How to Find "The One": The Science of Dating with Tim Molnar | The Happiness Lab podcast

Key Takeaway

This episode explores the science of modern dating with behavioral scientist Tim Molnar. The most actionable insight: Set a specific 'date number' for your biggest dating challenge—whether that's asking people out, going on second dates, or attending social events. Research shows men get a 'yes' only 20% of the time when asking someone out, so expecting rejection 80% of the time builds resilience and reduces anxiety. Having a concrete number (like attending 4 social events monthly or asking out 300 people total) transforms an overwhelming goal into manageable steps while providing the comfort of a finite endpoint.

Episode Overview

Behavioral scientist and dating coach Tim Molnar shares research-backed strategies for finding love in the modern world. The episode covers how to overcome dating anxiety using behavioral science principles, why dating apps often lead us astray, effective ways to meet people in real life, and how to approach dating with realistic expectations. Tim discusses the concept of 'date numbers,' exposure therapy for rejection anxiety, the paradox of choice in online dating, and practical tips for both online and in-person dating success.

Full Transcript

Transcript of How to Find "The One": The Science of Dating with Tim Molnar | The Happiness Lab podcast from The Happiness Lab. Auto-generated from episode audio; may contain minor errors.

Admit it. At some point, you probably fantasized about meeting somebody that you really clicked with. And in that fantasy, things are really great. You're into them. They're into you. You get a little jolt of joy every time you see a text from their number. Over time, you start to think, "Huh, I might love this person." or even, "This is the human I'm going to spend the rest of my life with." But of course, there are some steps you need to go through before it gets to that point.

Before that happens, I'm going to have to have a relationship at all. And before that's going to happen, I'm going to have to go on a date. And before that's going to happen, I am going to have to get a date. This is Tim Molnar, a social scientist turned dating coach in Boulder, Colorado. Before Tim became an expert on the science of dating, he was pretty much the opposite. I had, I think up until the age of 28, 29, never asked someone out. My initial approach to love was very much based on this idea that love will happen when it happens.

I just wasn't very proactive. I was spending a lot of time pursuing self-actualization and so trying to make sure that I was getting into the right grad schools and I was playing soccer over in Europe for a while, learning new languages, doing all of these things that I thought would make me a more interesting partner and I realized that really wasn't moving the needle forward. So Tim decided to look for love in an unlikely place, the world of behavioral science. I was in a grad program at the time and I was digging into all this different academic research, these social psychological frameworks and I thought there must be a way to be able to use these to help myself in dating.

And I think there's this commonly used expression in academia that our research is often research and so I figured that we could use these studies to help me date smarter. date smarter. date smarter. And Tim ultimately succeeded in his quest. I met my partner Paige at a coffee shop about six years ago at this point. point. point. Tim now wants to share all that he's learned. In fact, he has a new book called Date Smarter: A Strategic Guide to Navigating Modern Romance. In the book, Tim breaks down what the leading research says about finding your life partner.

He also gives some practical tips for navigating the messy and often intimidating landscape of modern dating. So stay tuned, Happiness Lab listeners, because in this second episode in our series on the science of love, Tim and I will explore strategies for meeting someone in real life, the ins and outs of online dating, and how to know when you found the one. That's all coming up after these quick messages from the Happiness Lab sponsors. Behavioral scientist and dating coach Tim Molnar wasn't always an expert on finding love.

And that's why he decided to take a scientific approach to the challenges of modern dating. I wanted to figure out is there a way that I can reverse engineer this process. Not to guarantee that I'm going to meet this person, but at least to reclaim agency and take actions that are going to improve the probability of that happening. So what was the approach you took to reverse engineering it? What did you look to? I tried to understand at each point in this process, are there certain numbers, are there certain heruristics that can be helpful for guiding this?

So for example, there's this great study out of the University of Copenhagen where the researchers had sent about 360 undergrads into the field and what they found was that on average men were getting a yes when asking women out about one out of five times. And so I use this 20% success rate and that was sort of my guiding path of like, okay, cool. So if I go out and shoot my shot and this doesn't work, it's actually to be expected and I can use this rejection as data points to learn maybe what I might do better next time.

