It was 2023, and Dr Jennie Young was sick of online dating. She was looking for a partner, and instead all she found in the apps were inappropriately sexual come-ons and conversations that went nowhere. It felt like looking for a needle in a big, rancid haystack. So one day, frustrated and totally out of ideas, she Googled “how do you actually find a needle in a haystack?”
The answer: burn it down.
Thus, the burned haystack dating method (BHDM) was born. With the help of some friends and her academic expertise, Young – a professor of rhetoric at University of Wisconsin-Green Bay – developed a set of rules for “people who are searching for a long-term, stable, monogamous relationship”, as the Facebook group dedicated to the method states.
Both dates I went on were for coffee. Let’s see if we click sober and go from there.
One led to being invited to her house the next day; the other walked me to her dorm room from Starbucks. The second ex-wife, who I just got off the phone with, was a situation no sane person would do outside of the physical conditions I was faced with, so I met her for the first time in her kitchen.
I seriously do not understand dating.