JeanDate: Week One 🏹

For those just tuning in, a little context. A couple weeks ago, I set up two friends for dating purposes. Due to the shelter-in-place, they wouldn’t be able to meet in person until at least May. I suggested they meet over Zoom. I was so intrigued they agreed to do so that I Tweeted about it. This led to a couple of other friends asking if I had Zoom matches for them too (see here). In the meantime, Date Zero was a huge success, lasting over 3.5 hours with an even longer second date to follow. I came to understand that finding love while sheltering in place was not only something many people wanted, but also possible—under the right circumstances.

I’ve loved matchmaking even during normal times, so I jumped at the opportunity to bring happiness to my single friends in these strange times. (And let’s be honest, this is a pretty fun quarantine hobby for me.) Last Thursday, I put up a Google Form on my Facebook telling people who wanted to be matched up to tell me what they are looking for. By Sunday evening, over 50 (!) friends and friends-of-friends had signed up. Several dates had already occurred, with second dates scheduled. I was fielding so many questions about the logistics that I had to put up an FAQ. I needed a website to put the FAQ on, so that’s when Jean’s Zoom Dating Experiment officially became JeanDate.

JeanDate is pretty simple: people sign up with a basic intake form (who are you; what are you looking for; what are you not looking for) and then I text them with potential matches. If both sides agree to match, I connect the two people for JeanDating. First JeanDates are 30+ minute Zoom calls. I check in with people before matching and after their dates to calibrate how I’m matching, while trying not to leak information between any of the JeanDaters. In the words of one of the JeanDaters, there is “very low latency” and the touch points make the experience “feel curated in a good way.”

Not only have I been collecting the intake data, but I’ve also been the one doing the matchmaking and exit interviews, so there’s a lot I’ve been learning about how people date. I’ll tell you some of it each week this experiment continues. (JeanDaters don’t worry! I won’t give away any identifying information!)

Who is participating in the Experiment?

• As of 2pm on April 11, there are 100 people participating in JeanDate and another 106 on the waitlist. All current participants are my direct friends or friends of friends.

• Of the 100, 42 are male-identifying and 58 are female-identifying.

• The median age is early thirties.

• JeanDate is largely heterosexual: women seeking men or men seeking women.

• Almost half of the JeanDaters live in the Bay Area and about a quarter live in the greater NYC region. There are also JeanDaters in Boston, DC, LA, London, Pittsburgh, and more.

• Almost half of the JeanDaters want a blind setup, as opposed to one where I check with them first about the potential match.

Do you want me to check with you beforehand, or surprise you?

Almost as many JeanDaters want a blind setup as they want to have a say over who their matches are.

What are JeanDaters looking for?

According to the basic intake information, 35% of JeanDaters are looking for a “serious Zoom relationship,” whatever that ends up being. 60% of JeanDaters are open to any kind of Zoom relationship that might unfold.

Despite the virtual nature of JeanDating, JeanDaters are primarily interested in making connections that will translate post-pandemic. Most JeanDaters want someone in their own geographic region: only 13 said they were open to people anywhere.

Because most of the JeanDaters are women seeking men or men seeking women, for the rest of this section I’m going to focus on what the heterosexual JeanDaters want. Here are some observations:

• Politics have come up only in the “what doesn’t work” (dealbreakers) answers.

• Religion has come up in both the “what works” (what they’re looking for) and “what doesn’t work” (dealbreakers) answers.

• Race has so far come up only when people are interested in a race different than their own.

• For the men who selected “check with me,” the decision seems to be largely based on photos. I’m inferring this from lack of follow-up questions and rejection reasons being photo-related. For the women who selected “check with me,” it’s been a combination of the photos and questions about their height, personality, and what kind of relationship they are looking for.

• Not only are there more women than men on JeanDate, but there are also more women who fit the men’s constraints than men who fit the women’s constraints. When I asked around about eligible 30-something bachelors, people said they have anecdotally observed they know more single women than men. This is a phenomenon I will continue to investigate.

There have also been some interesting differences in the ways the men on JeanDate talk about what they want and don’t want, versus how the women on JeanDate talk about what they want and don’t want. I have limited data points so far, but I capture some of it in these word clouds below.

