🙁 Is it just me, or is online dating making everyone incredibly flaky? I can’t count on two hands the number of times I’ve taken a girl I met online out for a nice date and she hasn’t responded to my texts the next day (or even my annoyed texts the day after that). WTF?! What’s a nice
guy to do?
– Feeling Like Attentive Kindness Exhibited
Deserves a Text
It’s not just you, FLAKEDAT. Online dating – and the abundance of romantic possibility that it brings – has changed our standards of etiquette dramatically. To understand why, consider the difference between you and a primitive hunter-gatherer ancestor in relation to food. Your ancestor spent hours every day digging for roots and grubs and carefully grinding them and preparing them for ingestion. This is how he spent most of his day. You, on the other hand, probably forgot to put the milk back in the fridge after pouring it over your Froot Loops this morning. You spend most of your day reading advice columns on the Internet.
Likewise, in the primitive era before online dating, new romantic prospects were scarce, and identifying them took hard work. People had to go out in public and sometimes even (gasp!) approach strangers in real-world scenarios. Now, rounding up a new option is as simple as opening an app on your phone. It’s natural that, as a result, people are less careful with each individual match. If something comes up, they’re more likely to cancel a date, even if it means losing that prospect forever. If they notice a red flag, they worry less about being alone and dateless forever – same as we no longer worry much about dying of starvation.
If you don’t like these newfangled mores, we recommend dating in a more old-fashioned style. Call it “slow dating” – the romantic equivalent of a diet based on local foraging. That is, focus on friends of friends or people that you share some kind of community with, who will be inclined to treat you thoughtfully if only because they’re likely to run into you again someday. Social network-based dating apps like Hinge are designed with these concerns in mind.
This said, FLAKEDAT, we should stress that we see no problem in how these women have treated you. Just as accepting an online date does not entail an offer of sex or affection, neither does it entail a promise of future communication.
Call it the “first date flakeout,” an important element of the online dating vocabulary. If an online dater is just not feeling it, he or she has no responsibility to let the other person down easy. At that point, further friendly communication is too likely to be interpreted as interest in either romance or friendship. A cold brush-off text is an option, too, but the first-date flakeout should be understood for what it is, a gentle “no.” So cut it out with the annoyed texts, FLAKEDAT, and keep looking for someone who can see you for the scarce and valuable grub you are. 🙂 HD
This article appears in January 23 • 2015.