If we think about our happiness as sort of our expectations minus reality, if I'm expecting to not get a date four out of five times, it builds in a lot more resilience for me. I love this idea of using the actual statistics to build in the resilience. But if you're a guy looking to ask a woman out, 80% of the time you're going to get rejected. I'm guessing some people hear that stat and they're like, "That's terrible. Like, I don't want to deal with that." How did you cope with the emotionality that comes with a number that might feel intimidating like that?

that? that? I think you're right that hearing that there is a higher probability of a failure than success is not always the most encouraging message. But I think the important reframe is a lot of our anxiety comes from uncertainty. And of course, there's always going to be uncertainty in dating. We can never avoid that. And I know you'd had Maya Shanka on the podcast a number of episodes back and she was referencing the study where we are more stressed when we have a 50% chance of receiving an electric shock as opposed to 100% chance.

And knowing these statistics, we still don't have that certainty. But there is comfort in knowing that we will strike out. And so when that happens, we can put certain pieces into place to make ourselves more resilient. For example, we might say, "Here's someone who who I'd love to go talk to. If this doesn't work out, I'm going to go on a run after this. I'm going to go take a warm bath. I'm going to listen to this music that always makes me feel better." And we have these things in place ahead of time.

And having that plan can reduce some of the anxiety that comes with putting ourselves out there. So it seems like it works in at least two ways, right? One is it just normalizes it. It's like it's 80% probably this is not going to work. I shouldn't freak out when I hear it. But the second thing I hear you say which is really important is if it's really an 80% shot that I'm going to get dinged. I got to have some strategies in place for when that inevitable role probabilistically comes up like, oh, I'm going to get turned down.

I got to call a friend. I have to have some happy music. You build in the resilience as you're going to kind of do better. Another thing I know you've talked about is the idea of having these statistics can shift our focus from outcome to effort. What do you mean there? And why can that be so powerful? The idea of focusing on what's in our control really does improve [clears throat] how we approach dating overall. When we feel like we have some agency over what's transpiring, agency over our actions, this does provide us a good bit of comfort.

And so there are a lot of different ways that we can think about this happening, but it might be I spend a lot of time working from home. And what's in my control is not necessarily when I meet my partner, but I do have control over deciding I can work from a coffee shop. And when I go there, I can choose to sit at the community table. I can choose to either do my yoga workout at home or I can go to class on Tuesday and Thursday.

And these are little decision points in our lives where reclaiming little bits of control can provide us comfort that comes along with that. It's like, well, I'm not, you know, immediately going to get my life partner, but at least I'm taking action. You're kind of always working towards something. You're putting yourself out there. Just that effort can feel really good. One of the frameworks I talk about in the book is this idea of the date number and putting some type of numerical value alongside whatever action is serving as some type of choke point in our dating life.

And it should be something that feels like a bit of a stretch. And so maybe that looks like each month I'm going to try and shoot for four social events. something that is maybe mildly uncomfortable, but really thinking about where am I getting stuck? Do I go on a bunch of first dates and I'm very quick to write people off because of this grass is greener on the next date phenomenon? And if so, can I change and set my date number around this year I really want to go on 12 second dates and just giving people another shot.

So, this idea of a date number is just like figuring out a number for the hard thing that you want to do. And it sounded like at first your hard thing was really asking people out. Knowing that your statistic was that you're going to get turned down 80% of the time, did you come up with a specific date number for the number of people you're going to ask out when you first started this? I did. And I like to like we want the math in the happiness lab, right?

So, I had set one at 300. 300. Whoa. This was overly conservative and my date number was 300 asks, but in terms of the number of dates that I had budgeted to go on, that would have been 60 dates, 20% success rate. It was building in this big buffer for saying when I go out and try and it doesn't work out, I shouldn't be surprised. And so, I think coming in with that understanding really helped me say like, great, okay, only 299 more. This one didn't work out, only 298 more.

which is so surprising because in some ways that seems like a really big number. But one of the things we of course know from the research is that these finite numbers are calming. 300 is a big number. 299 is a big number, but it's not infinite. And that alone can reduce our anxiety a little bit, which is kind of cool. The other thing is that these larger date numbers are good from a psychological perspective because they do something else that we might need in the dating domain, which is that we're getting exposure to the thing that we find really tough.

One of the things I loved about your book is that you compared this idea of doing the hard thing in dating with the kind of exposure therapy that we see in clinical practice when somebody's trying to get over a phobia. So you're afraid of spiders, you have to expose yourself to the spider. You're afraid of heights. You got to expose yourself to the heights. If we're afraid of the asking out, we got to expose ourselves to the asking out so it becomes kind of wrote and we get used to it.

