Northeastern University women are ambitious, often at the front of their fields. Co-ops allow us to not only experiment with our careers before we even graduate, but also make money, make connections, and gain an understanding of the professional world. NU women have the confidence to make professional choices that reflect not what is expected of them, but what they want.
So why are women who are so adept at being assertive in their NUWorks profiles unable to do the same with their dating profiles, and more importantly, in their dating lives?
It’s not just Northeastern women. In Boston, “the percentage of recent college grads now earning at least $40 000 a year is twice as high for women as for men […] the reason young women are successful is because they take initiative – so why the heck would anyone tell them to take the passive approach when it comes to finding love?”
This is the question posed by Jon Birger in his new book, Make Your Move. His first book, Dateanomics, which he admits was “more pop science than a traditional self-help book,” examined why so many young women seem to be unable to find men from a data-driven point of view. Make Your Move applies that data to offer several answers.
Each chapter posits different data-backed strategies to help young women overcome “the man-deficit,” a phenomenon in which “since 2000, four women have graduated from college for every three men,” causing the number of college-educated men in the dating pool to start small and keep shrinking over time. In fact, Birger argues that modern hookup culture has “little to do with Tinder or porn or Facebook, […] and everything to do with lopsided sex ratios among college grads.”
(for more on this, listen to his conversation with Rayna Greenberg and Ashley Hesseltine on their podcast, Girls Gotta Eat”).
Other dating books “urge women to feign disinterest or dislike and then make men guess whether they want to be pursued or left alone.” This book begins by imploring women to start by “breaking the rules” of traditional dating. First, because “playing hard to get doesn’t work so well in a post #MeToo world, one where men struggle to decipher which women are playing a game and which women simply wish to be left alone.” Second, because “dating would be easier if all you had to do to land Mr. Right was ignore him. But that is not the real world. What is real is being true to yourself – leaning into dating the same way you lean into career, education, politics, and so much else”.
So how do we go about breaking the rules? Birger’s first piece of advice is to get off the apps, which “Millenials spend ten hours a week on,” and do the “Make Your Move Offline Dating Challenge.” Why? I talked to Birger about this over email, and here’s what he said:
“If you wouldn’t go on an app to find a best friend, why would you go online to search for a soulmate? Studies show that the marriage rates are lower and the breakup rates higher for online dating than for the more traditional ways of meeting people that I endorse in Make Your Move. The one-year breakup rate for online couples was 16% — versus 9% for couples who met through friends & family, 8% who met as neighbors, 7% who met in college, 6% who met as co-workers and 1% who met at church or another house of worship.
It would be easier to overlook the high breakup rates — especially during COVID times, when dating is hard for everyone — if there weren’t a whole different set of concerns related to women’s safety. According to a recent Pew Research survey, 53% of female dating-app-users believe online dating is unsafe and 19% have been threatened with violence.
If there were a singles bar where one-fifth of the women were threatened with violence, who would ever go back?”
So where do we meet men if not online?
Birger offers several ideas to overcome this. My favorite is: “Long live the office romance!”
“The workplace is the single best place to find a romantic partner” because your coworkers already know your values, quirks, and priorities. You can be sure they are “unlikely to be axe murderers, but they probably won’t be deadbeats either.” And you, an NU woman, working brilliantly at your coop, are in a prime position to take advantage of this. Also, if things don’t work out, you’re only there for six months anyway.
Another strategy Birger puts forward is to simply “Date who you know.” In our email exchange, he told me about a conversation he had with a class at Rollins College in Florida. “One of the students asked how young people are supposed to meet if not through the dating apps. I posed a question to the entire class in response: I asked how many of them had someone from their daily, real-world lives whom they know and like and have ever wondered about dating. There were 30 people in the class. Thirty hands went up.”
I love this story because it exemplifies Birger’s point that you don’t need apps to meet people you would be interested in being with, and that even though dating who you know may pose risks of awkwardness, it also guarantees you will already have the coveted “perceived similarities,” which can lead to not only finding a boyfriend, but a best friend.
As someone who has been in a relationship for a few years now, I wasn’t sure I would really care to read a dating book. Also, as someone who hasn’t read many whole books for fun since middle school but has spent many hours shamelessly watching Hallmark movies, I wasn’t sure I would be able to read a whole dating book. Nevertheless, I loved reading Make Your Move and did so in less than two days. Something about Birger’s witty tone mixed with the data-driven approach and the way he uses real-life stories to drive his points forward makes his arguments not only compelling but memorable.
This book reads like a collection of stories that could each be their own Hallmark movie, or like the inspiration for you to use Make Your Move to kickstart your own romantic ever-after. It’s a must read for anyone interested in good storytelling, amusing pop culture references, unimpeachable data on a field everyone thinks they know about and perspicuous explanations on what it is actually like, hot takes on dating in an online world, and actual dating advice for the modern college girl.
Buy Make your Move on Amazon, and follow Jon Birger on Instagram and Twitter for more on dating and cute Lily content!
