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Cake day: June 5th, 2025

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  • It doesn’t have to be structured. It just has to give opportunities for repeat interactions, and maybe a promise of future interaction with the same person, in that low pressure environment.

    Dog parks have a bunch of dogs mingling, so their owners will often have the opportunity to get to know each other.

    Neighbors who see each other often have an opportunity to get to know each other. That goes for work neighbors, too, even if they work for another employer entirely (but in the same building or something.

    Regulars at a coffee shop, restaurant, bar, or gym might learn to recognize each other and go from exchanging pleasantries to actually getting to know each other (and the staff).

    Church isn’t as big a thing as it was a few generations ago, but any kind of social meetings, from support groups to volunteer associations, give the opportunity to work together for a common goal.

    This is where hobbies and free time come in. And I’m not going to knock video games and other hobbies where you might interact with people online, but there is something fundamentally different about repeated in-person interactions. So it’s worth making sure that your routine includes regular interaction with people in low-stakes settings.

















  • A lot of young people don’t realize just how difficult post-school dating was before online dating. Once we exhausted the pool of 5-10 single people who were friends of friends, that was basically it. We’d have to go find strangers at the bar.

    That conditioned everyone to be slightly more willing to settle for less perfect matches, knowing that there wasn’t necessarily a replacement available. That could be a good thing (people more likely to have the patience to let a spark develop) or a bad thing (a higher percentage of couples who just resented each other).

    I can see an argument that things were better before online dating for some subset of people. But having lived that period, I can say from experience that it wasn’t easy then, either. And for someone like me, who is a better writer than I am a speaker, especially over the phone, the rise of text-based communication was helpful for navigating the early stages of relationships when that became the norm.