Is There a Romance Hack?
It’s not just technology companies that have tried to build shortcuts to love.
Love is a core human need. It’s been around as long as any of us can remember and dominates our novels, movies, paintings, and poems. There are many products that claim to help you find love, faster and easier. Early dating websites promised the best match via a scientific survey, and today apps promise anything from a relationship to some variation on “hot singles nearby.”
Streamlining our lives is a never-ending hunger, and we increasingly look to apps to help us do it. Uber gets us “a private car in one tap”; why can’t an app find us the right partner? With the estimated 90 minutes singles spend per day on dating apps, some wonder if that time would be better spent (and feel less wasted) at a social event, instead. Technology only gets us so far.
The best attempts at innovating romance are actually not in Silicon Valley, but a few hours south, in Hollywood.
On the wildly popular dating show “The Bachelor,” contestants are curated based on intensive applications and interviews, chosen both for entertainment value and compatibility with that season’s lead. But hidden in the questionnaires is an ulterior motive — bungee jumping dates happen for the contestant who is scared of heights too often to be coincidence. On “Dating Around,” the dinner date is turned into a Groundhog Day-scenario where the lead contestant relives the same date with five different people on consecutive days.
These aren’t your typical “interview each other for biographical details over a series of drinks” first dates — they’re experiences. And they’re designed to heighten romance.
An experience date boosts intimacy in two ways. First, it removes judgment — questioning how you’re being perceived and judgment of the other person — because your focus is on the activity. Second, especially in the case of an adventurous date that gets your adrenaline pumping, it facilitates vulnerability.
Vulnerability is required for intimacy. “How can you let yourself be loved if you can’t be seen,” says Brené Brown, today’s foremost expert on vulnerability, in her Netflix special.
Over in NYC, a pair of friends ran 40 Days of Dating to see whether they would fall in love with each other. The social experiment included seeing each other daily, weekly sessions with a couple’s counselor, and documenting everything. Though they did not stay together, their learnings about intimacy helped them in subsequent relationships.
They weren’t the last to put love in a petri dish. The concept of active facilitation of intimacy rose to popularity with the 36 questions that lead to love in the New York Times’ Modern Love column. It’s been field-tested all over the world with results recorded by publications from Cosmopolitan to the blog of e-commerce site Zappos.
My interest in the science of falling in love was first piqued when I was browsing a bookstore as a teenager and came across Leil Lowndes’ 1996 book “How to Make Anyone Fall in Love With You.” The title alone suggests that love can be manipulated, but perhaps more radically, that the “who” doesn’t matter.
The real debate is whether fulfilling relationships come from finding the “right” person or the experiences shared, and how much weight to put on each. For example, given the right sunset and perhaps together narrowing escaping a tidal wave, could any two people fall in love?
For too long we’ve put all our chips on the “right” person, and not enough on creating experiences that open us up to love.
XO, the first dating app with games, was built to give you shared experiences, where you can express humor and personality. Not only that, but if your match isn’t perfect for you, after you’ve played a game together it’s easier to break ties respectfully because you’re not in what I call judgement/insecure mode.
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The shortcut to love doesn’t exist. But for those who are eager for connection, choosing experiences that prompt vulnerability can help. When we acknowledge that, and our own agency in creating these experiences, our fulfillment in relationships will grow.
