If you want to hear someone complain, one of your best bets is to ask one of your single friends what the dating landscape is like right now.
You’ll hear tales of first dates that lead nowhere, conversations that feel like they were ripped from a social media feed, and more and more people resigning themselves to partnerless existence. Even what once seemed like an ever-flowing fount of new romantic possibilities has now dried up: It feels like the days of meeting The One via a dating app are behind us.
We are officially in a romantic slump. As dating coach Lily Womble explains: “Dating can be so exhausting, depleting, demoralizing, and I only think dating apps have increased that experience for single folks.” Despite how discouraging it can be, though, a lot of people still desire partnership.
Womble is the author of Thank You, More Please: A Feminist Guide to Breaking Dumb Dating Rules and Finding Love, and she spoke with Vox about how to overcome dating fatigue. “If you do want to find love in a romantic partnership, there is a more healthful and empowering way to go about it that centers you as the main character,” she explains.
So how do you center yourself? How do you take your dating life off of your phone and into the real world? We answer those questions and more on the latest episode of Explain It to Me, Vox’s weekly call-in podcast.
Below is an excerpt of my conversation with Womble, edited for length and clarity. You can listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you’d like to submit a question, send an email to [email protected] or call 1-800-618-8545.
If you’re used to dating apps and you want to meet someone in person, how do you make that happen?
Dating in person is a lost art of social connection. I think that our reliance on dating apps has made us all sicker in some ways. These apps are built like slot machines. They’re designed to keep you sitting there with a gallon bag full of quarters and a Big Gulp, hoping to pull the triple cherry and get lucky.
It’s really important to reset your brain [from] dating apps, to get in-person to build new connections. It is as simple and as complicated as three steps.
What are the steps?
Number one: joy-building. Joy is connective. You need to exit your house, get off your couch, and go do something in your town or city that brings you some amount of joy with other people.
It could be something free or something paid. The point is not to be in proximity to hotties at this event. The point is to make a new friendship, to make a new connection, to say, “Hey, how’s it going?” From there, you’re expanding your social circle. The function of a dating app is purely to expand your social circle and expand your opportunity window to meet somebody. Same with expanding your social circle with joy-building.
You never know which 70-year-old you meet at your quilting night in your small town, whose son’s boyfriend’s cousin comes to a party and suddenly you’ve met the love of your life. I met my husband through joy-building. I went to an improv class, I made a friend that introduced me to her social circle, then I met Chris, my husband. Joy-building helps you meet the right people.
Second, you’ve got co-conspiratorship: helping your friends help you better. Now, your friend might say, “I don’t know any single people.” To that, you say, “I don’t either. So let’s co-create creative solutions. We’re both smart. You have a workplace, you have a work conference. Are you looking out for me there? Here’s the kind of person that I’m looking for. Here’s the questions I want you to ask somebody.”
Two of my clients were each other’s co-conspirators. They lived in different states. That didn’t matter because one of them visited the other, and in the airport met an eligible man, asked the qualifying and disqualifying questions, found out he was single, that he was eligible, that he was a good fit, and set them up. They literally started dating. So you need to have co-conspirators, you need to have friends looking out for you. Just like your friend asked you to be in their wedding, you need to ask them to support you in this way too.
Finally, we’ve got flirting, which is the most vomitous, nerve-wracking part of this plan. The good news is that it’s a buildable skill set. It’s not just something that your favorite friend who is so naturally flirty has and you don’t. I think that flirting is essentially a joyful, courageous connection.
People overcomplicate flirting to be this game. But I really believe, and have seen in my own experience, that flirting is just simply approaching somebody, asking a genuine question, and seeing if that person wants to co-create a conversation with you. To see if it’s romantic, you just ask, “Hey, random question. So are you single?” All of this requires 10 seconds of courage to go up to somebody and say, “Hey, you’re cute. I just wanted to come tell you that.” One of my clients did that on a crosswalk with a man that she found cute and they ended up dating.
You make it sound so easy, but that joy-building, that getting out and talking to people, that can be really hard. One, it’s hard to be joyful when it feels like the world is falling apart around us. Also, some of us are more shy than others. And there are people who lost a lot of valuable flirt skill-building time during the pandemic. I hear you, but how do you do it?
We have lost a lot of social skills. Those years that we were in lockdown were reps missed, especially for Gen Z, who literally were in school during that time. I’m a millennial, so I had already cut my teeth in New York circa 2015 with IRL flirting. It does require a rejection resilience plan.
I recommend that people have in the notes app on their phone a plan to be courageous and to know how they’re going to react and care for themselves after a hard moment. There are people, when you flirt or joy-build, who don’t want to be your friend, who don’t want to talk to you, who are uncomfortable themselves. That rejection resilience plan can really prepare you to be courageous and to know that no matter what, you’re going to be okay.
It’s as simple as understanding that your brain’s going to think it’s dying after an experience of rejection. Just say, “I think I’m going to die after rejection. It’s a thought, not a fact.” Then have a plan to be compassionate towards yourself. Self-compassion isn’t just a fluffy phrase. It is a science-backed tool that decreases cortisol, and increases resilience.
I also recommend a flirting ladder to increase your distress tolerance.
How does that work?
Start at the very basic level: I’m going to make eye contact with somebody for one second and then look away. Great, boom, done. That’s the first level on the flirting ladder.
Next level, I’m going to hold it for three seconds. It’s in small steps. Plan to do it in small, bite-sized steps so that you can increase your distress tolerance window. What flirting can be is a practice that you build up gradually towards. So wherever you are on the flirting ladder, if you’ve never made eye contact with somebody, you’re super shy, you’ve never gone up to a cute stranger and said hello, just literally write down five simple steps that you could do this week: eye contact, saying hello. One of my clients did a wink and run.
When you plan to do something courageous and say, “I’m going to do it for 10 seconds and then I can bail,” you’re more likely to do courageous things. You’re more likely to have more connections in your life and you’re more likely to meet the right people for you.
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