So maybe for your next date think it through and plan it out perfectly.
Instead of dinner at a nice restaurant, go to dinner at a nice restaurant but hire some actors who can do solid German accents to show up and fake an eighties Die Hard–style terrorist takeover of the place to create the danger effect seen in the shaky-bridge study. Then, after you narrowly escape, go outside and see that the road you have to take is super hilly and very dangerous. That’s when you say, “Maybe we should take my ride.” You point her to your car—that’s right, the monster truck Grave Digger. After that, you ride home, where you leap over dozens of cars and shoot fire from the sides of your tires.
Your date will be excited in no time.
MORE BORING-ASS DATES?
The quality of dates is one thing, but what about the quantity? When thinking about that question, I recalled a change I made in my own personal dating policy at one point. While I was single in New York, the city of options, I found myself and a lot of my friends just exploring as many options as we could. There were a lot of first dates but not as many third dates. We were consistently choosing to meet as many people as possible instead of investing in a relationship. The goal was seemingly to meet someone who instantly swept us off our feet, but it just didn’t seem to be happening. I felt like I was never meeting people I really, really liked. Was everyone shitty? Or was I shitty? Maybe I was okay, but my dating strategy was shitty? Maybe I was kind of shitty and my dating strategy was kind of shitty too?
At a certain point I decided to change my dating strategy as a personal experiment. I would invest more in people and spend more time with one person. Rather than go on four different dates, what if I went on four dates with one person?
If I went out with a girl, and the date felt like it was a six, normally I wouldn’t have gone on a second date. Instead, I would have been on my phone texting other options, trying to find that elusive first date that would be a nine or a ten. With this new mentality, I would go on a second date. What I found is that a first date that was a six was usually an eight on the second date. I knew the person better and we kept building a good rapport together. I discovered things about them that weren’t initially apparent. We’d develop more inside jokes and just generally get along better, because we were familiar.
Just casually dating many people had rarely led to this kind of discovery. In the past I had probably been eliminating folks who could have possibly provided fruitful relationships, short- or long-term, if I’d just given them more of a chance. Unlike my enlightened friend in Monroe, I just hadn’t had enough faith in people.
Now I felt much better. Instead of trying to date so many different people and getting stressed out with texting games and the like, I was really getting to know a few people and having a better time for it.
After doing the research for this book and spending time reading papers with long-ass titles like “Couples’ Shared Participation in Novel and Arousing Activities and Experienced Relationship Quality,” I realized the results of my personal experiment were quite predictable.
Initially, we are attracted to people by their physical appearance and traits we can quickly recognize. But the things that really make us fall for someone are their deeper, more unique qualities, and usually those only come out during sustained interactions.
In a fascinating study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, University of Texas psychologists Paul Eastwick and Lucy Hunt show that in most dating contexts, a person’s “mate value” matters less than their “unique value.”6