How to stop swiping and find your person on dating apps | Christina Wallace

481,487 views ・ 2018-08-21

TED


Please double-click on the English subtitles below to play the video.

00:12
I first tried online dating my freshman year of college,
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which was in 2001, in case you can't see my wrinkle.
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Now, as you may have noticed, I'm six-feet tall,
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and when I arrived at my chosen university
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and realized our men's Division III basketball team averaged five-foot-eight,
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I abandoned the on-campus scene and went online.
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Now, back then, online dating was pretty close to the plot
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of "You've Got Mail."
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You'd write long emails back and forth for weeks,
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before you finally met up in real life.
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Except, in my case, you'd realize you have no chemistry
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and so now, you're back to square one.
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So, while online dating has changed a lot in the last 17 years,
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many of the frustrations remain the same.
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Because here's what it does well.
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It broadens your pool of potential dates
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beyond your existing social and professional circles.
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And here's what it doesn't do well.
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Literally everything else.
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(Laughter)
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A few things you should know about me:
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I'm an action-oriented overachieving math and theater nerd,
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who ended up with an MBA.
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So, when things aren't working out, I tend to take a step back,
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apply my business toolkit to figure out why, and to fix it.
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My love life was no exception.
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The summer before I turned 30, I took myself on a relationship off-site.
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Which means I went camping solo in Maine for a week,
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to do a retro on my track record of mediocre relationships.
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Because the thing was, I knew what I wanted in a partner.
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Kindness, curiosity, empathy, a sense of purpose.
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And yet, here's what I chose for online:
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Ivy League degree, six feet or taller,
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lives within 12 subway stops of me.
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It's not that I intentionally prioritized those things,
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it's just the easiest to vet for online.
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It kind of is like a résumé review,
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which is why these guys looked great on paper
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and never quite fit me.
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So when I went back online in the spring of 2016,
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I decided to reengineer the process through some classic business tools.
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First, I went to OkCupid,
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because I wanted to avoid the gamification of swipe-based apps.
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And also, because I wanted a writing sample.
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Next, I set up a sales funnel,
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throwing out any sense of my type,
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and instead defining the criteria that would qualify a lead.
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An inbound message had to do three things:
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had to be written in complete sentences and with good grammar;
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it had to reference something in my profile,
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so I know it's not a copy-and-paste situation;
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and it had to avoid all sexual content.
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I figured this was a pretty low bar,
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but it turns out, of my 210 inbound messages,
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only 14 percent cleared that hurdle.
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(Laughter)
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Next, I wanted to meet in real life as quickly as possible,
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because the things I cared about, I couldn't see online.
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But the research, and my experience,
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shows you only need about 30 seconds with someone to tell if you click.
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So I invented the zero date.
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The zero date is one drink, one hour.
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With the goal of answering one question:
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Would I like to have dinner with this person?
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Not "are they the one"?
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Literally, "Would I like to spend three hours across the table
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from this person?"
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You tell them you have a hard stop --
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drinks with girlfriends, a conference call with China --
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it doesn't matter, they don't know you.
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The point is one hour.
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If it's awesome, you schedule a first date.
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And if it's not awesome, you downshift into entertainer mode
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and you workshop a few new stories for your next networking event.
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Plus, because it's just an hour, you can squeeze up to three in one evening
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and then you only have to do your hair and pick out one great outfit a week.
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The zero date also gave me a chance to see how they responded
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to me asking them out.
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I figured not everyone would dig my moxie, and I was right.
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Of my 29 qualified leads, only 15 replied to my message,
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and of those, six scheduled a zero date.
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My first zero date was with a set designer.
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And we were both into yoga
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and preferred our bagels with peanut butter,
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so it looked pretty promising.
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But two minutes in, I could tell it wasn't going to be a thing
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and I was relieved not to be spending dinner with him.
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After that, I was a little nervous about going to my next zero date.
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But we had agreed to meet on the Brooklyn Heights Promenade
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with a flask of whiskey to watch the sunset,
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and honestly, it was two blocks from my apartment.
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Plus, this guy had a podcast, I have a podcast,
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worst case scenario, we can talk about our podcasts.
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Then, Chas set down next to me.
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And this kind and empathetic man
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told great jokes and asked even better questions.
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He was a lawyer and a writer, and his eyes twinkled when he laughed
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and they squeezed tight when I kissed him
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and at some point in the evening, our zero date became a first date.
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And two years later, we have a washer, dryer and two house plants together.
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Now, I can't promise you're going to end up with house plants.
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But the point of this story
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is that online dating doesn't have to suck.
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Don't treat it like a game, and don't treat it like a resume review.
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Instead, use it to source and qualify leads
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and then get offline as quickly as possible with the zero date.
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Because the point of this isn't swiping.
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It's finding your person.
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Good luck.
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(Applause)
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