Dating Data II: First 9 Months in a New State
My parents met right after college when they both moved to the middle-of-nowhere Vermont to teach at a boarding high school. Mom was teaching math. Dad was teaching physics. In the 2016 equivalent of the same story, my older sister met her now-husband on Tinder the year after graduating from college when they were both working as software engineers in the Bay Area.
I know this is silly, but I took it for granted that my next relationship after college would be the one that lasted. I thought after college you just inadvertently stumbled (or swiped) your way into a strong relationship and then you built a life together. And I thought that would happen to me, too.
Up until the end of college, one thing in life had always led rather elegantly into the next thing for me. I always knew what I wanted to do next. But after college graduation, suddenly I didn’t know where I was going.
It’s been five years since my college graduation, and in that time I’ve found some answers to the question of what I want my life to look like. I applied to grad school and started a PhD program. I have more certainty than ever about what matters most to me. I’m figuring it all out. But on the romance front, well, there’s a blank space.
My expectation that after graduating from college the universe would promptly deliver me one life partner went shockingly unmet. I was not rewarded for finishing my senior thesis by never having to go through another breakup. And so, here I am, 5 years and more than one heartbreak later, older, gayer, and more single than ever. Okay, I’m actually equivalently gay, and I’ve been precisely this single quite a few times before, but you get it.
I want to tell you I’m really enjoying the freedom and possibility of this un-coupled late-20’s life, but the truth is, I’d really like a long-term partner. I don’t feel in a hurry specifically, but after so much time spent wandering, I feel like I’m really building a life, and I want to start building a life with someone else.
Last year, I wrote a post analyzing my data from 9 months of app dating before I moved out of Boston to start grad school. I moved to Maryland, just outside DC. Now, it’s been 9 months since I moved to Maryland and I’m posting again to reflect on the first 9 months of dating in this new place.
After analyzing the data for my last post, I wrote about things I wanted to do differently going forward. Here were the main ones:
- Match with fewer people I was more excited about. In essence, be pickier. This would leave me in a better position to…
- Get through the messaging stage and onto dates. I vowed to respond to messages more quickly and consistently, and to try to get out on dates with more of my matches.
- Be more persistent about seeing people and more open to second dates. Give people I met in person more chances to click with me. Don’t be quick to assume there were no romantic prospects with someone I liked platonically at first.
The Data
The data I’m about to visualize is my Hinge use since moving to Maryland.
Just for fun, let’s start by visualizing my swipes. I swiped on 556 profiles. Here they are in order from top left to bottom right like a calendar, with 25 swipes per row.
The decision fatigue is getting to me just looking at this graph.
Now let’s compare my like rate since moving to Maryland with what it was in Boston. This graph shows my average like rate for the last 50 swipes across the 500+ swipes in Maryland and the 600+ swipes from my final 9 months in Boston.
Look at me being consistently picky in Maryland!
Here are my overall like rates in Boston vs. Maryland:
My overall like rate was 24% in Boston and fell to 16% in Maryland. That’s decent evidence to suggest I followed through on my intention to be pickier with likes, but we can’t really compare Boston and Maryland directly since I was swiping on two different groups of people.
Here’s my match rate for people who had liked me first in Boston vs. Maryland:
I halved my like to match rate from 44% in Boston to 22% in Maryland. Again, we can’t compare these rates directly because it’s a different pool of people liking me, but I think I’m being pickier. This is good, because in Boston I was matching with people I didn’t feel that interested in meeting up with, and now I’m a grad student with less money and much less free time.
Stories
The fun thing about dating is that until it goes very well, it goes very, very poorly. Is that fun? I’m not sure. But it does make for some funny stories.
Before I show you the data on the in-person dates I went on, I’ll tell you a few of those stories. All identifying details have been changed (a special thank you to my trusty random female name generator).
Audrey
Normally I don’t think too much about any individual matches, but Audrey was one of the exceptions I was actively excited to meet in person. We matched soon after I moved to Maryland. After we’d messaged a little, I asked her out. Her response: “I’m sorry, I’m not feeling enough of a connection to meet up!”
I said, “okay, thanks for letting me know!” not what I was actually thinking, “THAT’S WHAT THE IN-PERSON DATES ARE FOR!!”
Jill
The first good date I went on in Maryland was with Jill. She’d recently moved here from Seattle. We walked around DC on a very hot day, talking about summer camp and how science knows almost nothing about how brains work. It was easy. Afterwards, we started planning to meet up again, but she ended up unexpectedly moving back to Seattle. I never saw her again.
