What we learned from dating 100 men: a San Francisco social experiment

How many people do you need to date before you find your “ideal candidate”?

• One? Really, just one? Wow. Just wow.
• Five? Okay, but what if you stick with Boring Bob #5 and miss your chance with Magic Mike #6?
• Fifty? Maybe #37 was the one though…did you kill your success by being too picky? Are you going to die at home while watching The Notebook and drinking wine alone, only to be discovered by your two cats and senile landlady?

Before you know it, you find yourself in a strangely applicable version of the secretary problem: given N candidates to pick from, when do you stop looking? Mathematically, the “elegant solution” is to reject the first N/e applicants and choose the next person who’s better than the previous ones. But news flash: life isn’t elegant and doesn’t have a solution. N, the number of single start-up-founding, flannel-wearing, craft-brew-drinking partners you will ever meet, is unknown — or dare we say it, unknowable.

N = ?

“Everyone is unique. Just keep looking and you’ll find the one.”

Oh, cut the crap. Basic math tells us that a statistically significant experiment requires a large sample size.

And really, how can anything in life be significant without being statistically significant?

If we’ve learned anything from Amy Webb’s TED talk, it’s that yes, we can find what we want —but only if we have a big data set, a large N. And where do we get this data?

Cue The Apps.

It is 2017 and all the cool kids are swiping left and right, trading up, seeing if people are down. It is an age of endless options. The question is no longer “How did you meet?” but rather “Which App did you use?”

Here is where we swoop in.

“N equals” chronicles the stories of three twenty-somethings testing high-N dating. We are a consultant, a software engineer, and a graduate student living in the Bay Area, conducting a grand social experiment on our love lives based on a high-volume approach. The Apps are our tools, Man Francisco is our specimen, and these posts are our lab notebooks.

This is the data-driven life. We’ve gone through thick and thin on Coffee Meets Bagel, waded through the fire and brimstone of Tinder, made connections on Hinge, looked for equality on Bumble, and sifted through entitlement on The League. Over the next few months, we’ll spill all the juicy details about our personal lives as we fill up our little black books.

We are those awful millennials you read and hear about. Call us what you will, but in the end we’re simply a few enterprising women using high throughput to uncover our futures. Live vicariously through our experiences, give us your commentary, and enjoy the stories of modern day reality. Welcome to dating in 2017.

Ava, Sarah, and Taylor