After going through a breakup last year, Connie Li, a software engineer, rejoined dating apps, ready to dip her toe back into the water. But many of the men who reached out to her only seemed to want casual, so she tried something new.
Inspired by the long, résumé-like dating bios he saw posted by others online, he created his own profile. In a file longer than this article, Ms. Li, 33, himself as monogamous, short and easy to wear colorful clothes. He added that he was undoubtedly a cat in a previous life, “just one of those weird warehouse people like.”
He posted a view-only document, what its creators called a “date-me doc,” on social media, and the responses started pouring in.
“There’s something slightly annoying about ‘date-me docs’ that reminds me of the early days of the internet,” Ms. Li, referring to the way people used to meet on AIM, AOL’s defunct instant messaging service. “I’m still on apps, though I’ve backed off heavily in recent months because they just don’t seem to be working for me in terms of getting serious fights.”
Ms. Li, who recently moved to San Francisco from New York, is part of a small but growing group of people who use online sharable documents to find love, often on Google Docs. “Date-me docs” are both a burgeoning dating trend and a relic of a bygone era, more akin to personal newspaper ads than any bio posted on an algorithm-driven, swipe-based app .
Since she wrote her profile last fall on Notion, a note-taking web application, Ms. Li said she went on about 15 first dates with men who contacted her after reading this.
The popularity of “date-me docs” among some urbanites stems from signs of people experiencing burnout from dating apps and increasingly turning to professional matchmakers, as well as TikTok, Instagram or other social media sites to find romance. Top dating apps saw a slowdown in user growth last year, according to a Morgan Stanley report.
Compared to the number of people on dating apps — about a third of adults in the United States have used one, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted last year — the number of “date-me doc” creators is small and mostly confined to people who work in the tech industry and live in major US cities.
It’s hard to know how many “date-me docs” exist, because some people don’t post their profiles publicly, and instead send their profiles to someone if they’re interested. A database compiled by a “date-me doc” creator includes more than 100 “date-me docs” from people in cities including London; Chicago; Toronto; Dayton, Ohio; and Denver. Another has profiles in Seattle; Ottawa; São Paulo, Brazil; and Los Angeles.
“Date-me docs” do not follow a set structure, but tend to be simple text documents that include age, gender, sexual orientation, hobbies and interests, as well as some of the best and worst traits. of the writer. Some look like polished websites, with clean designs, images and embedded music tracks. Others look more like extended resumes.
José Luis Ricón, who works at a biotech start-up in Silicon Valley, said he decided to make a “date-me doc” after a series of casual dates with women he met on exes app. Over the past year, Mr. Ricón, a 30-year-old from Madrid, has dated four of the six women who contacted him after reading his bio. “Even if it’s the first time you’ve met, there’s already a lot to share,” she says, as other “date-me doc” creators are in her extended social network.
About half of people who have used dating apps have had positive experiences, according to the Pew survey, involving 6,034 people in the United States. But discontent can grow. Last year, 46 percent of users said their overall experience was negative, slightly higher than 42 percent in 2019, the survey found.
Women are more likely to have a negative experience than men. About two-thirds of women under 50 on dating apps said they had received physical threats, experienced unwanted constant contact from a match, been called offensive names or sent of unsolicited sexual messages or images.
Such experiences lead some people to seek alternative ways of finding love. Although “date-me docs” aren’t yet widespread, they’re a potential antidote to that burnout, says Jessica Engle, a Bay Area-based therapist and dating coach.
He describes “date-me docs” as a hybrid of dating sites (which, unlike dating apps, allow people to write longer profiles) and traditional matchmaking, which tends to happen organically. way within one’s social circle. “The limitations of this may be that there are fewer people engaged in this way of meeting people, so there will simply be fewer matches,” he said.
Unlike profiles that are limited in word count and often focus on what advertisers are looking for, some people risk sharing too much, too soon.
Katja Grace, a 36-year-old artificial intelligence researcher, says people tend to talk about themselves too critically in their “date-me docs.” “I encourage people to say more about what makes them a good dater,” she said, after reviewing about 100 responses from men and women she received after the posted her “date-me doc” on Twitter in April.
Still, some of the responses have potential, Ms. Grace, adding that she still dates people who contacted her after reading her “date-me doc.”
“Date-me docs” aren’t for everyone, says creator Steve Krouse, 29 a centralized database of “date-me docs” last year after seeing them posted on various websites. “You have to be part of a unique internet, open-source culture,” he said. When creating his own “date-me doc,” Mr. Krouse, who lives in Brooklyn, wrote that he was shy about dancing in public and didn’t like to travel, so people who viewed those preferences as non-starters would know. contact him.
You can only glean so much from an online description, he acknowledged. However, he says that it is better than other methods of finding a partner.
“In my entire life, I’ve never gone to a bar to meet a stranger,” he said. “I can’t even imagine.”