I think that's right. We can think about having a fear of heights and starting at the second floor and saying this feels a bit out of my comfort zone and then the next week going up to floor three, floor 5 and floor 10 and building our way up gradually and dating. There's a very similar parallel to be drawn where it was really difficult for me to approach the first person that I did. It was really difficult to approach the last person that I did is always a hard thing.

But in doing this over and over and over again, there is a comfort that we begin to develop, begin to reckon with this idea of this fear of rejection, like gosh, I shot my shot and this didn't work out and I live to tell the tale. And one other thing that I would say about the exposure therapy piece is this was something that came out of a therapy practice that I was in and my therapist was trying to help me get to the bottom of, you know, why is this idea of being single so scary?

And I would immediately spiral into these, oh, it's 20 years into the future and I'm sitting at this choir concert for my sister's 9-year-old and everyone's coupled and has children and I'm the butt of the joke. Oh, you know, Tim's just single again. And brought up these really uncomfortable feelings for me. And so she's like, you know, just write that on a post-it note and put it in a really conspicuous place in your house. And so I was living with roommates at the time, so I was like, "Well, refrigerator is probably not the best place for like my deepest, darkest insecurities, but I can put this on my bedside table and still see it a good bit." [snorts] And over time, I'd see this very hyper specific example of like why I thought this was going to be such an scary experience of saying hi to someone in the aisles at Trader Joe's.

And actually, it was like, no, this is kind of a bit of a jump here to say, if this doesn't go well, then, you know, I'm going to be at that choir concert 20 years in the future all alone. It's so cool because the exposure really gets you to set these realistic expectations. Again, this is something we know from these clinical therapeutic practices like, oh, the spider's not as bad or the height's not as bad. You're basically teaching yourself that these practices in dating that cause anxiety, they're actually not that bad.

But the second thing this big date number gives you is that you're also setting these big goals into something a little bit tinier which we know from all the research on goal setting can be so important whereas you need 300 for a life partner but you might just need 60 for a first date or something like that. Absolutely. So one of the things that a framework like this allows you to have is when we develop a plan it's going to be more effective the more specific we're able to be.

So I talk about this idea of implementation intentions in the book where we're assigning a specific time, place, and behavior to an action that we want to take. So for example, going back to this idea of going out to four social events in a month, we might get hyper specific and say, "On Tuesday at 7 p.m., I'm going to go to trivia night over at this specific bar." And putting that onto our calendar does a couple things. one, we have to opt out of a plan that has already been made, which we know from the research makes much more effective followrough.

We see that in everything from donating organs to things like automatic retirement savings. And so that is very powerful in and of itself, having it on the calendar. Something else that allows us to do is then implement other accountability mechanisms. So I talk about getting something I call a datemate. basically just your accountability buddy. And I think anybody who's tried to have like an early morning, I'm gonna go to the gym, it's a lot easier to make that 6 am workout happen. If you're meeting someone there, I might just bail on myself.

I'm probably not going to bail on my friend. So, with the datemate, this could be someone that we check in with once a week and they know you were planning to try and go out to that trivia night this week. Did you end up making that happen? It's not meant to cause any shame if it didn't happen, but the idea is that when we're accountable to somebody else, we're more likely to take those actions that improve our probability for success here. It's so interesting because I think when you first hear this idea of a datemate, you might assume this is more like a wingman.

Like that's the person who's supposed to go with you to a trivia night and kind of talk to the person for you. But what you mean more is like the person you're checking in with to make sure that you're following through on the plans that you've decided for yourself. It's funny that you bring that up about heading out to an event with someone else. I was running a dating workshop over the weekend and someone had raised their hand. They're like, "Hey, you know, I struggle to get out of the house and it's easier if I go with a friend.

Is it possible that people will still like come say hi to me if I'm with someone else?" And one of the guys just jumps in. He's like, "I would never feel comfortable approaching someone." And and I was looking back on my own dating life and just sort of reflecting on this question and thinking that I had probably approached somewhere in the ballpark of 70 80 people over a multiple years time horizon. And one of those times I had approached someone who was with someone else which is not to say that it's an impossibility but it does make it more difficult.

And certainly if it helps you get out of the house it's great to like have that person but then just realize like but then ditch them go sit somewhere else. Yeah. else. Yeah. else. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So hopefully listeners who are interested in finding their partner are hearing this and saying, "Oh, date number. It fits with the behavioral science." If someone's thinking that, what's their first step to determining their own date number? What advice do you have? you have? you have? Getting clear on where we're getting stuck.

