Online dating is mostly miserable. You spend hours searching for your perfect match — or, let’s be honest, anyone who isn’t a complete sociopath — only to discover the pickings are decidedly slim.
Jennie Young feels your pain. Her adventure on the apps was going nowhere until she decided to use her academic training ― she has a Ph.D. in rhetoric and discourse studies ― to “read between the lines” with the profiles she was being served.
This led her to change her behaviour and how she interacted with the men she was meeting, and soon she was getting exponentially better results while spending exponentially less time swiping.
Young decided to share what she’d learned with the world in hopes other people (especially women and nonbinary folks) would have the same success she did. The Burned Haystack Dating Method was born.
Soon after, she launched a Facebook group for the method, where thousands of members now support each other while sharing their highs and lows of looking for love on the internet.
The method, whose name came from Young asking Google “how do you find a needle in a haystack?” and learning “you burn it to the ground and only the needles remain,” encourages its users to take a radically different approach to online dating.
“What women are told is ‘Be as appealing as you can to as many people as possible’ and ‘Give everybody a chance,’” Young told us – Raj Punjabi and Noah Michelson, co-hosts of HuffPost’s Am I Doing It Wrong? podcast – when we chatted with her a few weeks ago. But you actually never want to do either of those things.
“Burned Haystack says do the opposite of that: ‘Be exactly who you are’ — you really only want to appeal to a very narrow field of people who would actually want to match with you — and ‘Give nobody the benefit of the doubt,’” she explained. “There’s really not time — it’s a waste of time! So we use blocking extremely liberally.”
That’s why the method’s trademark phrase is “block to burn.”
“I think that’s a little different,” Young noted. “Blocking is generally presented as something you use if someone is being toxic or offensive or frightening. In Burned Haystack, we block everybody we don’t want to go out on a date with. All the apps have a mechanism to do that so it doesn’t hurt the other person ... and what that does is prevent the apps from recycling people to you, because they all do if you don’t block, and then you’re just wasting time.”
Young also told us the why photos without makeup or filters tend to be the most liked on apps, how writing a “bitchy profile” can help you find love, and lots more unique tips and tricks for doing online dating better:
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