Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Luncheon of the Boating Party, 1880–1881. Oil on canvas. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
Skills We Were Never Taught — Issue 17
We were, quite rightly, told to stop dating like without a purpose.
For a decade the model was the swipe: infinite faces, thumb on autopilot, a slot machine dressed up as romance, and it left a whole generation exhausted and faintly hollow. More than half of app users now report burnout with the entire process. Barely a third of young adults are dating at all. So a correction arrived, and it came with a good name: intentional dating. Date on purpose. Know what you want. Stop wasting everyone’s time, starting with your own.
It was the right instinct, and we have carried it somewhere strange. Because “know what you want” quietly hardened into “have a list,” and the list became a specification, and dating, having escaped the slot machine, walked straight into the recruitment department. There are compatibility scores now. Vetting periods. Pre-date background searches. People turn up to a first coffee with a mental scorecard and work down it like a hiring panel with one candidate and a very particular brief. We fled a marketplace that treated people as products to browse, and promptly built one that treats them as products to audit. Different sin. Same aisle.
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Two ways to treat a person like a product
The vetting model feels like the grown-up one, which is exactly why it is so hard to catch. Swiping was obviously shallow. Standing firm on your non-negotiables, screening for values, refusing to settle: all of that wears the clothes of maturity, and the culture now applauds it as discernment and self-awareness rather than what it sometimes is, which is fear with a spreadsheet.
But both models make the same quiet error. Each treats the other person as a fixed set of specifications to be matched against your own, as though a relationship were an assembly of compatible parts and the only task were sorting for fit. Swiping sorts fast and shallow. Vetting sorts slow and deep. Both are still sorting, and sorting is simply not the same act as meeting someone.
To be fair to the impulse, the shift has produced real gains, and it is worth saying so before taking any of it apart. Working out what you actually want from a relationship, and saying it early instead of performing indifference for three months, is genuine progress. So is caring more about whether someone is kind and steady than whether they gave you butterflies in the first hour, since the butterflies were never a reliable witness anyway. A generation learning to weigh emotional safety over spark is, on balance, building sturdier things than the one before it. The problem was never intention. The problem is what intention curdles into when you run it like a procurement process. The moment discernment hardens into a scorecard, a good instinct quietly starts doing the work of a bad one.
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When the order ran the other way
When I was dating, it worked in the opposite direction. Chemistry came first. You met someone, something either sparked or it did not, and only once it had did the nitty gritty arrive, and even that was a looser, more human sort of list than today’s. Did my friends think he was cool. Did he have a job, and did the job have somewhere to go. Did he drive a decent car, if we are being honest about it. And underneath the shallow ones, the question that actually counted: did he adore me. The judging came, but it came after the feeling, and it was measured against a real person I already liked, rather than against a specification I had drawn up before we ever met.
The order has since flipped completely. Now the checklist comes first, and the chemistry, if it is let in at all, comes later, once the candidate has cleared the hoops. And the hoops have multiplied, and the standards have climbed, sometimes to a height no living person could clear. We have gone from feel first and assess second, to assess first and perhaps, if all the boxes survive, feel something eventually. It is a great deal more complicated than it was. It is not remotely clear that it is better.
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Why the spec sheet does not work
The inconvenient truth sits underneath all of it. The things a checklist can measure are mostly not the things that decide whether a relationship works.
A list can capture height, income, politics, whether they want children, how they take their coffee, the shape of their five-year plan. Useful information, some of it genuinely important. But none of it tells you the things that actually determine the outcome. Whether this person can hear that they have hurt you without falling apart or going to war. Whether they turn towards you when you are low, or away. Whether the two of you can have a real disagreement and both still be standing, and still fond, at the end of it. Whether you feel more like yourself in their company, or less. None of that appears on a profile. None of it comes out under interrogation over a first drink. It reveals itself only over time, in how two particular people actually are together, which is the one thing no amount of pre-vetting can hand you in advance.
Worse, the interview format quietly destroys the very thing it is trying to measure. You cannot assess whether there is a genuine connection with someone while conducting a structured questionnaire about their position on marriage. The audit and the connection cannot happen in the same moment. Run the checklist hard enough and you will come away with clean answers to every question and no idea whether you actually like the person, because you never stopped scoring long enough to find out.
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The tighter the filter, the emptier the room
There is a second trouble with the spec sheet, quite apart from what it cannot measure. The tighter you draw it, the fewer people survive it, and past a certain point you have quietly filtered the entire world out of your own life.
Psychologists have a name for the mindset underneath it. The maximiser is the person who cannot commit to anything until they are sure they have found the best possible option, and who turns out, reliably, to be less happy than the person who finds something genuinely good and chooses it. Loaded onto a dating spreadsheet, this becomes a search with no stopping rule. Every real person gets measured against an imaginary composite, someone assembled from the best trait of everyone you have ever met and the flaws of none, and every real person loses, because real people arrive as whole packages and the composite does not exist and never will. The list was meant to save you from settling. Often it just quietly arranges for you to end up alone with it, every box still ticked, and no one in the chair across the table.
