My Story of Burning the Haystack
I started intentionally using my academic background in rhetoric (and my more recent interests in humor writing!) on the dating apps about two years ago. The first article I wrote about that experience can be seen here (and many of you probably already saw it in the facebook group, albeit with a different cover pic. The original cover pic featured my boyfriend and me, which was fitting because that was the relationship the article addressed).
We are no longer together, and out of respect for Scott (his real name, already used in that article) I don’t want to go into too much detail. It’s also difficult in a research project—one that sprang from my own personal experience—to determine how much sharing is over-sharing and how much sharing is relevant to the project itself and to the other participants.
I do feel like I owe you all some degree of explanation, though, especially when it comes to differentiating between the success of the method and the failure of one relationship (and the word “failure” is debatable; we were together for nearly two years, and overall it was a wonderful experience—more on that below).
The method itself worked. In addition to Scott, I met a *lot* of other nice men who were far more datable and much more relationship-minded than I had before I started using it. Scott was the one I happened to choose, and I do wish the relationship had worked out, but in the end we just wanted different things. I was ready for us to move toward a more serious life partnership, and he wanted to continue a more casual dating relationship (still exclusive and monogamous, but not moving toward anything like co-habitation or marriage, which are things I knew I still eventually wanted).
That said, I can say that from using this method I met someone who was not only really fun, but honest, kind, responsible, and trustworthy. I don’t regret the time we spent together, and I think highly of him as a person. I also don’t think that he intentionally misled me or wasted my time or anything like that. We did have all “the talks” at the beginning of the relationship about what we wanted for our futures, and at that time we wanted the same things. Over the course of the relationship, his feelings changed, but that happens. I’ve certainly been in relationships where my feelings have changed, and in the end, we have control over a lot, but we certainly don’t get to control other people’s feelings and we can’t entirely control our own.
When I started the Burned Haystack project, I did not intend to be a research subject myself because Scott and I were still together. I’m now in a position where I’ll be throwing myself back in, which I’m not excited about, to be honest, but that’s why I now need my own method more than ever. I still want to meet the person I’ll spend the rest of my life with, like so many of you do, and I’m hoping to burn the haystack for good this time. This is the epitome of “high-stakes” research now, I guess. 😊
In the interest of providing a little more background, given everything I’ve just told you, I’m pasting in below two links (one audio and one video of the audio-capture, in case you want to see us) to a podcast Scott and I did during the summer of 2021 (in which we talk specifically about the conditions of our original pairing through my purposefully-crafted profile). That first article got a lot of attention and ended up on Reddit and TikTok and a few other places, and as a result the hosts of this podcast found us. I thought Scott was a good sport to be willing to do it so early in our relationship.
It’s probably also worthwhile here to say that, from day one, he conducted himself on the app in the way we’ve already described as ideal in terms of being a solid indicator of someone you might want to move forward with: He began our communication with a smart, funny, and respectful message that clearly indicated he’d read and appreciated my profile; he gave me his real name and occupation so I knew he was who he said he was; he asked me out within days and offered a really great first date plan that included coffee and a walk to a lighthouse and then turned into dinner because it was going so well. So there ARE men out there who will do all these things! :)
Links are below, and thanks for your time reading this --- Onward! 😊 #BurnTheHaystack
~Jennie
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qoakHT_pwso&t=556s
