The way forward is to steer clear of babbling brooks, avoid stagnant pools and find slow rivers. Stripped of the metaphors, what I mean is this: stay away from gatherings with no chance of ‘get-to-know-you’ conversations, or where meeting up again is unlikely. Don’t get trapped in a social life where you see the same people over and over again. Instead, put your energy into groups which offer a steady and regular through-flow of different individuals, in situations where there’s opportunity to mingle, meet, chat and bond. That’s a slow river, and so long as it contains people with a similar background, outlook, values – it will deliver partner possibilities. Just as importantly, it will also deliver a fulfilled and fascinating existence as a base camp from which to embark on the partnership climb.
Finding a slow river
How many slow rivers do you have in your life? If the answer is not many, and getting ‘more’ is your issue, pause now and brainstorm what your rivers could be; include as many ideas as possible, without censoring even the maddest thoughts. Start a new hobby? Go to a partnered dance class? Attend dating events? Organize your own dating events? Put a call out on Facebook? Put a call out on your local radio station – it worked for Sam Baldwin, aforementioned hero of Sleepless in Seattle. Take off on a three-country tour – it worked for Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love.
Plus – if it feels comfortable – sign up to a dating website. Whether we like it or not, online is without question the most accessible slow river currently available – one in which the whole agenda is to bond and the entire process ensures a regular through-flow. To enhance the expansion project, join a variety of sites – some paid, some free, some new, some established. Once on, be open-minded about possibilities, proactive rather than reactive and as flexible as possible about non-essential parameters. (Though not foolishly flexible. Tick the ‘200 miles away’ location box on websites and you’ll very soon face the reality of long-distance relationships and find yourself switching the location specification to ‘same town’.)
Stagnant pools. It’s worryingly easy to create a life so pleasant, established and secure that it delivers absolutely zero chance of meeting any suitable partner.
More or less?
Having noted the above strategies, and taken the first steps towards action, forget the advantages of ‘more’ and embrace the benefits of ‘less’. And not only because quantity is less crucial than quality in partner choice, but also because the human brain treads a fine line between having a wide range of options and having too many for sanity.
In a famous experiment by Professor Sheena Iyengar of Columbia University, customers at a grocery store decided what jam to buy; of those who had a choice of twenty-four jams, only 3 per cent ended up purchasing, while of those who had a choice of six jams a full 30 per cent bought. Given we likely don’t use the same criteria to pick a partner as to pick a preserve, let’s also mention a less-famous but more relevant survey which gave parallel results. Prospective partners who looked at either four or twenty-four online profiles made more picks than those who looked at sixty-four. Significantly, the participants who were presented with only four options took time to consider everyone, while those who were presented with twenty-four or sixty-four options made only cursory decisions.
The point here is that too many options plunges us into what’s called ‘shopping mentality’. With a profusion of possibilities, we suffer mental overload. We get confused. Then we get anxious about getting confused. And then, to combat the increasing emotional paralysis resulting from that confusion, we try to simplify. Which in turn leads to our over-considering irrelevant criteria, rejecting without real consideration, and craving the ‘next good thing’ rather than focussing on the current one. (This last is part of the reason why the constant forward momentum of the left/right swipe on some dating apps is so addictive.) Finally, when it comes to online dating in particular, even if we think we’ve found The One, we may still suffer buyer’s remorse because the wealth of choice available suggests there’s someone even better out there for us. If you’ve ever been enthusiastically emailed for days then suddenly dropped, you were probably the victim not of someone’s rejection but of their shopping mentality.
If only choosing a partner were as simple as walking into a supermarket. On the other hand . . .
What all this means is that any website which trumpets – as one of the global players did very recently – an astounding 197 million members might seem like a magnificent opportunity, but may well prove a disaster in disguise. Our real challenge, offline as well as on, is not how to expand possibilities but how to limit them, how to reach an equilibrium where we think clearly enough to make good judgement calls.
Elimination
The solution here is, not coincidentally, to take the route that nature intended. Intelligent elimination – the kind of shedding that Steve Jobs refers to in the quote at the head of this chapter – is the way evolution means us to mate. Walk into a room full of a hundred possibles – or log on to a website of a million – and we’re doing just as our ancestors did thousands of years ago from the vantage point of their caves, unconsciously excluding those who don’t meet our basic criteria (right gender, right age, right tribe). Elimination may sound cruel, but it’s the way our instincts are meant to operate in the initial going – not saying ‘yes’ to one but ‘no’ to many, not making a single positive choice but first applying wholesale negative screening.
In a society more complex than the Neolithic, some screening’s done before we even begin. Dive into any ‘slow river’ where we feel at home – a study group, a sports association, a dance course – and it’s likely the event organizers have already aimed their publicity to eliminate people not in the tribe; we then informally cut the field by choosing to attend only certain events and then to mix only with certain people in the room.
Online, the system’s parallel. From the start, some elimination’s already done for us because we enter a world where those not looking for love have already self-excluded; many sites also helpfully (though covertly) screen out those with relationship-threatening issues such as drug abuse or long-term mental illness. We further narrow the range ourselves by signing up to sites that target our tribe even more specifically; there are now dedicated destinations for specific age groups, individual cities and almost any special interest you can name, along with some you can’t even imagine.
Once signed up, the site tick-boxes create further focussing on surface compatibilities such as smoking (or not), drinking (or not), whether we follow sport or how passionately we love Chinese food. The algorithmic ‘matching quizzes’, if well done, then disqualify on deeper issues – though of course they can’t predict face-to-face chemistry, and, as mentioned earlier, there’s little correlation with long-term compatibility. Happily, the recent introduction of categories for ‘serious’, ‘fling’ or ‘affair’ now also achieves the elimination of those wanting a relationship of a kind we’re not seeking, which is a huge relief for all those online daters single and looking for marriage who – up to a few years ago – kept bumping into those married and looking for a fling.
The funnel of love
All this pre-sorting is helpful. But the bottom line is that, however small the partner pool we fish in, there’ll come a time when we need to do our own, more individual eliminations, partner by partner. My favourite metaphor here is one offered by the late Israeli psychologist Ayala Malach Pines. She imagined a kind of ‘funnel of love’ – her pun, not mine – into which we pour everyone we meet. But just as a funnel gets narrower as it deepens, and lets fewer and fewer elements through, so our criteria naturally get more and more focussed as we eliminate potential partners, until we eventually accept only the ones who really suit. (The criteria we use to create and operate our funnel form the substance of the following chapters of this book.)