Regrettably, Amy Webb is off the market, but you can still take home her dating advice.
Since watching her Ted Talk, I’ve developed a girl-crush on online dating “hacker” Amy Webb. She speaks Japanese and knows JavaScript?! She’s intelligent, accomplished, makes (funny) jokes about kinky sex in front of a live audience and nabbed the man of her dreams?! She is one of those rare people who can proclaim, “Obviously, I’m having a fabulous life,” and you don’t feel a wave of jealousy or the urge to kick her in the shins. Okay, so maybe you feel a bit jealous. But mostly you root for Amy. If not because she’s living proof that people can find what they’re looking for in love, then for an entirely selfish reason: she shares her recipe for success and dares us to replicate it.
We can gain much from Amy’s blunders, in particular. Even if your monetization abilities are the toast of your feminist fan club, don’t be surprised when your resume-based profile strikes out. You can get away with this sort of stunt if you’re a falconer—being able to train birds of prey is dead sexy—but otherwise forget it. Before partaking in a $1300 dinner date, meet for a couple coffees to assess your suitor’s dine and dash potential. Raise an eyebrow if he consistently forgets his wallet. Finally, take it from this CSR that catfishing could result in your account(s) being deleted and banned, so resist the urge to conduct your own market research. Amy, did you really need to impersonate a bunch of men just to determine that they like women with cute profile photos? Your Nana could have told you as much.
So maybe the principles of attraction didn’t come all that easily to our unlikely heroine. So maybe she had never heard of an online dating coach. From the get-go, Amy Webb is worth emulating in at least two ways. She does not succumb to familial pressure to lower her standards, and she has standards, high and very specific ones. Like how she wanted her husband to “weigh twenty pounds more than me at all times.” If you’re going to go searching for a needle in a haystack, you’d better have an idea of what that looks like (Is it a pine needle? Knitting needle?). A list of 72 data points is what, ultimately, leads Amy to The One and informs her take-home message to build your own framework.
I have applied this advice to my own experience. Looking back on my listless early twenties I can see how a few parameters could have mitigated my own dating mishaps. I can see how I might not have stuck it out with the young man who was a self-proclaimed curmudgeon. Not for me. I might have been more discerning before leaping into relationships of convenience, and I would have been far less accommodating when it came to aspects of a romantic interest that just didn’t sit well. I never would have started wearing sweatpants in public because my boyfriend at the time liked the look of comfy clothes. Not for me. It’s one thing to be open-minded and quite another to be passive or worse, a pushover. Luckily, bad dates make great stories and also reveal the must-haves that aren’t on your list yet. I doubt that my list will ever make it to 72 pecs—I mean specs—but Amy makes a case for being proactively picky. And not a moment too soon; my other girl-crush is Margaret Atwood.