And this can be something that's difficult to do because by definition, when we have a blind spot, it is something that we don't see. So, it could be we might text a few people who know us well, ask a therapist, ask family members, someone who will give us an honest opinion. Hey, why do you think I'm single? What do you think's really holding me back right now? It's a tough question to ask is vulnerable, but there can be a lot of power in getting that feedback.

And then if they're saying you're swiping and swiping and swiping, you're messaging, you're rarely meeting up, and it makes sense that you're among the 78% of online daters who report experiencing burnout. burnout. burnout. And then if that's the case, then we can take tangible actions for saying like, okay, maybe I want to try more of an in real life approach. What does that look like? So the first step is yeah, like you said, really getting clear on on what you're doing and then coming up with some type of number around that goal that feels like it's going to push you without leading to burnout here.

So now that you've got a plan to step out of your comfort zone, the next question is where do you actually meet people with real relationship potential? on dating apps and bars, in the checkout line at Dunkin Donuts, and what actually makes a first date good. We'll tackle all that and more when the Happiness Lab returns from this quick break. Dating coach and behavioral scientist Tim Molnar is on a mission to make the process of finding love in the modern world a bit easier. And one of his more controversial suggestions is that we're better off looking for love in real life, not online.

In fact, Tim has argued there are lots of psychological reasons that dating apps tend to lead us astray. Our brains are not designed to be able to make sense of lots and lots of options. So, we know this from work from folks like Barry Schwarz that this idea of paradox of choice is we get overloaded and we're not able to make those value decisions. So, you can think about going out to the cheesecake factory and you have like 225 options on the menu and you're like, I don't know, should I get like the Cajun jumbo pasta or you know this other whatever.

And it's much easier for us when we go to a nice restaurant. We have six to eight choices and we're like great. When we enter the online dating world and we have limitless options or this perception of limitless options, we experience a sense of overwhelm. And I remember being on a date probably about seven or eight years back at this point and we were 30 minutes into dinner and things were going really well and I was kind of teasing. I like gosh like why did it take so long for us to meet up?

This has been great. And I remember she pulled out her app and she went to the section where it had active messages and just said 999 plus. So she had received over a thousand messages from people. And so it didn't matter like, oh man, was that the right thing to text? Maybe that wasn't funny enough. Maybe it wasn't unique enough. No, this is just a choice overload problem. Voter choice is great research on this where we see when we have a ballot that has lots and lots of options, it's very difficult for us to actually make choices that are aligned with the political values that we hold.

And when that gets down into the, you know, 6 to 8 range, that's a pretty comfortable decision-m range. And so what some of the apps, Hinge is a good example, have started to do is they'll say if you have more than X ongoing conversations, we're not going to allow you to continue to swipe because we know that's not productive for what we're trying to do here. So it seems like some of the apps try to help, but then sometimes apps have features that we use to try to narrow down the playing field, and then that messes us up.

I mean, one thing we talk about a lot in the happiness lab is we have no idea about the kinds of things that will make us happy. And I think that that's definitely true in the dating domain. We just have all these predictions about the kinds of things we want in a partner, but we're often wrong. And one of the things I'm struck by is that in your book, you talked about how you and your wife were on the same dating app at the same time, but you didn't ever see each other because you had filters on that filtered each other out, which I found so striking.

I love this story. I think it's a perfect example. I was two years outside of Paige's age filter and we were talking a number of months into dating. like gosh oh so you were on like Hinge and Bumble as well you know we were living a mile apart I wonder when we would have come across each other and we were going through all the filters that we had set like we wouldn't have not online anyway and it is like you said it's something where we have this false sense of I have control over this I can filter for someone who's over 6 feet tall I can filter for someone who is this religion I can filter for someone who has these drug and alcohol preferences and And yet the whole time we're filling in the blanks of the story of who we think we're going to be meeting up with.

This person says that they're religious. Are they going to be the person who's in the front pew every Sunday? Or is this someone who maybe they celebrate Christmas and they go once a year and like that's what being religious means to them? And so we're creating these ideas that often turn out not to be true. And the filters can be highly destructive for finding out what we actually want and recognizing some of those qualities. you know, there's not a filter to turn on to say, how kind am I, how loyal am I?

