It was 2023, and Dr Jennie Young was sick of online dating. She was looking for a partner, and instead all she found in the apps were inappropriately sexual come-ons and conversations that went nowhere. It felt like looking for a needle in a big, rancid haystack. So one day, frustrated and totally out of ideas, she Googled “how do you actually find a needle in a haystack?”
The answer: burn it down.
Thus, the burned haystack dating method (BHDM) was born. With the help of some friends and her academic expertise, Young – a professor of rhetoric at University of Wisconsin-Green Bay – developed a set of rules for “people who are searching for a long-term, stable, monogamous relationship”, as the Facebook group dedicated to the method states.
Back in my dating days, people wrote full profiles. And I’ve never been on more than one date. The whole scene confuses me. I’ve always been in the fuck-first-and-figure-it-out-later camp. I wasn’t looking for one-night stands, but if you click, you click. And it’s pointless to drag things out with dinners and movies before determining physical compatibility.
I kind of miss the full profiles thing, but match group largely killed them.
Dinners and movies are pretty bad for early dates. You go to a bar or coffee or something where you talk and can bail on short notice. If you like them, you can do more.
Both dates I went on were for coffee. Let’s see if we click sober and go from there.
One led to being invited to her house the next day; the other walked me to her dorm room from Starbucks. The second ex-wife, who I just got off the phone with, was a situation no sane person would do outside of the physical conditions I was faced with, so I met her for the first time in her kitchen.
I seriously do not understand dating.