The video game fallacy - or: stop thinking about your dates as NPC’s.

I’ve noticed a lot of posts on this subreddit asking questions like:

• Why did they unmatch me after only three messages?

• How long should I wait before texting after a date?

• The date seemed nice, why wasn’t there a second one?

I’ve got some thoughts on where these kind of questions are coming from, and some suggestions of perhaps healthier ways to think about them.

Humans, I think, naturally have a tendency to put themselves in the middle of their own world view, this becomes really obvious when you look at children. Then we slowly unlearn this as we grow up, and learn to appreciate others as individuals with their own sense of agency as developed as our own.

Most of us here are from a generation that’s grown up playing video games, where you play the protagonist, and every other character in the storyline responds based on your actions and your actions alone. That’s pretty cool - it gives you as a player agency and a sense that you’re having a real impact on the virtual world you’re in.

(I’m not trying to blame video games for creating this outlook on life by the way, just using it as an example I guess of how in our society we kind of cultivate this “main character” narrative.)

But it does exacerbate our tendency to focus on our own agency when we try to understand the outcomes. This can be problematic when we’re doing online dating for two reasons:

1. We often don’t have much information to go on, but what little we have we can go back and check and overanalyse.

2. Online dating has “gamified” dating, so it offers in some sense all the wrong cues as to how we should be thinking about others.

If we can go with the “why did they unmatch?” Or “why did they stop replying” question as an example: I would argue that the vast majority of the time, it’s a much more likely explanation (and a much more helpful mental framework to boot!) to assume they just have their own stuff going on. Maybe they’re just busy. Maybe they went on another date that went really well and they don’t feel like chatting to a bunch of matches anymore. Maybe they’re just on the app for a confidence boost and are not really ready for dating at all.

The point is: It very likely has absolutely nothing to do with you. Second-guessing yourself “what if I texted just an hour earlier or later?” is just unhelpful.

It may sound like this way of thinking about dating takes agency away from yourself, but to me it’s much more freeing to realise that not every rejection needs to be internalised as something I did “wrong”.

Attraction / romantic chemistry is a mix of luck, personal preferences, timing, circumstance, and the energy and attention you put into it. Any of those factors could be the wrench in the works - why do we insist on it being somehow our fault? Let go of that responsibility and the whole thing becomes just a much lighter experience.

Go on, give it a try!

(P.s. this works for job interviews too!)