As a relatively new card carrying member of the “real world” (read: post-college), it has come to my attention that dating is basically not the same at all.

In college, dating was easy. I was guaranteed to have several things in common with any girl on campus. At the very least we were both students and we were hanging out in the same place. More likely, we were studying related fields (which implies shared interest), had similar intellectual aptitude, knew at least a few of the same people, and were both looking for friends/more. A date was convenient. I may just have had to walk down the hall to get to her place, or at worst, across campus.

In the real world, dating is hard. Girls are distributed everywhere—across town, or suburbia are way harder to get to than across campus. A girl’s age is no longer guaranteed to be within 4 years of mine (not that that is terribly important to me, but it was convenient in college). Patronizing the same coffee shop is not a basis for conversation the way sharing a class is. I have no real reason to share a stranger’s company repeatedly the way a class or other regular shared appointment would.

Don’t get me wrong. Not having something obviously in common with someone isn’t enough to scare me away. That was the easiest part to get over. The things that concern me are the inconvenience and the undecidability.

Inconvenience makes regular meetings harder to establish. Not seeing a girl regularly makes it hard to establish a rapport. When I first approach a woman I’m interested in (and I’m typically only potentially interested at this stage) they either:

a) Like the attention and flirt with me
or b) Blow me off because they think I’m trying to lick them out of their pants with my silver tongue, or some other ridiculous reason.

Both of these responses are presumptuous. Sometimes I’m in a flirty mood, in which case a) is a perfectly appreciable response. Sometimes I’m not, and I just want to actually TALK to someone. Maybe that’s weird for a guy—judging from the binary reactions I get, I think its something most girls don’t consider. It’s really unreasonably difficult to establish platonic relationships because of it. Seriously, the only ones I have are coworkers or girlfriends of friends. Sometimes, I actually like to get to know a girl a little before asking her out.

Maybe I need to wrap my head around dating someone to see if I like them. That still seems backward to me.

The other thing that bothers me about extensive dating is its undecidability. N+1 has some good discussion on it here. In math terms (romantic, I know), dating is an optimization problem. You want to find the girl(s) that yield the local maximum of your utility function, whatever that may be. It’s undecidable in the sense that you never know when you’ve succeeded. You’d need to date every girl out there [though a statistically significant sample would be enough for a good guess]. My romantic side disagrees, and says I’ll know it when I see it.

Enough babbling.

I like hanging out with girls. So, if dating you is the only way to do it, here I come.