How to Find "The One": The Science of Dating with Tim Molnar

0:05Pushkin.

0:12Admit it. At some point, you probably fantasized about meeting somebody that you really clicked with. And in that fantasy, things are really great. You're into them. They're into you. You get a little jolt of joy every time you see a text from their number. Over time, you start to think, huh, I might love this person. Or even, this is the human I'm going to spend the rest of my life with. But of course, there are some steps you need to go through before it gets to that point. Before that happens, I'm going to have to have a relationship at all. And before that's going to happen, I'm going to have to go on a date.

0:50And before that's going to happen, I am going to have to get a date. This is Tim Molnar, a social scientist turned dating coach in Boulder, Colorado. Before Tim became an expert on the science of dating, he was pretty much the opposite. I had, I think, up until the age of 28, 29, never asked someone out. My initial approach to love was very much based on this idea that love will happen when it happens. I just wasn't very proactive. I was spending a lot of time pursuing self-actualization. And so trying to make sure that I was getting into the right grad schools. and I was playing soccer over in Europe for a while, learning new languages, doing all of these things that I thought would make me a more interesting partner.

1:38And I realized that really wasn't moving the needle forward. So Tim decided to look for love in an unlikely place, the world of behavioral science. I was in a grad program at the time and I was digging into all this different academic research, these social psychological frameworks. And I thought there must be a way to be able to use these to help myself in dating. And I think there's this commonly used expression in academia that our research is often me-search. And so I figured that we could use these studies to help me date smarter. And Tim ultimately succeeded in his quest. I met my partner Paige at a coffee shop about six years ago at this point.

2:21Tim now wants to share all that he's learned. In fact, he has a new book called Date Smarter, a strategic guide to navigating modern romance. In the book, Tim breaks down what the leading research says about finding your life partner. He also gives some practical tips for navigating the messy and often intimidating landscape of modern dating. So stay tuned, Happiness Lab listeners, because in this second episode in our series on the science of love, Tim and I will explore strategies for meeting someone in real life, the ins and outs of online dating, and how to know when you found the one. That's all coming up after these quick messages from the Happiness Lab sponsors.

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3:16Behavioral scientist and dating coach Tim Molnar wasn't always an expert on finding love. And that's why he decided to take a scientific approach to the challenges of modern dating. I wanted to figure out, is there a way that I can reverse engineer this process? Not to guarantee that I'm going to meet this person, but at least to reclaim agency and take actions that are going to improve the probability of that happening. So what was the approach you took to reverse engineering it? What did you look to? I tried to understand at each point in this process, are there certain numbers, are there certain heuristics that can be helpful for guiding this?

3:55So for example, there's this great study out of the University of Copenhagen where the researchers had sent about 360 undergrads into the field. And what they found was that on average, men were getting a yes when asking women out about one out of five times. And so I use this 20 % success rate. And that was sort of my guiding path like, okay, cool. So if I go out and shoot my shot and this doesn't work, it's actually to be expected. And I can use this rejection as data points to learn maybe what I might do better next time. If we think about our happiness as sort of our expectations minus reality, if I'm expecting to not get a date four out of five times, it builds in a lot more resilience for me.

4:46I love this idea of using the actual statistics to build in the resilience. But if you're a guy looking to ask a woman out, 80 % of the time you're going to get rejected. I'm guessing some people hear that stat and they're like, that's terrible. Like, I don't want to deal with that. How did you cope with the emotionality that comes with a number that might feel intimidating like that? I think you're right that hearing that there is a higher probability of a failure than success is not always the most encouraging message. But I think the important reframe is a lot of our anxiety comes from uncertainty.

5:16And of course, there's always going to be uncertainty in dating. We can never avoid that. And I know you had Maya Shankar on the podcast a number of episodes back, and she was referencing this study where we are more stressed when we have a 50 % chance of receiving an electric shock as opposed to 100 % chance. And knowing these statistics, we still don't have that certainty, but there is comfort in knowing that we will strike out. And so when that happens, we can put certain pieces into place to make ourselves more resilient. For example, we might say, here's someone who I'd love to go talk to.

5:56If this doesn't work out, I'm going to go on a run after this. I'm going to go take a warm bath. I'm going to listen to this music that always makes me feel better. And we have these things in place ahead of time. And having that plan can reduce some of the anxiety that comes with putting ourselves out there. So it seems like it works in at least two ways, right? One is it just normalizes it. It's like it's 80 percent. Probably this is not going to work. I shouldn't freak out when I hear it. But the second thing I hear you say, which is really important, is if it's really an 80 percent shot that I'm going to get dinged, I got to have some strategies in place for when that inevitable role probabilistically comes up like, oh, I'm going to get turned down.

