The Washington Post’s Date Lab is perhaps D.C.’s most regular and prominent social science experiment. Two strangers, set up by newspaper editors with limited information, on a date they know will be rated and read by thousands of people … Can it really work?
For the uninitiated: The Post selects two D.C.-area singles who seem compatible on paper from among a pool of several thousand applicants, and then pays for their blind date. Afterward, the Postfollows up to ask each participant’s memories of the night and rate the date from 1 to 5. About a month later, they check in to find out whether the couple stayed together.
The weekly feature regularly goes viral, or at least local-viral.
More than 500 people commented on the story of the guy who described his perfect date as “a Southern belle wedding planner who knows her way around the kitchen.” Sometimes it’s because they’re heartwarming, like a romantic slow dance between two 50-something daters. But more often it’s something cringeworthy, like time the Post accidentally sent a straight woman on a date with a gay woman. Jezebel once described a 2016 date as “historically shitty.”
So just how often does it actually succeed?
DCist crunched the numbers, analyzing the 100 blind dates that occurred after the feature’s August 2017 redesign. Of those, nine couples were still definitively dating a month later, a mere 9 percent.
In fact, most other couples often didn’t even come close to lasting a full month, with 41 percent ending with Date Lab’s most famous catchphrase “No further contact.” Harsh. And that’s not even counting similar phrases like “No second date,” used four times.
And that’s after a mere month. Date Lab’s five-year anniversary article in 2011 attempted to survey as many previous participants as possible. Given far longer time windows after the initial date, as many as five years, only 2 percent of participants were still together.
The Post has also gotten flak over the years for featuring relatively few same-sex couples. Things seem to have improved somewhat, but it’s still a much more limited data set—just 10 dates in the period we surveyed. With only one making it to the one-month mark, that’s basically the same success rate.
So is the point of Date Lab, created in 2006, actually to match people up—or primarily to entertain the public, especially when the dates flame out spectacularly so often?
Washington Post Magazine editor Richard Just swears that Date Lab editor Annys Shin and the section’s writers really do try “to set up dates that they think will work. … If we were trying to set up disasters for the purpose of entertaining readers, we wouldn’t be operating in good faith.”
Just doesn’t deny the column’s low success rate, but suggests that it’s irrelevant. “Our success rate isn’t the ultimate measure of the column’s success as a journalistic feature,” he says.
He also offers his own explanation: the quasi-public nature of the dates–and the personality types more common among people who would willingly step forward to declare, Hunger Games style, “I volunteer as tribute!”
“The fact of being on Date Lab influences the outcomes. We can only match people who sign up, and our database is self-selecting,” Just explains. “And once you’re on the date, the fact that you know the date will be written about undoubtedly influences the way things unfold.”
It’s not just the write-up, there’s the actual score to think about. Daters are asked to rate the evening from 1 to 5. And looking at that same data, neither gender is having a better time.
Among Date Lab’s 90 straight pairings, women on average gave a 3.88 rating, while men on average gave a 3.99 score—about even.
Although the date rating scale is technically supposed to be from 1 to 5, there was only one instance of someone giving a rating below the ostensibly average score of 2.5. They’re all Paula, or at worst Randy, but none are really Simon.
In straight dates, that 2.5 score was given only twice by women, but six times by men.
The same imbalance occurs on the other end of the spectrum, too. A perfect 5 score was given only 10 times by women, but 14 times by men.
Despite having almost identical average scores, men’s standard deviations proved wider. For whatever reason, there were a lot more cases of “She’s the one” or “She’s awful” than “He’s the one” or “He’s awful.”
It’s not that surprising to see daters judging their blind dates so readily, says Erika Ettin, a D.C.-based dating coach and founder of date coaching business A Little Nudge, and cohost of the dating advice podcast So We Met Online.
“Is it Date Lab or is it D.C.? I would say neither,” Ettin says. “I think it’s people making snap judgments. That’s universal.”
And is dating actually more difficult in D.C. than elsewhere, as Washingtonians love to lament?
“No,” flatly replies Ettin, who has clients across the country, even as she calls D.C. home. “In this world where everything is just a swipe away, everyone thinks the perfect person is right around the corner. That makes people less inclined to give their date a real chance.”
“People love to argue with me on this, but I think dating in D.C. is actually very similar to dating in most major cities,” Ettin continues. “I work with people in pretty much every major city. People love to blame it on their city, but then I’ll push. ‘What are you doing? Are you putting yourself out there?’ And when I drill down on it, they’re usually doing something wrong.”
Washington Post Magazine editor Just argues there is as much to learn—and perhaps more to learn—from the unsuccessful dates as from the successful ones, given the cumulative portrait it paints of this town and its inhabitants.
“Date Lab is an anthropological project, albeit a fun and light-hearted one. I think that, from reading Date Lab over time, you can definitely learn things about dating in D.C.,” Just argues. “And maybe not just about dating, but about the way people in D.C. relate to each other, and even about their hopes, dreams, and self-conceptions.”
Still, success stories do happen, and they can be truly heartwarming when they do occur.
Take April’s installment with Willie and Renee, two 50-something divorcees whose blind date was scheduled for Valentine’s Day. Bonding over a shared love of cooking and exercise, both rated their date a perfect 5. Ending sentence: “Willie texted about a month after their date to say they are officially a couple.”
Prior to that was January’s installment with Mickey and Jessica, who bonded over their shared love of sitcom Parks and Recreation, especially because she’s often told she looks like character April Ludgate while he’s often told he looks like character Ben Wyatt. (Photos accompanying the article confirm this.)
And you never know who will work out. One can’t help but wonder what the editors were thinking when they set up Philip and Megan, an environmental lawyer for the Sierra Club and a public relations executive for a firm whose biggest client was oil behemoth Chevron, respectively.
Yet instead of finding that juxtaposition irreconcilable, the article read, “Philip estimates that 75 percent of their time together was taken up by laughter.” They were still together a month later.
Since the feature’s July 2006 inception, at least three marriages have resulted. But Date Lab has created thousands of other lifelong commitments: People who religiously read it every single week … until death do us part.
