I INVENTED THE DATE ME DOC
I regret nothing, you're welcome
I love to be able to impress people at parties with "Fun Facts" about myself. I'm not confident enough to just be normal. One such fact that I liberally deploy is that in my early 20s I designed an album cover for Pitbull. Yes, the Pitbull. Impressed?
This works great on millennials and especially the hispanic demographic, but is sometimes met with blank stares from Gen X and Gen Z. No matter, I have other tricks up my sleeve.
If the target audience is rationalist adjacent or TPOT or even just very online, I can instead deploy this chestnut: I invented the Date Me Doc
It's true
"What is a Date Me Doc?"
Worst case scenario. Well if you don't already know, The basic premise is that people create DIY dating profiles in Google Docs, rather than suffering through modern dating apps. There are probably a thousand of these things floating around. The trend inspired at least three startups, and was covered in Wired, the New York Times style section, Business Insider, the Guardian, and many others.
Date Me Docs are considered terribly cringe, but they're not as bad as their reputation suggests. They allow you to make a dating profile for yourself that presents you exactly the way you want, free from any company inserting itself between you and potential partners. When I made the original, I wanted people to read my essays, listen to my music, watch my terrible TikToks, and get a sense of who I actually am as a person rather than just swiping on a few photos.
Mainstream online dating is extremely bad. It jams relationship formation into the logic of capitalism: women become a product, and access to women is sold off to desperate men. There is no incentive to pair people off, quite the opposite actually. All women are forced onto a gradient towards prostitution and men towards johns.1
Date Me Docs are a stand against the commercialization of dating.
"How did you come up with the concept?"
During the covid lockdowns I was larping as a consultant with a group called the Yak Collective. I co-edited a speculative report on homes in the post pandemic world called "The New Old Home". After that came out I started pulling together ideas for another report on the state of dating and relationships. 2020 was a wild time for experimentation in the cultural zeitgeist around dating, with people doing DIY clones of reality shows like love is blind, etc.
The project ended up falling apart due to creative differences with my co-editor, but all of the preliminary conversations really got the gears turning. In particular I concluded that the Tinder swiping interface is hell for a mid-looking man like me, and I missed the old okCupid where I at least had a shot to convince people that I have a good personality.
I realized that there was nothing stopping me from just making an okCupid style dating profile for myself.
Now, I could have just made my own website. I am actually extremely good at making websites and have been doing it since I was 10 years old. But I really did have this inkling of an idea that maybe other people could do this with me. I set up my profile in Dropbox Paper, which was (before it got shitty) a better looking hipster version of Google Docs—this detail will become important later.
"What proof do you have that you invented them"
Good question. I never posted about them publicly or staked any particular claim until a few years in. I wasn't in any of the media coverage. I honestly wasn't even sure myself about it for a long time because the whole thing just seemed so surreal.
My Date Me Doc editing history goes back to Oct. of 2020, which I think is pretty comfortably earlier than anyone else.
In Nov 2020 a friend of mine on twitter, GoblinOdds, pulled together a matchmaking thread, and I decided to respond with my "dating profile" there. GoblinOdds then featured and promoted my profile as an example of what people should do, leading it to be seen by hundreds of people. (This is where I added some of the "fields" that show up in a lot of people's profiles, including a question about whether or not you're poly which is not something I would have thought to add myself2.)
In March of 2021 Catherine Olsson's Date Me Doc went viral on twitter, which led to a 2022 profile in Wired magazine that kicked off the media coverage. She never claimed to be the first person to make one—she copied it from another friend on a locked account—and she agrees that it's interesting circumstantial evidence that her and her friend's profiles also used Dropbox Paper. Later Date Me Docs mostly dropped this convention.
I had an opportunity to try to stake a claim about them in 2023 when The Guardian reached out about their piece, but I got scared and asked them not to include me.
The idea has spread pretty far without any direct involvement from me. It never felt right to try to own something that was about self determination. The whole thing is honestly pretty surreal.
I found out that at least one couple has gotten married because of Date Me Docs and now has, I think, two kids? (at least one). This makes me feel pretty proud.
“What are the limitations”
As much as I would like to continue to hype up Date Me Docs as a sort of self aggrandizing gesture, I actually think that they're far from a solution to modern dating woes.
Early online dating websites, including the old okCupid that Date Me Docs were modelled after, were developed to serve long tail users: the sort of freaks and geeks that were more comfortable meeting people through text on the computer than in person at a bar. Most normal people were still meeting people in person at those bars, as well as community dances, public parks, airport lounges, etc. But online dating became so popular with the long tails that it ate too far into the market share of those in person folkways, and now nobody has much of a choice but to use them.
Date Me Docs essentially do nothing to address the woes of this "missing middle" market segment of 25–55 year old heterosexuals that are quite poorly served by the current status quo. Date Me Docs mostly serve even more tail-endier people, who are so unusual that it makes sense to conduct something like a nationwide search to find love.
I wonder just how much of the modern issues with gendered political radicalization are downstream of a dating paradigm that incentivizes people to move towards the tails ("stand out") rather than towards the middle ("be normal").
Date Me Docs were kind of a flash in the pan in terms of media attention but people still make and use them. They occasionally blow up, but for all the wrong reasons (mostly to make fun of the person who created it). It's hard to say if they're a force for good in the world, but even if they're a little cringe I think they have their uses.
My own Date Me Doc hasn't been terribly successful for me: I haven't ever gotten a date out of it, but I certainly have had a few sharp and interesting people reach out.
If you want to check it out, it's here. (The photos are like 5 years old but I just am not going to bother changing it.)
I’ve heard a rumour that right now some elite matchmakers are scanning every high school yearbook in the US to create databases of all the random hotties in the midwest that they can recruit into their pipelines, to be matched off with high net worth men. It’s the wild west out there man.
A remarkable amount of Date Me Docs don’t say if the person is gay or straight, which seems like an oversight