6:30I got to call a friend. I have to have some happy music. You build in the resilience as you're going to kind of do better. Another thing I know you've talked about is the idea of having these statistics can shift our focus from outcome to effort. What do you mean there and why can that be so powerful? The idea of focusing on what's in our control really does improve how we approach dating overall. When we feel like we have some agency over what's transpiring, agency over our actions, this does provide us a good bit of comfort. And so there are a lot of different ways that we can think about this happening.

7:07but it might be I spend a lot of time working from home and what's in my control is not necessarily when I meet my partner, but I do have control over deciding I can work from a coffee shop. And when I go there, I can choose to sit at the community table. I can choose to either do my yoga workout at home or I can go to class on Tuesday and Thursday. And these are little decision points in our lives where reclaiming little bits of control can provide us comfort that comes along with that. It's like, well, I'm not immediately going to get my life partner, but at least I'm taking action. You're kind of always working towards something.

7:46You're putting yourself out there. Just that effort can feel really good. One of the frameworks I talk about in the book is this idea of the date number and putting some type of numerical value alongside whatever action is serving as some type of choke point in our dating life. And it should be something that feels like a bit of a stretch. And so maybe that looks like each month I'm going to try and shoot for four social events, something that is maybe mildly uncomfortable, but really thinking about where am I getting stuck? Do I go on a bunch of first dates and I'm very quick to write people off because of this grass is greener on the next date phenomenon?

8:30And if so, can I change and set my date number around this year? I really want to go on 12 second dates and just giving people another shot. So this idea of a date number is just like figuring out a number for the hard thing that you want to do. And it sounded like at first your hard thing was really asking people out. Knowing that your statistic was that you're going to get turned down 80 % of the time, did you come up with a specific date number for the number of people you're going to ask out when you first started this? I did. And I like to... What was it? It's like, we want the math in the Happiness Lab, right?

9:04So I had set one at 300. 300, whoa. This was overly conservative. And my date number was 300 asks. But in terms of the number of dates that I had budgeted to go on, that would have been 60 dates, 20 % success rate. It was building in this big buffer for saying, when I go out and try and it doesn't work out, I shouldn't be surprised. And so I think coming in with that understanding really helped me say like, great, okay, only 299 more. This one didn't work out, only 298 more. Which is so surprising because in some ways that seems like a really big number. But one of the things we of course know from the research is that these finite numbers are calming.

9:45300 is a big number, 299 is a big number, but it's not infinite. And that alone can reduce our anxiety a little bit, which is kind of cool. The other thing is that these larger date numbers are good from a psychological perspective because they do something else that we might need in the dating domain, which is that we're getting exposure to the thing that we find really tough. One of the things I loved about your book is that you compared this idea of doing the hard thing in dating with the kind of exposure therapy that we see in clinical practice when somebody is trying to get over a phobia.

10:14So you're afraid of spiders. You have to expose yourself to the spider. You're afraid of heights. You got to expose yourself to the heights. If we're afraid of the asking out, we got to expose ourselves to the asking out. So it becomes kind of rote and we get used to it. I think that's right. We can think about having a fear of heights and starting at the second floor and saying, this feels a bit out of my comfort zone. And then the next week going up to floor three, floor five, and floor 10, and building our way up gradually. And dating, there's a very similar parallel to be drawn where it was really difficult for me to approach the first person that I did.

10:52It was really difficult to approach the last person that is always a hard thing. But in doing this over and over and over again, there is a comfort that we begin to develop, begin to reckon with this idea of this fear of rejection. Like, gosh, I shot my shot and this didn't work out. And I live to tell the tale. And one other thing that I would say about the exposure therapy piece is this was something that came out of a therapy practice that I was in. And my therapist was trying to help me get to the bottom of, you know, why is this idea of being single so scary and I would immediately spiral into these oh it's 20 years into the future and I'm sitting at this choir concert for my sister's nine-year-old and everyone's coupled and has children and I'm the butt of the joke oh you know Tim's just single again and brought up these really uncomfortable feelings for me and so she's like you know just write that on a post-it note and put it in a really conspicuous place in your house.

11:57And so I was living with roommates at the time. So I was like, well, refrigerator is probably not the best place for like my deepest, darkest insecurities, but I can put this on my bedside table and still see it a good bit. And over time, I'd see this very hyper specific example of like why I thought this was going to be such a scary experience of saying hi to someone in the aisles at Trader Joe's. And actually it was Like, no, this is kind of a bit of a jump here to say, if this doesn't go well, then, you know, I'm going to be at that choir concert 20 years in the future all alone. It's so cool because the exposure really gets you to set these realistic expectations.

