So you simply ask them: “What do you want to do”? And maybe you add “I’m completely fine with anything!” to ensure you’re really introducing no constraints whatsoever and you two can do exactly what your friend desires.
This error reminds me of people on a dating app who kill the conversation by texting something like “How’s your week going?”
When texting on a dating app, if you want to keep the conversation flowing nicely instead of getting awkward/strained responses or nothing, I believe the key is to anticipate that a couple seconds of low-effort processing on the recipient’s part will allow them to start typing their response to your message.
“How’s your week going?” is highly cognitively straining. Responding to it requires remembering and selecting info about one’s week (or one’s feelings about one’s week), and then filtering or modifying the selection so as to make one sound like an interesting conversationalist rather than an undifferentiated bore, while also worrying that one’s selection about how to answer doesn’t implicitly reveal them as being too eager to brag, or complain, or obsess about a particular topic.
You can be “conversationally generous” by intentionally pre-computing some of their cognitive work, i.e. narrowing the search space. For instance:
“I’m gonna try cooking myself 3 eggs/day for lunch so I don’t go crazy on DoorDash. How would you cook them if you were me?”
With a text like this (ideally adjusted to your actual life context), they don’t have to start by narrowing down a huge space of possible responses. They can immediately just ask themselves how they’d go about cooking an egg. And they also have some context of “where the conversation is going”: it’s about your own lifestyle. So it’s not just two people interviewing each other, it has this natural motion/momentum.
Using this computational kindness technique is admittedly kind of contrived on your end, but on their end, it just feels effortless and serendipitous. For naturally contrived nerds like myself looking for a way to convert IQ points into social skills, it’s a good trade.
The computational kindness principle in these conversations works much like the rule of improv that says you’re supposed to introduce specific elements to the scene (“My little brown poodle is digging for his bone”) rather than prompting your scene partners to do the cognitive work (“What’s that over there?”).
Oh and all this is not just a random piece of advice, it’s yet another Specificity Power.
Hmm, I think people have occasionally asked me “how’s your week going” on dating apps and I’ve liked it overall—I’m pretty sure I’d prefer it over your suggested alternative! No doubt to a large extent because I suck at cooking and wouldn’t know what to say. Whereas a more open-ended question feels better: I can just ramble a bunch of things that happen to be on my mind and then go “how about yourself?” and then it’s enough for either of our rambles to contain just one thing that the other party might find interesting.
It feels like your proposed question is a high-variance startegy: if you happen to find a question that the other person finds easy and interesting to answer, then the conversation can go really well. But if they don’t like the direction you’re offering, then it’d have been better to say something that would have given them more control over the direction.
Context is a huge factor in all these communications tips. The scenario I’m optimizing for is when you’re texting someone who has a lot of options, and you think it’s high expected value to get them to invest in a date with you, but the most likely way that won’t happen is if they hesitate to reply to you and tap away to something else. That’s not always the actual scenario though.
Imagine you’re the recipient, and the person who’s texting you met your minimum standard to match with, but is still a-priori probably not worth your time and effort going on a date with, because their expected attractiveness+compatibility score is too low, though you haven’t investigated enough to be confident yet. (This is a common epistemic state of e.g. a woman with attractive pics on a dating app that has more male users.)
Maybe the first match who asks you “how’s your week going” feels like a nice opportunity to ramble how you feel, and a nice sign that someone out there cares. But if that happens enough on an app, and the average date-worthiness of the people that it happens with is low, then the next person who sends it doesn’t make you want to ramble anymore. Because you know from experience that rambling into a momentumless conversation will just lead it to stagnate in its next momentumless point.
It’s nice when people care about you, but it quickly gets not so nice when a bunch of people with questionable date-appeal are trying to trade a cheap care signal for your scarce attention and dating resources.
If the person sending you the message has already distinguished themselves to you as “dateworthy”, e.g. by having one of the best pics and/or profile in your judgment, then “How’s your week going” will be a perfectly adequate message from them; in some cases maybe even an optimal message. You can just build rapport and check for basic red flags, then set up a date.
But if you’re not sold on the other person being dateworthy, and they start out from a lower-leverage position in the sense that they initially consider you more dateworthy than you consider them, then they better send a message that somehow adds value to you, to help them climb the dateworthiness gap.
But again, context is always the biggest factor, and context has a lot of detail. E.g. if you don’t consider someone dateworthy, but you’re in a scenario where someone just making conversation with you is adding value to you (e.g. not a ton of matches demanding your attention using the same unoriginal rapport-building gambit), then “How’s it going” can work great.
