rotation

In the vocabulary of men’s dating coaching, a rotation is the set of people a man is seeing at the same time, and the instruction is to keep it populated. The reasoning offered is psychological. A man with options will not become needy, will not overinvest, and will hold his frame. The logistics go largely undiscussed, and the logistics are where the practice actually lives.

A rotation requires infrastructure. Contacts are saved with descriptors, so that there is a Sarah Climbing and a Sarah from the other side of town. A notes app holds the siblings’ names, the dietary restrictions, and which stories have already been told to whom. One evening a week is kept open for whoever confirms first. There are spreadsheets sold for this, with conditional formatting that turns a row amber after a set number of days without contact. The system resembles a small sales territory and produces the same side effect as one, which is that the account manager spends more time in the CRM than with the clients.

Coaching material calls the goal abundance. The defining sensation of an actual rotation is a specific kind of scarcity: there is never quite enough attention to go around, and some portion of every date is spent checking the phone for the next one.

My rotation has held one person for 113 days, and the infrastructure got built anyway. There are 15 forms, each with 6 scorecard fields and an optional reciprocity panel measuring 6 dimensions against each other. There is a running total, a cost per hour, a travel column and a count of how many columns balanced. The CRM is the whole point and there has never been anything to manage in it, which means the tooling was not built to handle the volume. It was built for the same reason the spreadsheet is sold: it is easier to maintain a system than to sit in the outcome.