If you are drawn to someone off the bat, it could be because they feel familiar, Kevin Lewis, a UC San Diego sociologist, told me. Maybe they remind you of an ex, variations of whom you seem to keep dating. Maybe, as Logan Ury, a behavioral scientist for Hinge and the author of How to Not Die Alone , argues bluntly , a spark just means the other person is hot or charming. Slow burns, evidently, are in.
First impressionsβand their attendant misperceptionsβare out. In fact, keep dating someone until you feel absolutely certain that, even with all of the good-faith effort in the world, you could not grow to love them. And of course, people can grow on you. On either end of the spectrum, the advice can feel unsatisfying.
For one thing, studies suggest that time and familiarity can grow attraction. This is my actual nightmare. But by the end of the semester, when students rated one another again, the rankings were far more variable. The same idea holds up when you study people who are actually dating. That effect becomes less pronounced when people have longer to become acquainted.
With more time, essentially, you might assess people on less superficial and more meaningful grounds. When I asked Joel how people typically decide whether to try one more date, she took a long pause. The problem is that, in modern dating, gauging vibes is not a casual process.
Before dating apps, relationships tended to form between people who were already socially connected. Until about the 19th century, partners in many cultures typically came from families that knew each other and matched the partners up. In the U. But in recent decades, and especially in the online-dating era, more and more people have sought love with strangers. You ask them about their job, their interests, their cultural tasteβall while trying to assess who they are and how you feel about that.