This is actually the default context if you’re brave enough to approach strangers you want to date in meatspace. The stranger can be much more physically attractive or higher initially-perceived dating market value than you. Yet just implicitly signaling your social confidence through boldness, body language, and friendly/fun way of speaking and acting, raises your dateworthiness significantly, and the real-world-interaction modality doesn’t have much competition these days, so the content of the conversation that leads up to a date can be super normal smalltalk like “How’s it going”.
Bonus points in a dating context: by being specific and authentic you drive away people who won’t be compatible. In the egg example, even if the second party knows nothing about the topic, they can continue the conversation with “I can barely boil water, so I always take a frozen meal in to work” or “I don’t like eggs, but I keep pb&j at my desk” or just swipe left and move on to the next match.
Can confirm, I also didn’t have good experience with open-ended questions on dating apps. I get more responses with binary choice questions that invite elaboration, e.g. “Are you living here or just visiting?” and “How was your Friday night, did you go out or stay in?”.
Outside of dating, another example that comes to my mind are questions like “What’s your favorite movie?”. I now avoid the “what’s your favorite” questions because they require the respondent to assess their entire life history and make a revealing choice as if I’m giving them a personality test – not everyone is prepared and vulnerable enough to do that. It’s also impossible to decline to answer without coming along as impolite (“I’m not telling you”) or unsophisticated (“I don’t really have a favorite”).
Instead, I ask “Did you watch any interesting movies recently?”, and sometimes add a justification for the question that lowers the stakes (“I’m looking for something new to watch”). This allows the respondent to either answer something their memory readily gives them right away, or simply answer “Not really”, in which case I might reply with something I’ve seen recently and recommend it.
Yeah nice. A statement like “I’m looking for something new to watch” lowers the stakes by making the interaction more like what friends talk about rather than about an interview for a life partner, increasing the probability that they’ll respond rather than pausing for a second and ending up tapping away.
You can do even more than just lowering the stakes if you inject a sense that you’re subconsciously using the next couple conversation moves to draw out evidence about the conversation partner, because you’re naturally perceptive and have various standards and ideas about people you like to date, and you like to get a sense of who the other person is.
If done well, this builds a curious sense that the question is a bit more than just making formulaic conversation, but somehow has momentum to it. The best motivation for someone to keep talking to you on a dating app is if they feel they’re being seen by a savvy evaluator who will reflect back a valuable perspective about them. The person talking to you can then be subconsciously thinking about how attractive/interesting/unique/etc they are (an engaging experience). Also, everyone wants to feel like they’re maximizing their potential by finding someone to date who’s in the upper range of their “league”, and there are ways to engage in conversation that are more consistent with that ideal.
IMO the best type of conversation to have after a few opening back&forths, is to get them talking about something they find engaging, which is generally also something that reflects them in a good light, which makes it fun and engaging for them while also putting you in a position to give a type of casual “feedback”, ultimately leading up to a statement of interest which shows them why you’re not just another random match but rather someone they have more reason to meet and not flake on. Your movie question could be a good start toward discovering something like that, but probably not an example of that unless they’re a big movie person.
I’d try to look at their profile to clues of something they do in their life where they make an effort that someone ought to notice and appreciate, and get em talking about that.
Those are just some thoughts I have about how to distinguish yourself in the middle part of the conversation between opening interest and asking them on a date.
I notice that this is a standard pattern I use and had forgotten how non-obvious it is, since you do have to imagine yourself in someone else’s perspective. If you’re a man dating women on dating apps, you also have to imagine a very different perspective than your own—women tend to have many more options of significantly lower average quality. It’s unlikely you’d imagine yourself giving up on a conversation because it required mild effort to continue, since you have less of them in the first place and invest more effort in each one.
The level above that one, by the way, is going from being “easy to respond to” to “actively intriguing”, where your messages contain some sort of hook that is not only an easy conversation-continuer, but actually wants them to either find out more (because you’re interesting) or keep talking (because the topic is interesting)
Worth noting is I don’t have enough samples of this strategy to know how good it is. However, it is also worth noting is I don’t have enough samples because I wound up saturated on new relationships a couple weeks shortly after starting this strategy, so for a small n it was definitely quite useful.
When my brother was trying to meet girls on social media sites about twenty years ago, after going through early PUA stuff and throwing out some of the nonsense, this was his the message decided to use as his cold opening:
Why did the apple like the banana?