What's my level of trustworthiness? trustworthiness? trustworthiness? And I think that they really do steer us wrong in that department. So, the apps are steering us wrong. We should commit to meeting people in real life, but where should we think about going to meet a new partner in person? I would start by saying that I don't think we should ever head out to places just for the idea of I'm going to meet someone here who's going to be my future romantic partner. It puts far too much pressure on the situation and it creates strong likelihood that we're going to be disappointed.

Instead, I think there's this matrix of, is this something that I'm genuinely going to enjoy. If I head out to that Saturday morning trail maintenance crew, I'm probably going to get some fresh air. I'm probably going to meet some people who are kind and generous and who volunteer their time. Maybe I happen to meet someone who's a good friend. Maybe I happen to meet someone who ends up being a future matchmaker. Maybe I meet someone who ends up being my life partner. But it is really important to focus on those types of places that we're genuinely looking to have a good time at.

And I think there's also this idea of what's the likelihood that I'm going to have a conversation. So if I go to a concert, there are a lot of people there, but there's not a super high probability that I'm going to be having a conversation. If I go to a book club, by definition, there's a curated group of people who are designed to be talking and interacting with one another. And so being thoughtful about am I going to have a good time here? Is there a high likelihood that there are going to be different people here?

And will I likely interact with them? Those are good filters as it were to be able to begin thinking about where we might head out to meet people in real life. Okay, so we're at the spot that we're going to have a good time. We can have a conversation. There's somebody we might be interested in talking to. What's the next step? Do we go with a goofy pickup line? How does it work? [sighs and laughter] There are a number of different approaches. One of my favorite is called the foot in the door approach and it comes from the old business adage where if we wanted to sell something, if we could get like a literal or figurative foot in the door, we've crossed over this threshold and now we're more likely to close a sale.

And so in the dating context, there's research on this idea of if we first open with a small favor, something like, "Hey, I'm looking for directions." or like, "Can I have a light for my cigarette?" When people open with this small favor first before going into, "And I'd love to grab a coffee sometime," they're five times more likely to get a yes. And so that can look like a lot of different things in real life. Going back to the coffee shop example, you're sitting at the community table, you need to go to the bathroom, and you turn to the person next to you and just say, "Hey, do you mind watching my stuff while I go to the bathroom?" It's a pretty low stakes thing to say.

And then we come back, we're like, "Hey, thanks so much. You working on anything fun today?" But now that I've had that initial conversation, that initial touch point, it's much more likely that if I later say like, "You just had like a really good smile and good energy about you and be really fun to go for a walk. Would you be out for that sometime?" Our probability is much higher. higher. higher. When you're talking about this, this sounds so easy, but when I talk to the young people I work with, like my Yale students, they would describe an act like that as incredibly anxietyprovoking.

And I think that it's true. These days, we just have more friction for these quick conversations with people in part because we're on our phones all the time. And that means when we're first starting out, we do kind of experience a little anxiety when we're trying to do this. So, any tips for regulating the anxiety when you're doing these light ice breakers? Yes, I don't want to talk about these things as if it's easy. It was never easy for me speaking from personal experience. It did get easier and understanding some of the research.

Nick Epley does a lot of great research on this out of University of Chicago and the upshot of a lot of his findings are people enjoy being talked to a lot more than we think a lot more than they think and we enjoy those conversations a lot more as well. So for me as an academic that's something that did give me a good degree of comfort but also just creating some of these opportunity response mechanisms. A good example, I met my partner Paige at a coffee shop and I really want an excuse to come up and talk to her and I went over and I said like, "Hey, do you mind if I plug in my laptop here?" laptop here?" laptop here?" That didn't feel like a crazy thing to say.

It was still hard. there was still like a level of anxiety, but understanding the social context that this is a normal thing to do within a coffee shop. I would often do this whether or not I was interested in someone, like my battery is running low, I need an outlet, you're buy an outlet, this is a convenient option. So, one thing I think is just having a rough idea of like here's something I might say. And then if this doesn't go the way that I hoped, what can I do to elegantly, gracefully extract myself from the situation?

You know, hey, no worries. Hope you have a great rest of your day. And just understanding that like I can get myself out of this situation in a way that leaves them feeling respected and leaves me with my dignity intact as well. And then having those lists of things that make you feel better at the ready, like I'm getting on the phone with my friend right now. You also are big on making sure that you can be the one that receives conversation from someone else, that you're doing something that allows you to seem a little bit more approachable.

