Date stacking is designed to save time, cut out too much messaging and swiftly find out who you actually click with. Photo / 123rf
Singletons spend almost an hour a day on dating apps, so is scheduling multiple dates back to back the answer to cutting the small talk?
Frantically cramming my gym kit into a bag, I grab my phone to check the time. Oh God. I have 15 minutes to say goodbye to date number one, jump on the Tube to meet date number two, and text date number three that I need to push him back an hour. I’m exhausted, and it’s only 11am. This is not my usual lazy Sunday.
Why the rush? I’m attempting to “date stack”, a trend inspired by a TikTok video that went viral earlier this year in which a New Yorker narrates an evening of three back-to-back dates. The aim? To save time, cut out too much messaging and swiftly find out who you actually click with.
I’ve just finished my first — coffee followed by a Boxfit class with a personal trainer I met on Hinge. One down, two to go. Next it’s a walk around the park with a friend of a friend and, after that, a glass of rosé with an actor-slash-model-slash-social media manager, also from Hinge.
The premise of scheduling multiple dates one after the other isn’t new, of course: speed dating was invented by a rabbi in Los Angeles in 1998. But for me, once a hopeless romantic who dreamt of meet-cutes and cliches like being whisked away to Paris for the weekend, this is entirely new territory.
The appeal? I’m very busy, my weeknights are crammed with work events and I’m sick of wasting hours on dating apps to no avail. For me dating has become just another thing that has to be done. And it would seem I’m not alone. A study by eHarmony says we spend nearly an hour swiping every day, with 39 per cent of us checking for a new message as soon as we wake up and 48 per cent looking before bed.
Last month I was horrified to discover that my screen time was up 14 per cent; I also had a repetitive strain injury in my hand — and I’m convinced both were due to an intense week of incessant swiping. Modern dating is exhausting and time-consuming, and you become so bored with all the messaging maintenance that most of the time you never get around to meeting up. Research says 73 per cent of dating singles estimate that 10 per cent or fewer of their matches result in a real-world date. I am definitely one of them.
I don’t have to look far to find other women with dating fatigue. The slightest mention of Hinge, Raya or Bumble to a group of single girlfriends is met with a chorus of groans and eye rolls. One friend is going on so many first dates in a fast-track attempt to meet “the one” that she has started keeping an Excel spreadsheet. Columns are broken down into “Boy” (his name and occupation), followed by ratings for humour, compatibility and how good he is in bed.
It seems intense, but when life is busy and you’re talking to multiple men at once on various different apps, you need to keep track (apparently the average person has six conversations going on at the same time). “Apps train us to behave in certain ways,” says Moira Weigel, author of Labour of Love: The Invention of Dating. “They promise efficiency because you can sort through people speedily. So it encourages us to try to create a real-life version of processing people quickly.”
Stacking my dates does speed things up. Twenty minutes into date one, I know I’m not going to be seeing this guy again. The only thing we have in common is exercise, and the awkward half-hug we give each other at the end tells us all we need to know. But that’s fine, because I’m straight onto the next one. Things are smoother and more free-flowing with the second man; there’s even some laughter. I don’t feel an attraction, though — more a familiar friendliness. There’s no need to ponder on what I’m feeling or try to find something that isn’t there, though, because I’ve got to get to date number three. With this one there’s more of a buzz and physical attraction, but that could just be the second glass of wine. Three dates done and dusted, without wasting three evenings of my week.
Dr Angela Ahola, a psychologist and author of 100 Dates: The Psychologist Who Kissed 100 Frogs So You Don’t Have To, spent a year and a half dating men back to back as an experiment. She says that out of the 100 dates she went on, eight were great, five were really bad and the rest were somewhere in between. “Dating is a numbers game,” she explains. “If you really want to find a person, you just need to get it done. Like any other goal you want to achieve, you work for the result. So this strategy has higher odds of working out than dating at a slower pace.”
Mathematically it makes sense, but it’s not the most romantic view. I find myself thinking of these men as just another appointment in my diary, a task to tick off rather than real people with real feelings. When date number one asks me what I’m doing for the rest of the day and I blurt out that, actually, I’ve got two more dates, he doesn’t look impressed and, unsurprisingly, I don’t hear from him again.
“Apps encourage us to think of other people as commodities,” Weigel says. “Dating is an interactive process about learning how you feel, so in the long run this approach won’t work. You have to feel some vulnerability.”
Ahola has now been in a relationship for one year. She didn’t meet her partner online — they met on an aeroplane — but she puts the success of their relationship down to her experiment. “It was one of the most important personal development periods of my life,” she says. “I learnt so much about myself and what I wanted that when I met my partner I knew straight away I wanted to be with him.”
I concur. Whether we’re looking for love, companionship or just a bit of fun, what we really get from dating is a deeper understanding of ourselves. Dating has made me so much clearer on what I want, and stacking my dates means I don’t have to waste hours and energy on people who aren’t right for me.
They say the third time’s a charm, but from my date stacking experience, maybe it’ll be the fifth or sixth.
Written by: Roisin Kelly
© The Times of London
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