I rarely date. I don't do dating apps and as a guy I don't feel any time pressure to find a partner. The girls I am friends with or even women I encounter in social situations (just as friends) are surprised I do not have a partner.
It is likely that I am sending you this because the conversation of dating came up.
I really do love it when my girl friends introduce me to their friends. As a guy, it is the ultimate honor when a girl, who I am friends with, vouches for me with her friends. I have found that these referrals have become the best channel for relationships.
If you are interested in pairing me with a friend, reading this will best help you help me.
So yes, I rarely date. This is not from a lack of experience, this is a deliberate and strategic decision, after learning from experience actually. It is a huge risk to entangle myself emotionally and romantically with someone. As one of my friends Alexandra said, the most precious thing a high status guy can give a girl is their time.
Even if girls come from the right channels it can still result in her not being a fit.
I have confidence in my game and I know what I bring to the table.
The status quo is not to give my attention and energy and emotional availability to just anyone. Obviously no one is perfect, but this is my stance.
The standard I hold for a long-term partner is higher than the standard I hold for a business partner, and that gap is intentional. A business can be sold. A company can be wound down, restructured, or exited when the conditions change. A marriage is not designed with an exit. It is designed to last until one of us is gone, and to hold together through everything that happens in between: job loss, illness, disagreement, seasons where one person carries more than the other. The stakes are categorically different.
So I am selective. Not because I have something to prove, but because I understand what the commitment actually is.
The three things I come back to every time: smart, fun, kind.
Smart does not mean credentialed. It means curious. It means you engage with ideas, ask good questions, and have developed a view of the world through experience and not just through what you were told. Intelligence without curiosity is just memory. I want the version that keeps growing.
Fun is underrated as a criterion. I want to spend a lot of time with this person. We should genuinely enjoy being in the same room. The ability to make each other laugh, in a way that feels natural rather than performed, is not a trivial quality. It is load-bearing.
Kind is the easiest one to skip over and the most important not to. Not just kind to me, but kind to the people around us: family, strangers, service workers, anyone who crosses our path. How someone treats people they do not need anything from is a signal worth paying attention to.
These matter, even if they are less romantic to say out loud.
Diet alignment. Food is a significant part of how I live. I am not looking for identical eating habits, but I need someone who is at least compatible. I love Cuban food, pork, steak, fish. Fundamental misalignment here is a friction tax on daily life that compounds quietly. No vegans.
No cats. I am not allergic to cats. I just did not grow up with one. I do not like cat hair and they do not express love the same way dogs do. Sorry not sorry. 🤣
Family alignment. This one runs deeper. My relationship with family, wanting to build one, being present in each other's families, how we handle the obligations and the love that come with that, has to be directionally shared. Not identical, but compatible. Two people with fundamentally different ideas about what family means will find that gap eventually. Better to understand it early.
These are not a checklist I run through on a first date. They are the things I have learned, over time, actually matter in a partnership built to last.
I think sinking time swiping is time poorly spent when I could be playing tennis, hanging out by the beach, or spending time with friends and family.
I personally would rather be peaceful and alone in Miami, locked in on tennis, work, and coding, than go out one-on-one with someone without having spent time actually meeting them beforehand.
A girlfriend, call her Ale, thought Hinge might widen my breadth of options and include good girls who may not be at the club, in Brickell, at events or tennis, or who are actively looking to meet someone online instead of being approached in person. There is some logic to this but it misses key things.
There is a huge time and money risk to swiping and sending messages. The girls who are attractive in Miami get an overwhelming number of messages on Hinge. It does not work as well in Miami as it does in NYC, from all the feedback I have heard. You almost stand out more by not being on these platforms at all than by pushing aggressively on them.
I do not stand out being another message on Hinge. I also do not stand out being another message on Instagram with girls I have actually met and had a good time with.
The risk of going on a bad date, or even a good date where the girl ghosts me afterward, and spending $120 on it, is not the move at the moment. As I grow my income, it becomes less about the money and more about the time.
Those time and budget risks outweigh the potential benefits. I am not going to spend time on channels that have not worked for me in the past.
In 2024 my friend Mina had a similar idea to Ale. I gave her the full explanation. She said she did not care and was going to run the experiment anyway. She made a Hinge account pretending to be me and sent all the messages she thought she would want to receive as a girl. It was ghosts and crickets. At the end of the experiment she said she was not expecting that. The experience on that app is completely different depending on which side you are on.