What sort of behavior does that entail? There are different ways to do this. Some of my favorites are giving people something easy to comment on. And so one way we might think about doing that is putting certain stickers on back of a laptop on the back of a water bottle and someone can come up and see your Bryce Canyon sticker and be like, "Oh my gosh, you've been to Bryce Canyon." Another thing could be, you know, something that you're wearing. Maybe you're a big Patriots fan and you have your Patriots shirt on or your Patriots mug or whatever it might be.

It's an easy conversation piece for people to make a quick comment on the game, to make a quick comment on their favorite players. And so if we're not as comfortable approaching other people, which I think is is very very common today, we can make it slightly easier for other people to approach us. And part of that is being ready and willing to receive that. Like if I have noise cancelling headphones, people are much less likely to approach me than if I'm just sitting glancing up every once in a while, sitted at a community table.

Context helps drive that approachability piece. So far, we've heard Tim's suggestions for meeting people in real life, but what if you're still attached to those online dating apps? Are there actually effective ways to use them? And how do you know when it's time to stop swiping and commit? We'll get into Tim's tips for online dating when The Happiness Lab returns from the break. Social scientist turned dating coach Tim Molnar is a big advocate for meeting people in real life, but he also knows that dating apps can help you find your person if you use them wisely.

So, I asked Tim to share his best practices, starting with what the science says about choosing your profile picture. It's really helpful when we're going through setting up a profile to put yourself in the place of someone who's going through this on the other end and to understand I might not make it past the first picture if this doesn't seem like it's something that's interesting to me. So some of those things with respect to choosing best pictures, candid pictures perform very well. So these receive about 15% more likes.

We also know that beach shots aren't performing very well. So, women who have beach photos get 47% fewer likes on these. Men get 80% fewer likes. That seems weird because I think my stereotype is like showing off your body is a good thing, but people seem not to like that. That's incredible. Yeah, it's an interesting one. Another one that for me was surprising when I was digging into this research was that black and white photos actually perform very well. They perform better than color photos in general.

They're about twice as likely to get a positive swipe. This may be less surprising as smiling, having that like open posture, not being with someone who could be perceived as a significant other. And this might seem like an obvious one. You're like, "Oh, well, like I know this is my sister. Clearly, they're going to know this is my sister, too." It's like, we probably wouldn't know that. You know, going back to that putting yourself in their shoes piece. piece. piece. What about selfies? How do those do?

Selfies do not do well, particularly mirrorbased selfies. And so if you are able to have a friend do a quick photo shoot, this is one of those very high lever moments with respect to online dating, talk in the book about this idea of the paro principle, this 8020 rule where 20% of our actions often get 80% of the results and then the other 80% of our actions are aimed at the remaining 20% there. So, in dating, this can look like asking a friend for a quick photo shoot.

It can also look like sending a text message out to some friends and saying, "Hey, I'm getting pretty serious about dating right now. If you happen to meet anyone or know anyone who you might set me up with, please feel free to let me know." These are things that don't take a lot of time but can be very high leverage as opposed to the typical way that a lot of people interact with online dating which people on average spend 51 minutes a day on dating apps.

So that's 25 hours in a month. But there's not a lot of time spent actually meeting up for dates. And so I'm very interested in those things that we can do to spend a lot less time, a lot less frustration and spend more time on dates, meeting up with people, hopefully having a good time, getting to know someone. someone. someone. Okay, so that's the picture that we put in our profile, but they also have some text. What does the research say? We'll start with proof reading.

Proof reading is something that is often overlooked, and this is something that turns off a lot of people. about 50% of people will disqualify a profile if there is even a simple typo in it. So just do one last pass over it to make sure that you don't have any typos in it. Being able to respond to something in a way that allows people to comment. So for example, we might say, you know, ask me about the time I super glued my hand to the wall or had to go down the emergency slide on an Air India flight.

These are all things that can help us make ourselves more approachable. Honesty is always something that is paramount here. And also being positive. I think we want to be able to tell people all the things that we don't want. And we're like, you know, I wouldn't date someone of this political affiliation. I wouldn't ever do this. And there are a lot of ways that we can signal these same things, but in a way that exudes more positivity. So, we might say like looking for someone open-minded.

And that may touch on certain political beliefs without having to say, you know, like this is what I'm not looking for. Or instead of like no workaholics, I'm seeking someone who values quality time and work life balance. If you like animals, you could say if you don't like animals, swipe left. The other reframe is like looking for a fellow animal lover here. So, that's what we put in a profile. But then if our profile works, we have this moment that can feel really nerve-wracking, which is that we have to send the first message.

