Hot Take: ‘Intentional Dating’ Is a Trend We Should've Left in The Pandemic

The year is 2020. You’re single, living alone in a tiny NYC studio apartment. Lockdown has forced you into an endless loop of alone time—no crowded happy hours, no impromptu flings—just endless swiping with Netflix in the background. (Never did you think you’d long for a 2 a.m. booty call.) Eventually, you decide, you have to find a way to narrow down the herd. Trim the fat of dating app profiles that never seem to end. Enter: Intentional dating. TikTok tells you to define exactly what you want from a partner: “Use this time to get intentional,” say self-proclaimed dating coaches. “Picture who you want to be with when the world opens up.” So you make a list: ambitious, emotionally intelligent, communicative…6’ tall, scruffy, one bedroom in the West Village (Charles Street, to be exact). The coaches say the more specific you get—the more detailed you are about who this person is, and how they’ll show up for you—the more likely you’ll be to find them in the real world. 

So at first, intentional dating feels useful. It not only offers hope, but it also sells you a practical tool—something you can use to navigate dating apps. If someone’s selected Hinge prompt is, Together we could, and they answer, pre-game our kid’s soccer games (a common response), it aligns with two of your traits: They want to have kids and they don’t take life too seriously. Likewise, if their profile says ‘Jewish’—and your intentional dating checklist says ‘Catholic’—there’s no shame in hitting the ‘X’ button. It offers structure; boundaries that make it easy to delineate what you want from what you don’t. In fact, it promises something novel: Control. For the first time, dating doesn’t feel like a process that’s happening to you. ‘Intentionality’ says you’re finally in the driver’s seat of your love life.

Here's where things went sour. As weeks turned into months, loneliness began to eclipse what mattered most to you. You started focusing on what someone should be rather than who it was you saw yourself with (because, logistically, you couldn’t see yourself with anyone). Like it or not, you were now living in a world where interacting within six feet of a stranger was a health code violation. And with so much uncertainty in the air, a first date felt more like punching a hole in your ration card. It wasn’t something you’d waste on a guy who loves EDM and feigned interest by DMing you, “Yoo.” If you were going to go out with someone, they had to be worth it. A serious contender who deserved two hours under a faulty heat lamp—at a make-shift dining pod in the streets of SoHo—with an unsurprisingly impossible reservation to secure. (A booth at Bowery Beer Garden became as elusive as a table at Rao’s.)

Somewhere along the way, intentional dating turned into rigid dating. 

Nearly five years later, we’re still dating as if we’re rationing interactions and dodging airborne germs. The pandemic gave us lists and lofty (unrealistic) ideals of what love should look like, but it didn’t teach us to recognize what’s right in front of our faces. We’ve become so stuck peering over the metaphorical fence—always convinced the grass is greener—that we've made ourselves believe the perfect partner is just one more swipe away.

It’s a mentality that’s not only turned us into serial skeptics but also made us blind to the value of dating the so-called “wrong” person. Because, the truth is, not every relationship is meant to last forever. And that doesn’t mean it’s a waste of time. In fact, dating someone who doesn’t fit your checklist can teach you far more about what you truly need—and just as importantly, what you don’t. Your list might say, "communicative and over 6’ tall,” but the algorithm won’t tell you, “You’ll feel surprisingly at ease in the presence of this shy, 5’10” guy.” 

Chemistry doesn’t play by the rules, and intentional dating forgot to mention that. The strongest connections often arrive unannounced—messy, confounding and entirely unplanned. And yet, we’ve slammed the door on any kind of spontaneity. We’ve failed to acknowledge that real people have their own timelines, with their own idiosyncrasies, which is exactly what makes them feel interesting in the first place. What's more, the most worthwhile connections are often ones that feel imperfect, even awkward, at first. It’s the fear of looking desperate, pathetic, or—God forbid—unwanted that stops us from finding what’s meant for us. 

The TL;DR here is this: All intentional dating has done is convince us that “messy” equals “bad.” We’ve become too hesitant to explore connections that don’t fit neatly into the story we want to tell our kids—or the TikTok version of how we think love should look. But life isn’t black and white. The perfect person does not exist. My best advice is to let go of the checklist, and instead, be more intentional about living in the present. Stop searching for what’s next and start embracing what’s here. More to the point? Go out with that blonde if you usually date brunettes. Say yes to drinks with the cute Irish bartender—even if he's three years younger than you. Because the most worthwhile relationships? They rarely start according to plan.