So you’ve found your way here — maybe through a post on dating and journaling, maybe from The Date Book — and you’re wondering who we are, and why you’d take anything we say seriously.
Here’s the honest answer: we’re not going to give you dating advice. We don’t think advice is the thing you’re missing. There’s more of it than ever — podcasts, lists, coaches, an endless feed of people who’ve never met you telling you what to do. The trouble isn’t that it’s all wrong. It’s that none of it knows your situation, and dating is nothing but specifics.
So instead, we’ll tell you plainly what we believe about dating — and you can decide whether we see it the way you do.
How you think about dating shapes how you date.
The frame you bring to it matters more than any single tip. Treat dating as a war to be won, and you’ll treat people like opponents. Treat it as a win/lose situation, and that’s the outlook — and the result — you tend to end up with. A view of dating that’s cynical about humanity or gender, that treats relationships as transactional, doesn’t just describe your dating life. It quietly builds it. So it’s worth being careful about the one you adopt.
We believe who you date is one of the most important decisions you’ll ever make.
Relationships are a huge part of a life, and your dating life deserves your energy and attention. You can wander in and hope for the best — or you can pay attention, on purpose. We built The Date Book for the second option: a structured place to think about what you actually want, and to keep track of what’s actually happening, instead of trying to hold it all in your head.
Who we are & what we believe
We don’t believe dating is a zero-sum game or an adversarial pursuit, and we don’t believe it’s a miserable slog to be endured.
We aren’t going to promise you’ll meet the love of your life tomorrow.
And we aren’t going to give you ten ways to attract a billionaire who rides in on a white horse and showers you with free, no-strings-attached money.
What we believe is simpler, and less thrilling: most people want the same few things from a partner — someone who shares their values, hopes, and dreams, who treats them with kindness and respect, who they’re genuinely attracted to and glad to be around. Not a fantasy. A person. The work is figuring out, honestly, who that is for you — and whether the person in front of you is actually them.
We are neither cynics nor hopeless romantics. We don’t believe dating is about writing down a list of characteristics and finding someone who fits them. (That doesn’t work.) And we don’t believe it’s about always following your heart — not when your heart keeps leading you into bad places. We believe in both logic and emotion when it comes to dating: heart and mind together.
And we believe dating is worth doing with attention — not gamed, not endured, but taken as seriously as something this consequential deserves.
Who is this for?
We made sure it works for anyone — whether you’re dating women, men, both, or neither.
Because we all want the same things from a relationship.
Partners who share our values, hopes, and dreams.
Relationships built on mutual respect and trust.
Someone we’re attracted to and can actually have fun with.
The Date Book is built around those universal wants — not around a demographic.
What we hope you get out of dating (besides love)
I’m one of those people who genuinely loved online dating. I made a lot of friends, met a wide and strange slice of humanity, and had a good time — even with the heartbreak and the rejection and the occasional genuinely awful date.
A lot of people hate dating now, and it’s true that online dating culture has gotten warped.
You’ll probably come out of it with a few stories — the person who stole your wallet, the one who picked a fight with the waiter.
But we hope you look back on this stretch of your life and find it was, on balance, kind of fun — a strange and interesting time that happened before you met your person, one you can think about fondly.
That’s what we believe. If you see dating roughly the way we do, you’re in the right place.