What does a good first message look like? A great first message is something that, first of all, asks an open-ended question, something that someone is able to respond to. When we're thinking about these messages, we want to invest a little bit of time looking through their profile, making a thoughtful comment on something that they have said about themselves. And at the same time, we don't want to obsess. You know, we're not penning the great American novel here. This is just an opportunity to reach out and to maybe start a spark that leads somewhere.

One important thing when we're thinking about online messaging is the amount of time we're spending back and forth before we're actually getting to a date. It can feel very tempting to want to understand everything about this person before understanding if it's a good idea to meet up or not. And there are certain safety considerations for sure. At the same time, research from Hinge suggests that there's a sweet spot between about 2 to 5 days where people are comfortable meeting up. So on average, people think that that's a good amount of time.

That's not going to be for everyone, but it is helpful to keep in mind that we don't need to have these digital pen pals and instead we can say like, "Hey, this has been really fun. I've enjoyed our banter. I think we might even do a better job in person. What are your thoughts on going for a walk Friday at 6 p.m. over on the Highline?" And I love that particular example because that gets to another thing you suggest, which is that when you're asking for the in real life moment, you got to be very specific, concrete.

let's meet up at the Highline at 7 p.m. and do this thing. We're going to take a walk rather than like, hey, let's just meet up. That seems to work better, too. Huh. It's so much easier to know what we're signing up for when we say the time, place, behavior, invitation versus the, "Hey, are you around this weekend? I don't know what I'm signing up for." The highline at 7:00 p.m. There's a specificity that allows us to understand what we're getting ourselves into. And so a problem with meeting up in real life is that we're all really busy.

You had this lovely solution which you called turtlenecking your dating life. What is that? In the dating world where people are experiencing experiencing experiencing record high burnout rates, being able to cut down on the effort, the overwhelm, the choice overload is really helpful. And so being able to automate certain things makes our life a lot easier. Steve Jobs was iconically someone who wore pretty much the same outfit for good portion of his career. And so one of the things that I suggest is using that same black turtleneck analogy from Steve Jobs is like picking out a first date outfit.

What is your dating uniform going to be? For me, I had this Henley that I love with these particular pair of pants and I was like, I don't need to obsess over what I'm going to wear on this date. I know that if I go on a date, this is what I'm pulling out of my closet. And it made this a lot easier. One fewer thing that I needed to obsess over. over. over. You've done this too for even what the date is. I think you want to kind of make it authentic to the person you're talking to.

But you had some go-tos, your kind of date spot turtlenecks, if I understand it right. There's a careful balance here between wanting to be thoughtful and say like, "Hey, there's this great Italian restaurant in your neighborhood. Maybe we try and meet up there. That shows a certain level of thoughtfulness. And there's also this balance with our own schedules, living busy lives, and thinking about how can we date, recognizing that I don't have to go on Yelp and scour reviews for every restaurant on the Upper East Side.

I know that there's this really great ramen place. I know like this is actually on my way back from the office anyway, so it works well with my day. So, I'm going to suggest this and maybe we have to iterate and maybe ramen on the Upper East Side turns into tacos somewhere else, but at least it provides that tangible starting point and keeping that balance, but also having the ability to cut down on some of that choice overwhelm. choice overwhelm. choice overwhelm. The other thing we need to cut down on is just how obsessed we get over things.

You know, you mentioned this idea, you can invest in the first message, but you don't need to obsess over it. you just mentioned you don't need to do this huge Yelp search to figure out where you're going to go. I think one of the problems with online dating is it can become a bit of a compulsion especially when it comes to just the swiping. Tell me a little bit about what we know about how much online dating has in common with other addictive behaviors that people can fall into.

Online dating and particularly swipe based dating algorithms algorithms algorithms are made based on a very similar algorithm to how slot machines operate where we don't know when we're getting that dopamine hit. Intermittent rewards produce highly addictive tendencies. So for example, we keep swiping and swiping and swiping not knowing when that reward is going to come. We want to just keep doing this behavior over and over again. Here's some interesting psychological research from BF Skinner. We did this with pigeons and they're pecking at this little lever trying to understand, you know, when are they going to get a little piece of food and for those pigeons that pe get some food, peck, get some food, and then eventually the food stops being administered, they'll stop pecking.