Yeah, it’s a dad joke; the punchline is “Because it has appeal!” It worked, though; there were enough girls that were curious enough about the punchline to respond to a message from a stranger in order to hear it.
This error reminds me of people on a dating app who kill the conversation by texting something like “How’s your week going?”
When texting on a dating app, if you want to keep the conversation flowing nicely instead of getting awkward/strained responses or nothing, I believe the key is to anticipate that a couple seconds of low-effort processing on the recipient’s part will allow them to start typing their response to your message.
“How’s your week going?” is highly cognitively straining. Responding to it requires remembering and selecting info about one’s week (or one’s feelings about one’s week), and then filtering or modifying the selection so as to make one sound like an interesting conversationalist rather than an undifferentiated bore, while also worrying that one’s selection about how to answer doesn’t implicitly reveal them as being too eager to brag, or complain, or obsess about a particular topic.
You can be “conversationally generous” by intentionally pre-computing some of their cognitive work, i.e. narrowing the search space. For instance:
“I’m gonna try cooking myself 3 eggs/day for lunch so I don’t go crazy on DoorDash. How would you cook them if you were me?”
With a text like this (ideally adjusted to your actual life context), they don’t have to start by narrowing down a huge space of possible responses. They can immediately just ask themselves how they’d go about cooking an egg. And they also have some context of “where the conversation is going”: it’s about your own lifestyle. So it’s not just two people interviewing each other, it has this natural motion/momentum.
Using this computational kindness technique is admittedly kind of contrived on your end, but on their end, it just feels effortless and serendipitous. For naturally contrived nerds like myself looking for a way to convert IQ points into social skills, it’s a good trade.
The computational kindness principle in these conversations works much like the rule of improv that says you’re supposed to introduce specific elements to the scene (“My little brown poodle is digging for his bone”) rather than prompting your scene partners to do the cognitive work (“What’s that over there?”).
Oh and all this is not just a random piece of advice, it’s yet another Specificity Power.
Hmm, I think people have occasionally asked me “how’s your week going” on dating apps and I’ve liked it overall—I’m pretty sure I’d prefer it over your suggested alternative! No doubt to a large extent because I suck at cooking and wouldn’t know what to say. Whereas a more open-ended question feels better: I can just ramble a bunch of things that happen to be on my mind and then go “how about yourself?” and then it’s enough for either of our rambles to contain just one thing that the other party might find interesting.
It feels like your proposed question is a high-variance startegy: if you happen to find a question that the other person finds easy and interesting to answer, then the conversation can go really well. But if they don’t like the direction you’re offering, then it’d have been better to say something that would have given them more control over the direction.
Context is a huge factor in all these communications tips. The scenario I’m optimizing for is when you’re texting someone who has a lot of options, and you think it’s high expected value to get them to invest in a date with you, but the most likely way that won’t happen is if they hesitate to reply to you and tap away to something else. That’s not always the actual scenario though.
Imagine you’re the recipient, and the person who’s texting you met your minimum standard to match with, but is still a-priori probably not worth your time and effort going on a date with, because their expected attractiveness+compatibility score is too low, though you haven’t investigated enough to be confident yet. (This is a common epistemic state of e.g. a woman with attractive pics on a dating app that has more male users.)
Maybe the first match who asks you “how’s your week going” feels like a nice opportunity to ramble how you feel, and a nice sign that someone out there cares. But if that happens enough on an app, and the average date-worthiness of the people that it happens with is low, then the next person who sends it doesn’t make you want to ramble anymore. Because you know from experience that rambling into a momentumless conversation will just lead it to stagnate in its next momentumless point.
It’s nice when people care about you, but it quickly gets not so nice when a bunch of people with questionable date-appeal are trying to trade a cheap care signal for your scarce attention and dating resources.
If the person sending you the message has already distinguished themselves to you as “dateworthy”, e.g. by having one of the best pics and/or profile in your judgment, then “How’s your week going” will be a perfectly adequate message from them; in some cases maybe even an optimal message. You can just build rapport and check for basic red flags, then set up a date.
But if you’re not sold on the other person being dateworthy, and they start out from a lower-leverage position in the sense that they initially consider you more dateworthy than you consider them, then they better send a message that somehow adds value to you, to help them climb the dateworthiness gap.
But again, context is always the biggest factor, and context has a lot of detail. E.g. if you don’t consider someone dateworthy, but you’re in a scenario where someone just making conversation with you is adding value to you (e.g. not a ton of matches demanding your attention using the same unoriginal rapport-building gambit), then “How’s it going” can work great.