Sonia
When we were messaging, Sonia had that bafflingly common habit of answering my questions but never asking one in return. Once I was exhausted by it and thus quite sure I didn’t want to go on a date with her, I asked her why she hadn’t asked me any questions. That worked wonders to change the dynamic; she never responded.
Katherine
I met Katherine in real life. I liked her (as much as you can like someone you don’t really know but are intrigued by). There was this guy she was close with, and I couldn’t figure out if they were dating. I invited her to do things with me a few times. She was so wholeheartedly uninterested in spending time with me, I never even got to know her well enough to find out if she was available.
Heather
Heather was another Hinge match. On our first date, we did this goofy thing called a penny date where you repeatedly flip a coin and use that to decide where to go and what to do. We ended up going into a grocery store, buying a bag of fruit candies, sitting on a staircase nearby and eating some of the candy while I showed her how to fold the wrappers into little links to make a bracelet. A man with a thick accent walking by thought I was teaching her how to roll cigarettes and stopped to say, “Smoking is bad!” We laughed and laughed.
On our second date, we went to a museum and then shared a pastry in a nearby cafe. On our third date, it was a rainy evening and we got dinner at a Thai restaurant. Afterwards, I dropped her off at the train station. She darted from my car out into the rain towards the station, and then she ghosted me. I know! The least she could do was claim to be unexpectedly moving to Seattle! I also got a parking ticket during that date. I still owe the city $35.
Being ghosted stung. What sucks about it is the lack of clarity — you eventually realize the other person doesn’t want to see you again, but only after a totally unnecessary and painful period of confusion.
After being ghosted, I decided to take a break from dating apps. During that break is when I froze the data to analyze for this post. It felt like a good time to do some reflecting on how things were going.
The Dates
I only match with people I’m interested in and the vast majority of them don’t do anything to scare me away in the brief messaging-before-meeting phase. One of my take-aways from analyzing my data from Boston was to try to get out on dates with more of the people I matched with. Let’s see how I did. This graph shows the proportion of people I got to each stage of dating with out of the total pool of people I matched with (the vast majority of whom I theoretically wanted to go on in-person dates with):
I upped the proportion of matches I went on first dates with from 13% to 23%!
Analyzing these rates reminds me that dating to find a long-term partner thing is definitely not about optimization. My point in looking at this data (besides having fun and laughing about the dating process) was to figure out what I was doing that wasn’t aligned with my goals and then starting to do things differently. Getting out on more in-person dates was definitely a successful example of that.
Other changes I made
There were two other things I had started doing differently since moving to Maryland.
First, I was finally convinced that early dates should be “flirty.” I’d been skeptical that the date activities really mattered; I thought if someone was a good match, I’d like them no matter whether we were joyfully throwing axes together or just getting coffee. And anyway, being a disabled grad student nixed a lot of flirty date options; axe throwing would blow through my dating budget real fast, and having POTS makes anything requiring much standing a no-go for me. But at some point, the awkwardness of coffee dates just got to me. I realized less formal and more fun activities might lead to better outcomes.
It was also helpful for me to reframe flirtiness as playfulness. “Flirting” makes me think of teenagers, clumsy and unsubtle. Playfulness I can do. So I started suggesting dates that incorporated an element of playfulness, like the penny date I described above. I can report more later, but so far it’s going well.
The other change I made to early dates was trying to have better conversations. I know I can be a kind of intense person who asks quite personal questions, so I’d been conscious to avoid that on dates. But I think I went a little too far with that, and I got so sick of having boring conversations. Nobody really enjoys small talk anyway. So, I started being slightly more daring on dates—if someone referenced something a little personal, I would ask an open-ended question about it to leave an opening for our conversation to get a little more real. And my dates seemed to follow my lead and ask me about more personal topics, too. It hasn’t been long that I’ve been trying this, but I’ve already had two people comment that I ask good questions. I do ask good questions, so I’m glad my dates are getting to see that more now.
Looking Ahead
The app dating pause was brought on by more than just the ghosting. Lately, Hinge has been showing me people I’m really not interested in. I’m not sure if I’ve run out of compatible people in my area, or if I somehow “taught” the algorithm to show me these people I’m not into. Either way, it’s not working and I’m really fed up with Hinge.
So, I’m going to try some other strategies. I’m going to go to in-person events to try to meet people in the wider world, ask friends if they know anyone they might want to set me up with, and try out some other dating apps.
I’ll keep you posted, so stay tuned if you want to hear more. In the meantime, if you’re dating, good luck out there!
P.S. As usual, here’s a link to see my code.
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