How to date IRL

I refuse to touch a dating app and have only been making connections through people that I meet in real life

Apps have been decreasingly worse and worse, and people are not as invested or engaged as before. I don't communicate well through the dating app and love being in person better. Apps make you interact with people you should have never met in real life and feel dehumanizing. Everyone is burned out on dating apps and this is a way to get out and socialize

Across sex, dating, partnership, cohabitation, and marriage, all of these behaviors are kind of on the decline. The marriage rate in the U.S. and many other countries has been declining for a while now. John Burn Murdoch found the proportion of 25 to 34 year olds in partnerships dropped steeply from 1980 to 2022. In 2019, 42% of single adults younger than 40 told Pew they had never been in a committed relationship. People will start giving up and not getting something they deeply want when dating is difficult and being single is easier

Global chaos is a big part of the romance slump and has to do with interpersonal trust and optimism about other human beings. Gen Z is described by researchers as slow to trust and afraid of rejection and risk. Unstable work conditions and money worries make romance hard to prioritize logistically

Joy building requires exiting your house to do something that brings joy with other people to make new connections. Co-conspiratorship means helping friends become expert wing people by co-creating creative solutions. Flirting is a buildable skill set that is essentially joyful, courageous connection. Flirting is simply approaching somebody, asking a genuine question, and seeing if they want to co-create a conversation

A rejection resilience plan helps prep you to be courageous and know you will be okay after rejection. A flirting ladder uses small steps like eye contact or saying hi to increase distress tolerance. Planning to do something courageous for 10 seconds makes you more likely to do it and have more connection

Dating apps are publicly traded companies incentivized to keep users on the platform and de-incentivized to get them off. Cognitive overload from seeing too many faces causes higher functioning to shut down and increases settling

Dating should be viewed as an act of agency, aliveness, and pleasure for yourself rather than a high-stakes search. Dating as practice involves setting boundaries and getting to know your preferences and what turns you on or off