamed: If there is another word or phrase that rhymes with your name, use it: “Kyrie, rhymes with ‘weary’” — or “Milada,” rhymes with ‘de nada’.”

Tell your friends or others who habitually mispronounce it: “Can I be honest with you? You always mispronounce my name, and it really bothers me! Here’s how to pronounce it…”

After one honest, calm and patient correction, then yes, if this happens again, definitely ask them what is wrong with them.

Dear Amy: The letter from “Sad Mom” brought tears to my eyes, remembering my own struggles when I was a new mother of two babies.

Thank you for suggesting she might have post-partum depression. I didn’t have it with my first, but had severe post-partum with my second. Honestly, the minute I got a diagnosis, I started to feel better.

— Fine Now

Dear Fine: It is truly terrible to struggle, blaming yourself for a character flaw when you are actually sick. A diagnosis is the important first step to healing.

« Older posts
Newer posts »