Olsson didn’t really promote her Date Me doc, but Chana Messinger, a teacher and blogger, tweeted it in March 2021, saying, “I like this genre of stuff: people who put themselves out there, say clearly and publicly that they want a partner, and know who they are and what they’re looking for.” Messinger went on to share a thread of some of her favorite Date Me docs, a celebration of the subculture. It’s fascinating to flip through, and a bit voyeuristic. They also require a much longer attention span than Tinder.
I reached out to Olsson to ask her what inspired her to release a Date Me documentary. The pandemic is part of this story, because of course it is. “For obvious reasons, I didn’t often go to parties, group events, or meet friends-of-friends,” Catherine Olsson told me via Twitter DM. “I wanted something to enable friend-of-friend intros in the pandemic world.”
But mostly, Olsson only wanted to filter out people who don’t like this way of dating, and no longer rely on chance to find the right match. “If spontaneity hasn’t worked yet, why not help it?” she wrote to me.
All this is deep rational. You could also say practical, except that the distinction between practical and rational is an important distinction in Silicon Valley today, because rationalism is now its own influential subculture. Nearly all the people mentioned in this story identify as rationalists or, as Olah put it, hold to values associated with effective altruism. Olsson said she doesn’t think the dating document is a widely accepted format outside of these circles: “This was always (?) intended as something to be passed down within our subcultural communities. It’s a ‘by nerds, for nerds’ format!”
But of course dating and love cannot always be optimized. We think we know what we want, but we’re actually pretty lousy at estimating what makes us happy. Or, as WIRED previously explained, “Good romantic partners are hard to predict with data. Wanted romantic partners are easy to predict with data. And that suggests that many of us are dating all wrong.”
Like a lot of people, I’ve used dating apps on and off, and my most profound realization, which isn’t very profound, is that the people I’m completely attracted to in real conversations are often people I may have passed on in a app. I’ve never made a Date Me document either, because it sounds demeaning, but I once published a 5000 word article that practically screamed my singleness, so same difference.
Date Me docs seem like a natural next step in the evolution of online dating, not because the results are necessarily better, but because the docs themselves are at least an effective form of self-expression. They are the anti-app, in that they embrace the vastness of the open web and evade the ideals, dodgy algorithms and templates of containerized dating apps. Apps and web, web and apps, and we go on and on. In a way, this is also the natural ebb and flow of dating. We alternately expand and shrink our dating pools depending on our needs and desires. Or we verticalize — narrow our options because of religion, culture, or age — and if that doesn’t work, we go horizontal again. (And I don’t mean that as a euphemism, though, sure, why not.)
