How to Find Your Mate

Introducing: Datecraft

Apr 01, 2024

A Brief Announcement

We’ve been honored and humbled by reader support for Statecraft's core mission over the past 8 months, and we’ll continue to execute on that mission: explaining how policymakers get big, hairy things done.

But we’ve also received consistent feedback from readers: sometimes Statecraft can be a little too wonky, too brainy. One reader asks, “are there any lessons from Statecraft that apply to normal people like me?”

It’s a good question, and the answer is yes. Following extensive consultations with readers and policy practitioners, we’re launching a new series, taking lessons from policy practitioners and applying them to the most intimate, human policy challenge: love.

Introducing: Datecraft.

Unlike traditional Statecraft interviews, Datecraft will not contain roadmaps for readers trying to get big hairy things done. We will not push anyone to explain just “how the sausage gets made.” Public, private partnerships are a sensitive topic.

Rather, Datecraft will strive to help illuminate the inner workings of our affinitive attachments by speaking to people who have built up insider knowledge of how things really work.

We’ll be showcasing a range of perspectives: although datecraft is the art of the possible, we have as much to learn from notable failures as from the most admirable successes. Building romantic capacity isn’t about turning one dial in a particular direction: each date study will tell us something novel.

As Eva Illouz writes about “romantic postmodernity” in The End of Love:

If traditional cultural sociology is based on the assumption that actors have strategies of action, …what is precisely difficult for actors is to develop a strategy of action for their relationships.

To help develop our own relationship strategies of action, we asked experts in family policy to weigh in.

Jenna Silber Storey and Benjamin Storey, Senior Fellows at the American Enterprise Institute

In an essay for First Things, you point out that we're bad at knowing what we'll want in the future, or who we'll want; we're bad prediction machines. How can we get better at finding a romantic partner?

“We’re “bad prediction machines” because there is an art of falling in love at first sight — and we've lost it. It takes skill to see a potential spouse in the slope of a shoulder, the love of your life in a laugh overheard from across the room. Think Dante and Beatrice, Rosalind and Orlando! As Blaise Pascal says, the heart has its reasons — and if you learn to listen to them well (and question them intelligently), they will guide you better than any dating app algorithm.”

Patrick Brown, Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center

Patrick, you write the excellent newsletter Family Policy Updates. What is your family policy?

“Personally, my family policy is that there is to be no jumping on the nice sofa. But on a macro level my policy is that the state needs to do something about the positive externalities of having kids.
“It may not feel like it when my kids are making their presence extremely felt on an airplane or at the library, but a society with fewer kids is one with lower long-term growth, higher political tensions, and fewer opportunities to be pulled out of ourselves to focus on what really matters. Left to their own devices, markets are incredible tools at sanding away inefficiencies, and having kids certainly leads to higher costs (measured both in the cost of berries and diapers as well as forgone income and career advancement). So there’s a role for the state to compensate families a little for the burdens they bear as well as keep an eye on barriers (like housing costs) that can prevent families from forming in the first place.”

Christine Emba, Staff Writer at The Atlantic

Your book Rethinking Sex: A Provocation was hailed as both a "call to arms" and a "searing examination." But can a searing examination make for a good date?

“The point of dating is to get to know someone in a low-stakes setting, not to interrogate them! So no, a ‘searing examination’ generally doesn’t make for a good date (although I'm sure there are exceptions -- and I'd love to hear the story!)
“That said it is worth examining *yourself* before you get out there onto the romantic scene. What beliefs do you hold about sex and relationships, and are they actually true, and helpful? Are you prepared to treat your fellow daters ethically and with care? If not, maybe put off the date -- or cross-examination-- until you’ve figured that out.”

Emma Waters, Senior Research Associate at the Richard and Helen DeVos Center for Life, Religion, and Family

You’ve previously argued that Phyllis Schlafly was right about quite a bit. But what can today's young lovers learn from the marriage of Fred and Phyllis Schlafly?

“Fred and Phyllis Schlafly’s marriage shows us that the ‘strongest’ women are those married to strong men. Phyllis was an anti-fragile and untouchable force of nature in her political work because she had the luxury of relying on her husband—not a fickle and demanding corporation—for her financial support and encouragement."