ThroughFriends
A friend told me a few months ago that she thinks she is bad at dating, and I have not really stopped chewing on it since.
She is one of the funniest people I know. She is who you want at the end of the table at a long lunch, the one who gets a story going and then hands it over so someone else gets the good bit. I have watched her talk to a stranger at a party for an hour and both of them came away better off. So I asked what she meant, and we got into it a bit, and what she actually meant was that she is bad at texting.
I keep thinking about how easily those two things got welded together. She has decided something fairly bleak about herself on the basis of a skill that has almost nothing to do with the thing she is worried about.
What we are all actually talking about
The talking stage is the stretch between matching with someone and actually meeting them. A week, maybe two, sometimes longer. Somewhere along the way it stopped being the bit before the date and became the bit you get judged on.
I do not think anyone designed it that way. It just sort of happened, and we all went along with it, and now it is the front door.
And it asks a lot. Be funny, without any of the timing. Be warm, with no face and no voice. Keep something going across a nine hour gap where you are both at work, about a weekend involving people the other person has never met. All of it in writing, to someone you have never heard laugh.
The ways it seems to go
I have watched this happen to enough friends, and done it myself enough times, to notice it mostly goes one of about four ways.
There is the one where it just slows down. Replies get further apart on both sides, nobody decides anything, nobody actually says no, and after a while it has stopped. I think that is the one that does the most quiet damage, because there is no moment to point at. You are left holding a name in your phone and a vague sense of having been found wanting.
There is the flat Sunday. Something good was going on Thursday and then it is Sunday afternoon, they are at their parents' place, you are tired, someone sends a one word answer, and it never quite starts again.
There is the one where you build a whole person out of very little. Two weeks of good messages and you have assembled someone in your head out of punctuation and reply times. Then you meet them and they are different. Not worse. Just different. And you have to quietly get over someone who was never there before you can be curious about the one who is.
And then the auditioning, which I think is the real one. Every message is a sample, so you tidy it up. The odd bit comes out. The thing that would genuinely make someone laugh in a room comes out, because written down it looks like a lot. They are doing exactly the same. So it ends up being two edited people comparing edits for a fortnight, and then deciding something about each other on that basis.
The bit I actually wanted to say
My friend is not bad at dating. She is bad at a specific written performance that got bolted onto the front of it about ten years ago, and she has been carrying those marks home and letting them mean something about who she is.
I do not think she is unusual. Most of the people I have talked to about this are quietly holding some version of the same verdict, and nearly all of them are people I would happily set anyone up with.
If you want a cheap way to test it, ask the warmest, funniest person you know how they go over text. A surprising number will tell you they are hopeless, and they will say it the way people admit to being bad at parking.
Things that seem to help
I am not sure I would call any of this advice. It is more what I have noticed, and most of it works the same way, by making the texting part smaller.
Getting to a plan early. Not as a tactic, just because a conversation with somewhere to go tends to survive and one without anywhere to go tends not to. Four or five messages in seems to be plenty.
Being specific about it. "We should grab a drink sometime" hands the work back and usually gets a warm yes that never turns into anything. "Thursday, seven, somewhere in Surry Hills?" can be answered with one word, and one word is about all any of us has on a Tuesday night. If it helps, here are the places I would suggest.
Voice notes. Twenty seconds, a bit rambly. They carry something typing cannot, and you cannot rewrite them eleven times, which I suspect is most of the benefit.
Not reading the gaps. A slow reply is a meeting, a gym class, a flat battery, a friend having a hard week. We have all done it to someone this month without meaning a thing by it.
Keeping the first one small. One drink, a weeknight, somewhere you could leave after forty minutes without it being a whole thing. Most of the pressure seems to come from how much of the evening got signed away in advance.
Letting a friend do it. This is the old way and I still think it is the best one. When someone who knows you both says "you two would get on", you turn up already half believing it, and so do they, and nobody has to prove anything by text because the vouching already happened. If you have a mate who has been threatening to set you up for a year, this is what I would ask them for.
What I notice when people are just sitting down
Everything is easier, and it is easier straight away.
A quiet moment in a bar is not a silence. It is someone having a drink while a room carries on around the two of you. There is a bartender doing something, a couple at the next table having a very mild argument, a song one of you knows every word to. You can be interested with your face instead of with a question mark. You get tone, which is most of a joke. You find out whether someone is kind to staff, which four hundred messages will never tell you and eleven seconds in a room will.
And the odd bits, the ones that got edited out, land properly. Being far too enthusiastic about one particular subject is charming in person. Typed out it reads as a wall of grey.
I do not have a neat ending for this
Only that there are a lot of people in this city who have quietly concluded they are bad at meeting people, on the evidence of a format that was never going to show anyone at their best.
I do not think that is true of most of them. I am fairly sure it is not true of my friend. And I think the distance between where they are and a decent Thursday night is mostly a fortnight of admin, which is a much smaller and more fixable thing than the story they have been telling themselves.