What men want in women

What men don't want in women

What women want in men

What women don't want in men

For those of you who are curious, I generated the word clouds by feeding in the freeform answers to the Python wordcloud library. I filtered out stopwords like “somebody” and “anybody.” Some words show up because they show up with other words—for instance “conversation” shows up as something the men don’t like because some men put certain conversation situations as dealbreakers.

How are the dates going?

On the whole, surprisingly well. Some basic data below. (To my friends who are actual data scientists: like an old person, I’m loading my Google Form data into SQLite to do these calculations. What’s the more hip way to do this?)

• About half the JeanDaters have gotten matched. As of today, I’ve matched 55 JeanDaters, 26 men and 29 women, in over 50 matches. Among the matched daters, this is an average of 2.08 matches per man and 1.93 matches per woman.

• Matches are succeeding and failing with similar frequency. Of the 50-some first dates, there are 11 second dates that have either occurred or are being scheduled. The number of JeanMatches have definitively ended at the first date is also 11.

• JeanMatches are connecting quickly. Something surprising to me was that many JeanDates got scheduled within 1-2 days of the introduction. (People’s social schedules are much emptier than usual—and a Zoom date is low-overhead.)

• Chemistry is possible! Several pairs of JeanDaters have reported enjoyable (and sometimes lengthy) first meetings, with the record for longest first JeanDate currently at four hours. Most first JeanDates were pretty simple: conversation, occasionally over a drink.

• Some matches move fast. One pair of JeanDaters has already had their third date in just one week!

Some people have been very happy with their JeanDate experiences:

• “Just ‘met’ 💘💘💘. He is GREAT! Totally my type.”

• “She’s very attractive. Like actually probably the most attractive person I’ve dated.”

• “Way higher ratio of rad ladies on this service!”

• “Definitely the most thoughtful/successful setup I’ve ever had, so thank you 🙂“

• “I was a bit worried based on your prompts and stuff that it might be awk or whatever but it turns out it’s in some sense very similar to just… going on a date.”

As with non-virtual romance, there are many matches that fall into a middle zone:

• A lot of people have brought up the question of how to gauge chemistry over Zoom. JeanDating has been especially challenging for people where the in-person aspects of physical humor and physical touch are usually core to their dating.

• People have also brought up the awkwardness of having no external stimuli to break things up. There’s also the question of when to end the date when there are no external signals (like the waiter bringing a check) to break up the time.

• For matches where the chemistry is uncertain, there has also been uncertainty about the second Zoom date: whether to do a second Zoom date; how to make the second Zoom date different than the first Zoom date. (I address some of these questions in the JeanDate FAQ.)

And of course, there have also been JeanMatches that have not worked out. The reasons people don’t pursue further JeanDates usually don’t have to do with the Zoom medium, but rather a mismatch in lifestyle, values, or what people are looking for in a conversation. People have been pretty honest about what’s worked and what hasn’t worked—and this has been helpful for calibrating new matches.

If you’re curious about what it’s like being part of JeanDate, my friend Irene talks about her experience at 23:32 of her AI talk interview. (The rest of the interview is super interesting too! And thanks Irene for the very kind words about JeanDate!) She talks about her experience with JeanMatching and how she came to JeanDate three men at the same time. 🤭

What’s next for JeanDate?

As long as shelter-in-place continues and people are looking for love, we will continue on with the JeanDate experiment! Next week, many of our couples will be going on second dates, third dates, and beyond. Since I’m starting to hit match saturation with my own network, I’ve been asking JeanDaters to refer their friends. Here are what I think will be the most interesting things that will unfold:

• What will second JeanDates look like? How will JeanDaters get creative with the Zoom format?

• Will the JeanDaters who had great first meetings be able to keep the momentum on subsequent JeanDates? What will cause JeanMatches to fizzle out?

• Which JeanDaters who wanted more data after the first meeting will come to develop chemistry with their JeanMatch? Which will walk away from their JeanMatches? What helps us predict which way things go?

• Will any JeanDaters succeed in falling in love over video chat?

Stay tuned to see what happens! 💘