None of which means the standards were the problem. It means a filter is a tool, and a tool aimed at the wrong target, with the dial turned all the way up, does damage in the name of care.
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Drift is not the answer either
None of this is a licence to bin the list and follow the sparks wherever they flicker, because that failure is just as real, and this essay has spent months among its wreckage. The person who overlooks every genuine incompatibility because the chemistry is good, who waits three years to mention they want children, who mistakes intensity for suitability, is not being open. They are being asleep. The falling-into-things-and-hoping model is exactly how people end up a decade deep with someone they never quite chose.
So the answer is not less clarity. It is clarity about the right things, held the right way. There is a very short list of things that genuinely need to align, the actual load-bearing walls: whether you both want a life shaped roughly the same way, children or not, and whether this is a person capable of honesty and repair. That list is short, and it is worth holding firmly. The trouble is that most people’s spec sheets are ninety per cent trivia and ten per cent substance, and they enforce the whole thing with equal severity, screening out a warm, honest, capable partner because he came in two inches under the number in their head.
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What dating on purpose actually looks like
Real intention, then, is not a finer filter. It is knowing which few things truly matter to you, being honest about them early rather than hiding them to seem easygoing, and then getting genuinely curious about the person in front of you instead of checking them against a template.
The whole difference between vetting someone and getting to know them comes down to two questions. Vetting asks: do you meet my criteria. Knowing asks: who are you, and what are we like together. The first is a monologue with the other person cast as respondent. The second is the actual beginning of a relationship.
That does not mean the big subjects go unspoken. It means they arrive as real conversation rather than intake forms. There is a world between demanding, over the first flat white, a full accounting of someone’s views on marriage and money, and letting yourself say, somewhere along the way, something true and a little exposed: I want children, and I have got to the point where I would rather know early if that is not where you are headed. That is not an interview question. It is the plain directness the last essay was about, and it does the very work the checklist was straining to do, without reducing a person to a form to be completed.
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What the checklist is really for
It is worth being honest about what the spec sheet is so often really for, because it is rarely just efficiency. A list promises control. If I can define exactly what I need and screen rigorously enough for it, then perhaps I can guarantee the outcome, avoid choosing wrong, never again be blindsided or left. The checklist is a device for removing risk from something that is irreducibly risky.
But there is no audit thorough enough to make love safe. No compatibility report, no vetting period, no number of pre-date searches will ever tell you in advance whether it will work, because that answer does not yet exist while you are deciding. It gets written by the two of you, afterwards, in how you come to treat each other. At some point the spreadsheet has to be closed, and a real, unverified, only-partly-knowable person has to be met, and let close, which is precisely the vulnerable thing the whole apparatus was built to avoid. The list, like the studied coolness in the last essay, is armour. It keeps out the disappointment. It keeps out everything else as well.
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And none of it has worked
One fact should stop all of us. For all the new rigour, the checklists and the compatibility scores and the vetting periods, and for all the relationship knowledge now sitting in everyone’s pocket, more than any generation in history has ever had, none of it has produced better relationships. People are not more satisfied. Partnerships are not more durable. By most measures the reverse is true: people are dating less, trusting the whole enterprise less, and arriving at connection later and warier, if they arrive at all. We know more about love than our grandparents could have imagined, and we have less to show for it.
That should tell us something plain. The problem was never a shortage of standards, and it was never a shortage of information. You cannot screen your way to a good relationship, because a good relationship is not a thing you find by filtering. It is a thing two people build, afterwards, out of skills that almost none of us were ever taught.
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So what could we do instead
Not add another hoop, which is the one move we already have strong evidence does not work. The change is close to the reverse of everything the culture is currently selling.
Let something be felt before it is assessed. Put connection nearer the front again, where my generation had it, not because a feeling is a reliable judge, it is not, but because there is nothing worth assessing until there is a real person in the room instead of a profile. Shrink the list to the two or three things that genuinely carry weight, and hold everything else loosely enough that a good person is allowed to surprise you by failing to match it. And then take all the effort currently poured into screening and spend it on the part that actually decides the outcome: learning to be honest, to repair after a rupture, to stay in the room when it is uncomfortable, to say the true thing kindly. Those skills, the ones this whole platform exists to name, and not the checklist, are what a relationship is really made of.
Dating on purpose was always a good idea. It simply never meant this. It did not mean turning yourself into a hiring manager and every person you meet into a CV. It meant caring enough about your one life to get clear on what genuinely matters, being brave enough to say it out loud, and then staying open enough to let a real, surprising human being show you the things you would never have known to specify.
The best relationships almost never resemble the brief. They tend to look like the thing you did not know to ask for, recognised only once it was standing in front of you. Which is a problem for a spreadsheet, and rather good news for a person. Close the list. Keep the two or three things that are genuinely true. Then go and let yourself be surprised.
Sharon x
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The Relational Human is a newsletter about the skills of intimacy. The ones no generation was ever formally taught, and the ones that quietly decide whether our lives, and the lives of those who come after us, feel like genuine connection or its prolonged simulation. Written by Sharon Alexandra: psychotherapist, behaviour specialist, educator, and writer. With rigour, with warmth, and with the conviction that none of this is fixed.
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