Whereas the other ones who get this on an intermittent reward schedule, so they pack and sometimes get the food, pack, sometimes get the food. That's a highly addictive patterning and it's something that we see all the time with online dating and it's not a coincidence that these are engineered in this way especially when you think about the incentives that these app companies have for engagement for time on the app and all of these things. So what do we know about what a healthy amount of time looks like on these apps?

Healthy is going to be a little bit different for each person in general. something like 15 minutes a day is what a lot of experts recommend for interacting with these. One thing that I suggest is setting an alarm when you log into the platform because it can get very addictive as we were just talking about and so it's easy to blow past that 15minute hard stop unless we have something reminding us like okay it's time to get off these things. In terms of regularity, of regularity, of regularity, again, this is person dependent, but often I'd say something like three times a week, 15 minutes.

It's enough to stay current, to stay fresh. If you're worried about missing a match or not responding quickly enough to message, you can always just be upfront and say like, "Hey, you know, I'm much quicker over text. So, if you do end up being free for that walk on the Highline, then text me. Here's my number." But we want to avoid that situation where we're constantly logging in and generally speaking, the amount of time on average that people are spending is much too high for protecting our mental health.

And so those are some of the pitfalls of apps, but hopefully we either do that or we meet a person in real life and we find somebody that we really like. And so how can you tell when the person you found is the right one to invest in when it's time to stop dating other people? It's a great question. And from a numerical standpoint, like yes, I had set this date number goal. I said, "All right, I'm willing to ask out up to 300 people. I had found some pretty good matches along the way, things that for small reasons didn't end up working out.

When I met Paige, there was a one understanding that she was compared to a previous baseline like considerably better than that, but also there were more importantly these bigger overriding qualities, things like kindness, things like curiosity. We shared a lot of values in common. And so it was something where I had felt very differently than I had in previous relationships. That was something that for me surfaced fairly early on. I don't think that always needs to be the case, but here it happened to. And kind of on her end, she tells a story about when we were out for sort of our first official date.

And I was asking about her morning routine and she was talking about the smoothie that she makes. I was like, "Oh, okay." Like, "Well, what goes into the smoothie?" And she's like, "Well, you know, it's spinach and some juice that goes in there and yogurt." I was like, "Oh, what kind of yogurt do you use?" And I'm a pretty curious person and I didn't even remember that conversation when she brought it up months later. But she remembers that like gosh when you were asking me about what type of Greek yogurt I use, there was this level of interest, this curiosity, asking questions, wanting to get to know someone.

And for her that was signaling of here's someone who's going to be growth mindseted. And there were a lot of things on her end as well. And so any final thoughts for our listeners about how you can use a behavioral science approach to date smarter? This idea that we invest a lot of time and effort in lots of things that we care about is one that seems very normal for so many aspects of our life. When we think about getting our dream job, when we think about having our, you know, health, whatever it might be.

And with dating, I think there's again like the same idea that I approach things with that it'll happen when it happens. What I would say is we have a lot more agency than we often give ourselves credit for. And we should think about those ways in which we can exercise this on a daily basis. And maybe that's saying, I'm going to shift up my schedule a little bit. I'm going to move from the Tuesday pottery class to the Wednesday pottery class, meeting new group of people.

I'm going to make sure that I'm sitting out at the community table when I'm out at the coffee shop. I'm going to set a date number and find an accountability buddy and begin taking action in the ways that rest within my control that improve our outcomes. And that's really what I think the deep takeaway message is here. Dating can feel mysterious and frustrating, but as Tim's work shows us, it's not as out of control as we often assume. There are strategies we can use to build resilience, reduce anxiety, and maybe, just maybe, find that perfect person.

And if you want even more advice on the best ways to go about that, check out Tim's book, Date Smarter: A Strategic Guide to Navigating Modern Romance. If you have thoughts about today's episode and the science of love, we'd love to hear them. You can email us at happiness lab pushkin.fm or leave us a review to tell us what you liked. You can also sign up to learn more about the science of happiness and join my free newsletter on my website drls santos.com. drls santos.com. drls santos.com.

That's dr r l aur i s a n t os.com. Coming up on next week's episode of the happiness lab, we'll explore the misconceptions we have about attraction. We'll dig into the science of happier bonding with an expert on the evolutionary psychology of human mating. When we look at these differences and what men and women say they want, they're not translating into their experienced preferences when they're out there meeting real life people. That's next up in our series on the science of love on the happiness lab with me, Dr.

Lauri Santos.