12:32Again, this is something we know from these clinical therapeutic practices like, oh, the spider's not as bad or the height's not as bad. You're basically teaching yourself that these practices in dating that cause anxiety, they're actually not that bad. But the second thing this big date number gives you is that you're also setting these big goals into something a little bit tinier, which we know from all the research on goal setting can be so important. Whereas you need 300 for a life partner, but you might just need 60 for a first date or something like that. Absolutely. So one of the things that a framework like this allows you to have is when we develop a plan, it's going to be more effective the more specific we're able to be.

13:11So I talk about this idea of implementation intentions in the book, where we're assigning a specific time, place, and behavior to an action that we want to take. So for example, going back to this idea of going out to four social events in a month, we might get hyper-specific and say, on Tuesday at 7 p.m., I'm going to go to trivia night over at this specific bar. And putting that onto our calendar does a couple things. One, we have to opt out of a plan that has already been made, which we know from the research makes it much more effective follow-through. We see that in everything from donating organs to things like automatic retirement savings.

13:53And so that is very powerful in and of itself. Having it on the calendar, something else that allows us to do is then implement other accountability mechanisms. So I talk about getting something I call a date mate. basically just your accountability buddy. And I think anybody who's tried to have an early morning, I'm going to go to the gym. It's a lot easier to make that 6 a.m. workout happen if you're meeting someone there. I might just bail on myself. I'm probably not going to bail on my friend. So with the date mate, this could be someone that we check in with once a week and they know you were planning to try and go out to that trivia night this week.

14:33Did you end up making that happen? It's not meant to cause any shame if it didn't happen. But the idea is that when we're accountable to somebody else, we're more likely to take those actions that improve our probability for success here. It's so interesting because I think when you first hear this idea of a date mate, you might assume this is more like a wingman. Like that's the person who's supposed to go with you at a trivia night and kind of talk to the person for you. But what you mean more is like the person you're checking in with to make sure that you're following through on the plans that you decided for yourself.

15:00It's funny that you bring that up about heading out to an event with someone else. I was running a dating workshop over the weekend and someone had raised their hand. They're like, hey, you know, I struggled to get out of the house and it's easier if I go with a friend. Is it possible that people will still come say hi to me if I'm with someone else? And one of the guys just jumps in. He's like, I would never feel comfortable approaching someone. And I was looking back on my own dating life and just sort of reflecting on this question and thinking that I'd probably approached somewhere. in the ballpark of 70, 80 people over multiple years, time horizon.

15:35And one of those times I had approached someone who was with someone else, which is not to say that it's an impossibility, but it does make it more difficult. And certainly if it helps you get out of the house, it's great to have that person, but then just realize. But then ditch them, go sit somewhere else. Exactly. Yeah. Okay. So hopefully listeners who are interested in finding their partner are hearing this and saying, oh, date number, it fits with the behavioral science. If someone's thinking that, what's their first step to determining their own date number? What advice do you have? Getting clear on where we're getting stuck.

16:09And this can be something that's difficult to do because by definition, when we have a blind spot, it is something that we don't see. So it could be, we might text a few people who know us well, ask a therapist, ask family members, someone who will give us an honest opinion. Hey, why do you think I'm single? What do you think's really holding me back right now? It's a tough question to ask. It's vulnerable, but there can be a lot of power in getting that feedback. And then if they're saying you're swiping and swiping and swiping, you're messaging, you're rarely meeting up. And it makes sense that you're among the 78 % of online daters who report experiencing burnout.

16:50And then if that's the case, then we can take tangible actions for saying like, okay, maybe I want to try more of an in real life approach. What does that look like? So the first step is, yeah, like you said, really getting clear on what you're doing and then coming up with some type of number around that goal that feels like it's going to push you without leading to burnout here. So now that you've got a plan to step out of your comfort zone, the next question is, where do you actually meet people with real relationship potential? On dating apps, in bars, in the checkout line at Dunkin' Donuts, and what actually makes a first date good?

17:29We'll tackle all that and more when The Happiness Lab returns from this quick break.

17:46Dating coach and behavioral scientist Tim Molnar is on a mission to make the process of finding love in the modern world a bit easier. And one of his more controversial suggestions is that we're better off looking for love in real life, not online. In fact, Tim has argued there are lots of psychological reasons that dating apps tend to lead us astray. Our brains are not designed to be able to make sense of lots and lots of options. So we know this from work from folks like Barry Schwartz, that this idea of paradox of choice is we get overloaded and we're not able to make those value-aligned decisions.

18:22So you can think about going out to the Cheesecake Factory and you have like 225 options on the menu and you're like, I don't know, should I get like the Cajun jambalaya pasta or this other whatever? And it's much easier for us when we go to a nice restaurant, we have six to eight choices. And we're like, great. When we enter the online dating world and we have limitless options or this perception of limitless options, we experience a sense of overwhelm. And I remember being on a date probably about seven or eight years back at this point. And we were 30 minutes into dinner and things were going really well.