This is actually the default context if you’re brave enough to approach strangers you want to date in meatspace. The stranger can be much more physically attractive or higher initially-perceived dating market value than you. Yet just implicitly signaling your social confidence through boldness, body language, and friendly/fun way of speaking and acting, raises your dateworthiness significantly, and the real-world-interaction modality doesn’t have much competition these days, so the content of the conversation that leads up to a date can be super normal smalltalk like “How’s it going”.
Bonus points in a dating context: by being specific and authentic you drive away people who won’t be compatible. In the egg example, even if the second party knows nothing about the topic, they can continue the conversation with “I can barely boil water, so I always take a frozen meal in to work” or “I don’t like eggs, but I keep pb&j at my desk” or just swipe left and move on to the next match.
Can confirm, I also didn’t have good experience with open-ended questions on dating apps. I get more responses with binary choice questions that invite elaboration, e.g. “Are you living here or just visiting?” and “How was your Friday night, did you go out or stay in?”.
Outside of dating, another example that comes to my mind are questions like “What’s your favorite movie?”. I now avoid the “what’s your favorite” questions because they require the respondent to assess their entire life history and make a revealing choice as if I’m giving them a personality test – not everyone is prepared and vulnerable enough to do that. It’s also impossible to decline to answer without coming along as impolite (“I’m not telling you”) or unsophisticated (“I don’t really have a favorite”).
Instead, I ask “Did you watch any interesting movies recently?”, and sometimes add a justification for the question that lowers the stakes (“I’m looking for something new to watch”). This allows the respondent to either answer something their memory readily gives them right away, or simply answer “Not really”, in which case I might reply with something I’ve seen recently and recommend it.
Yeah nice. A statement like “I’m looking for something new to watch” lowers the stakes by making the interaction more like what friends talk about rather than about an interview for a life partner, increasing the probability that they’ll respond rather than pausing for a second and ending up tapping away.
You can do even more than just lowering the stakes if you inject a sense that you’re subconsciously using the next couple conversation moves to draw out evidence about the conversation partner, because you’re naturally perceptive and have various standards and ideas about people you like to date, and you like to get a sense of who the other person is.
If done well, this builds a curious sense that the question is a bit more than just making formulaic conversation, but somehow has momentum to it. The best motivation for someone to keep talking to you on a dating app is if they feel they’re being seen by a savvy evaluator who will reflect back a valuable perspective about them. The person talking to you can then be subconsciously thinking about how attractive/interesting/unique/etc they are (an engaging experience). Also, everyone wants to feel like they’re maximizing their potential by finding someone to date who’s in the upper range of their “league”, and there are ways to engage in conversation that are more consistent with that ideal.
IMO the best type of conversation to have after a few opening back&forths, is to get them talking about something they find engaging, which is generally also something that reflects them in a good light, which makes it fun and engaging for them while also putting you in a position to give a type of casual “feedback”, ultimately leading up to a statement of interest which shows them why you’re not just another random match but rather someone they have more reason to meet and not flake on. Your movie question could be a good start toward discovering something like that, but probably not an example of that unless they’re a big movie person.
I’d try to look at their profile to clues of something they do in their life where they make an effort that someone ought to notice and appreciate, and get em talking about that.
Those are just some thoughts I have about how to distinguish yourself in the middle part of the conversation between opening interest and asking them on a date.
I notice that this is a standard pattern I use and had forgotten how non-obvious it is, since you do have to imagine yourself in someone else’s perspective. If you’re a man dating women on dating apps, you also have to imagine a very different perspective than your own—women tend to have many more options of significantly lower average quality. It’s unlikely you’d imagine yourself giving up on a conversation because it required mild effort to continue, since you have less of them in the first place and invest more effort in each one.
The level above that one, by the way, is going from being “easy to respond to” to “actively intriguing”, where your messages contain some sort of hook that is not only an easy conversation-continuer, but actually wants them to either find out more (because you’re interesting) or keep talking (because the topic is interesting)
Worth noting is I don’t have enough samples of this strategy to know how good it is. However, it is also worth noting is I don’t have enough samples because I wound up saturated on new relationships a couple weeks shortly after starting this strategy, so for a small n it was definitely quite useful.
When my brother was trying to meet girls on social media sites about twenty years ago, after going through early PUA stuff and throwing out some of the nonsense, this was his the message decided to use as his cold opening:
Yeah, it’s a dad joke; the punchline is “Because it has appeal!” It worked, though; there were enough girls that were curious enough about the punchline to respond to a message from a stranger in order to hear it.