The Stories That Draw Us In
A subscriber makes a compelling case for why I should go out with him + my own story of romantic myth making
Quick question before this week’s story: I’m working on a project about Hinge and the new AI features the company is rolling out for Hard Fork, the NYT podcast I produce. Do you have strong feelings about Hinge’s new AI feedback on written prompts? Looking in particular for people who have found it helpful or hysterically unhelpful. Respond to this email and we can talk.
I. Is Email The Hottest Way To Ask Someone Out?
There are two times in my life that I have ended up on a date because of a particularly well executed email.
The first was an email I sent to a guy who was featured on Hot Singles, the now defunct Substack where Randa Sakallah would post short q&a style interviews with single people looking for love in NYC.
It was a modern take on what the classified section of a newspaper maybe sort of looked like pre-dating apps. Each interview was a little bit different but the general structure was the same: 4 photos of the person, 5 short questions - always ending with: What’s your toxic trait? What makes you hot? Who are you looking for?
In form, it was a lot like looking scrolling through a bunch of Hinge profiles. In emotional resonance though, it was utterly different. The profiles gave me a sense of clarity and satisfaction. They sharpened rather than muddled my thoughts on what I wanted in a partner. They gave me the impression that I knew the person being profiled, or at the very least, I knew the kind of person they were.
On Hinge, everything blurred together, with no unifying narrative to hold all the discrete parts. I’d get up from a chair after losing 30 minutes to looking at just 4 profiles and think: wait who did I just look at? What did I learn? There was that one guy’s smile, and I sort of liked this other guy’s thoughts on books, and oh there was someone else’s description of ambition. But that was not a person. That was a bunch of disembodied parts floating in space.
On Hot Singles, the trick I think was in the packaging. Each profile presented a focussed, consistent narrative about who the person was.
People’s complex personalities and varied interests got squeezed into one organizing descriptor: the Dance Floor Flirt, the Ski Bum, the Vegan Cook.
The titles were reductive obviously, but it was that very reductiveness that made them so functional. By distilling people into a simplified narrative, they were suddenly legible. I could look at a profile and pretty immediately develop a strong impression about whether I thought there was any chance I’d be compatible with the person.
And my god did I think I’d be compatible with this one guy. I can’t go into too many details without giving away his identity (feel free to scroll through the profiles and sound off in the comments with your guesses on my type) but suffice it to say: from the few short paragraphs I read about him, I became convinced we were an exceptionally good match. We had similar interests, we were both earnest and self deprecating, we both enjoyed totally uncommon activities like… watching critically acclaimed movies… and…going to restaurants.
I emailed him something short and sweet about how similar I felt we were and why I thought we should go out - and he responded enthusiastically. “You seem great. Would love to meet!!”1
I was in the bathroom of a Thai restaurant in the LES when his email came through. I remember reading it again and again at least 5 times before tucking my phone into my pocket, looking at myself in the bathroom mirror and just beaming. The joy I felt was unburdened by skepticism. The exhilaration, motivated not by surprise at his mutual interest, but by the validation that I of course was on to something. Our compatibility screamed out so loudly to me, how could it not also scream out to him?
Now at this point I should tell you that the point of this story is not how the date eventually went. (Which was, not particularly well lol. He later told me he spoke about me with his therapist who thought we were perhaps better suited to starting a book club than a romantic relationship.) No… the point of this story is that I got extremely psyched to go on a date with a complete stranger who I got just the teeniest snapshot of online.
It wasn’t him that I was excited about of course; it was the story about him… about us… that I had spun up in my head. It bonded us to each other, it made us excited to meet, maybe even more willing to look past annoyances or doubts. And it was all the more powerful a story because we wrote it together. It was his reductive narrative about himself on Hot Singles that allowed me to conjure up my own simplistic vision of our compatibility, which I in turn sold right back to him over email. How could we not root for our success when we had built the myth together?
II. In Defense of Lies
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the stories that draw us to one another. One could argue that these stories are dangerous. As my experience demonstrates, they’re delusions that can lead us astray, set our expectations too high, result in disappointment and disorientation.
But even given those obvious pitfalls, I still think they’re valuable. They give dating - no they give all aspects of life - a kind of manic excitement, little bumps of dopamine hitting unpredictably throughout the day. At their best, they glide the runway for a successful take off of a relationship. Even at their worst, they give infatuation a shape to fill.
The value of this is maybe most evident when compared to the alternative: no compelling narrative. How many times have you heard a friend complain about how hard it is to get excited to go on a date with someone they matched with on a dating app? Or later, how hard it is to know if they should keep seeing that person after they’ve gone on one or two dates? There is both too little and too much information, like looking at a spread of little pieces of tile on a table, before they’re been put into a mosaic. It’s hard to get excited about the pieces when you don’t have any vision for how they fit together!
Even when the stories we tell end up being wrong, isn’t the clarity they offer worth something? Aren’t stories the ultimate building blocks of figuring out whether or not we want to be with someone? We update our stories with new information until we find a narrative that fits, and then we ask ourselves: do I want to live this out?
Which brings me to the second email. The only other time an email has led me to a date.
Last year, a little before Thanksgiving, I spotted a message with the subject line “Hi From A Fan!” in my inbox.
I was on the subway riding back from dinner after work with a friend. My newsletter was just starting to take off beyond my immediate friends and kind messages from strangers complimenting my work were very surprising. I skimmed it quickly searching for the key takeaway. “Oh my god!” I said out loud. My friend looked at me, one hand on my phone, the other still on the subway poll. “I think I just got asked out via my Substack.”
Here’s that very long, worth-every-word email. (Told in full with just a few redactions for his privacy.)2
Let me know what you think in the comments.
There was a little more to this message. He also told me in his initial email that he had looked me up and realized we both worked at the same company. Insanely, on our eventual date, we learned that we actually worked on the same floor, with desks that were something like 4 rows away from each other.
At his request, I actually un-redacted some things! I wanted to cut the section gassing up the newsletter because I am deeply self conscious of coming off as self-congratulatory. But he advocated for leaving the entire message in, so the effect of his storytelling could land in full.
WHAT HAPPENED WITH HIM?????
at the edge of my literal seat