18:56And I was kind of teasing her like, gosh, why did it take so long for us to meet up? This has been great. And I remember she pulled out her app and she went to the section where it had active messages and just said 999 plus. So she'd received over a thousand messages from people. And so it didn't matter like, oh man, was that the right thing to text? Maybe that wasn't funny enough. Maybe it wasn't unique enough. No, this is just a choice overload problem. Voter choice is great research on this where we see when we have a ballot that has lots and lots of options. it's very difficult for us to actually make choices that are aligned with the political values that we hold.

19:39And when that gets down into, you know, six to eight range, that's a pretty comfortable decision-making range. And so what some of the apps, Hinge is a good example, have started to do is they'll say, if you have more than X ongoing conversations, we're not going to allow you to continue to swipe because we know that's not productive for what we're trying to do here. So it seems like some of the apps try to help, but then sometimes apps have features that we use to try to narrow down the playing field, and then that messes us up. I mean, one thing we talk about a lot in the Happiness Lab is we have no idea about the kinds of things that will make us happy.

20:12And I think that that's definitely true in the dating domain. We just have all these predictions about the kinds of things we want in a partner, but we're often wrong. And one of the things I'm struck by is that in your book, you talked about how you and your wife were on the same dating app at the same time, but you didn't ever see each other because you had filters on that filtered each other out, which I found so striking. I love this story. I think it's a perfect example. I was two years outside of Paige's age filter and we were talking a number of months into dating. We're like, gosh, oh, so you were on like Hinge and Bumble as well.

20:45You know, we're living a mile apart. I wonder when we would come across each other. And we were going through all the filters that we had sent. I'm like, we wouldn't have. Not online anyway. And it is, like you said, It's something where we have this false sense of, I have control over this. I can filter for someone who's over six feet tall. I can filter for someone who is this religion. I can filter for someone who has these drug and alcohol preferences. And yet the whole time we're filling in the blanks of the story of who we think we're going to be meeting up with. This person says that they're religious.

21:20Are they going to be the person who's in the front pew every Sunday? Or is this someone who maybe they celebrate Christmas and they go once a year? And like, that's what being religious means to them. And so we're creating these ideas that often turn out not to be true. And the filters can be highly destructive for finding out what we actually want and recognizing some of those qualities. You know, there's not a filter to turn on to say, how kind am I? How loyal am I? What's my level of trustworthiness? And I think that they really do steer us wrong in that department. So the apps are steering us wrong.

21:52We should commit to meeting people in real life. But where should we think about going to meet a new partner in person? I would start by saying that I don't think we should ever head out to places just for the idea of I'm going to meet someone here who's going to be my future romantic partner. It puts far too much pressure on the situation and it creates strong likelihood that we're going to be disappointed. Instead, I think there's this matrix of, is this something that I'm genuinely going to enjoy? If I head out to that Saturday morning trail maintenance crew, I'm probably going to get some fresh air.

22:31I'm probably going to meet some people who are kind and generous and who volunteer their time. Maybe I happen to meet someone who's a good friend. Maybe I happen to meet someone who ends up being a future matchmaker. Maybe I meet someone who ends up being my life partner. but it is really important to focus on those types of places that we're genuinely looking to have a good time at and I think there's also this idea of what's the likelihood that I'm going to have a conversation so if I go to a concert there are a lot of people there but there's not a super high probability that I'm going to be having a conversation if I go to a book club by definition there's a curated group of people who are designed to be talking and interacting with one another And so being thoughtful about, am I going to have a good time here?

23:16Is there a high likelihood that there are going to be different people here? And will I likely interact with them? Those are good filters, as it were, to be able to begin thinking about where we might head out to meet people in real life. Okay, so we're at the spot that we're going to have a good time. We can have a conversation. There's somebody we might be interested in talking to. What's the next step? Do we go with a goofy pickup line? How does it work? There are a number of different approaches. One of my favorite is called the foot in the door approach. And it comes from the old business adage where if we wanted to sell something, if we could get like a literal or figurative foot in the door, we've crossed over this threshold and now we're more likely to close the sale.

23:59And so in the dating context, there's research on this idea of if we first open with a small favor, something like, hey, I'm looking for directions or like, can I have a light for my cigarette? When people open with this small favor first before going into, and I'd love to grab a coffee sometime, they're five times more likely to get a yes. And so that can look like a lot of different things in real life. Going back to the coffee shop example, you're sitting at the community table, you need to go to the bathroom and you turn to the person next to you and just say, hey, Do you mind watching my stuff while I go to the bathroom?