Written by our founder, Sarah.
What does a dating journal actually look like after years of dating? Here’s mine, start to finish. Like a lot of people, I met most of my dates online, which meant a lot of dates — some I never spoke to again, some who became close friends, and one who became my fiancé. Writing it all down is what got me through it, and somewhere in the middle of that I decided to build a dating journal other people could use too. (Here’s why I created the Date Book.)
As you flip through, you’ll see entries from different points in my dating life. But it starts before the Date Book existed — scribbles and charts in a random notebook. (I wish they were a little nicer.)
So here they are.
Before the Date Book
Here’s where it started. Just a list — names, how many dates we’d been on, and what I remembered of each one. This scribbled list is what became the Date Log in the final version of The Date Book. Over time I started reflecting more, but at first that went into my everyday journal, not a separate dating one.
This is what it looked like when it lived in my regular journal — everything in one place, and none of it easy to find or look back on later. That was the problem the Date Book was built to fix.
The Idea for the Date Book
Here I’m playing around with different formats and questions for the Date Book.
doesn’t look anything like this.
Some reflection work I found helpful. A similar prompt made it into the final version of the Date Book.
The Finished Date Book
My filled-out exercises.
The Entry That Turned Out to Be Ryan
That’s the whole thing — from scribbles in a random notebook to filled-in, structured pages. The difference between them isn’t neatness. It’s that the structured version is one I can actually read back and learn from, which the loose notes never were. The scribbles got me through; The Date Book is the version I wish I’d had from the start.
Warmly,
Sarah
