Lexicon ·
intentional dating
noun phrase
- Stated meaning
- Dating with clear goals and open honesty about wanting a committed relationship.
- Operating meaning
- A declaration of seriousness that front-loads the job interview, so that both parties can disclose a 5-year plan before either has disclosed a middle name.
- Origin
- Church courtship circles and relationship coaching, adopted by app bios in the early 2020s as a filter phrase.
April 20, The Vig. I arrived with 4 questions and asked them in order, ending with what she was looking for. On April 25 she asked me the same question back and I could not answer it until she rephrased it for me, at which point I agreed with her version.
Intentional dating is dating with the purpose printed on the outside of the envelope. The bio says so, usually in the first line, and often beside the phrase “no games,” which is itself a rule of a game. The aim is to filter early, and the filter works by compressing several months of discovery into the first 20 minutes.
The mechanism is a set of questions asked up front: children, religion, geography, a timeline. There is a coaching economy that supplies these as worksheets, and the worksheets are honest about their own logic. Most of the questions could be answered by a résumé. Very few have a section for what the other person finds funny.
The approach has a real efficiency to it, and one respects it in the way one respects a tollbooth. It also selects for a particular kind of candidate: the person who is good at the format. Being good at the format is not the same as knowing the answers, and the method has no way of telling the two apart, because it only ever hears the answer.
I ran the method on April 20. I arrived with 4 questions and asked them in order, and the fourth was what she was looking for. She answered at length and volunteered more than she was asked for. Five days later she asked me the same question, and I could not answer it. I produced something about a life partner and a retirement and got tangled in it, and she rephrased it back to me clearly, and I agreed with her rephrasing. That is the whole defect of the method in one exchange. I had a screening instrument and no prepared position, and the first time it was turned around I needed the candidate to complete my side of it.