Why We Should Treat Dates Like Job Interviews

Few things could sound as offensive and unromantic as to draw comparisons between hiring an employee – and getting together with a partner. 

We’re highly attuned to the many differences between commercial recruitment and love: money plays an overt role in the first, ideally rather little in the second. One is about cold objectives and annual targets, the other about feelings and tenderness.

But we can end up emphasising the differences at our cost. An unhelpful nebulousness can afflict our search for love. We can fall prey to notions that it would be vulgar or unseemly to think directly about how to accomplish our ends, that we must trust in fate and keep things ‘old fashioned’. We may imagine that if someone was truly meant to be with us, they would – paradoxically – arrive in our lives with minimal intent on our part (the less we have to do, the more it was meant to be). 

But when we look back at the embers of failed relationships, what often emerges is that we simply weren’t clear enough, with ourselves or with the other, as to what we needed. We failed to see that we had certain implicit requirements which we omitted to explore with necessary forthrightness.

Compare this with our approach at work. It would be odd, when tasked with hiring someone, to conclude that we had to let time take its course. We understand the urgency. No less intense time pressures exists, in a more concealed form, in love (we need only ask an older person about the windows that lie between 20 and 30 and 30 and 40). 

When recruiting at work, we also have little compunction getting clear as to what a role entails. We understand that there are criteria and that it helps to list them. Somewhere inside, we have comparably defined requirements in love, we’re just a lot more hesitant about drawing them up. We might (let’s imagine) need someone who was: 

— Interested in psychology

— Working on themselves

— Ready to put a relationship above their friends

— Settled in their careers

— Neither having nor wanting children

— Keen to travel

— Attractive to us – which probably means not too tall and maybe with glasses.

But to draw out such criteria, we need to understand ourselves – and then feel sufficiently legitimate and confident about our wishes to dare go out into the world in search of them.

We should import into our hunt for love some of the unembarrassed state of mind that naturally accompanies us in the workplace. Why wouldn’t we use technological tools? Why wouldn’t we set aside a few hours regularly for the search? Why wouldn’t we tap our networks in undisguised ways? Why wouldn’t we – on dates – run through a prescribed set of questions (subtly delivered)?

To do anything less disregards the fundamental basis of our lives: that we have limited time.

Jane Austen would have understood. Every date is at heart a recruitment interview, for which we need to show up with a privately held brief and the right set of questions. The breadsticks and olives shouldn’t distract us: this is possibly the most serious work of our lives, given the contribution that love can make to life’s richness.

The best way to guarantee our finer, higher emotions may be to double down on their practical underpinnings: the best guarantor of love is a very un-Romantic mindset.