> Each Agile Dating experiment is called a Sprint, beginning with a Kick-off and ending with a Check-in. I found that two weeks was a good length for a Sprint - just long enough to get a decent sense of a partner.
After years of working as a dev in several "agile" shops, reading this just gives me the creeps.
Things get a little weird when the Product Owner shows up at the first Retrospective. But you have to remember, in some cultures, they even show up at Planning.
Rating your dates with Story Points also feels a lot less natural at first, until you realise how impersonal it is to rate them with exact time.
If things go well this week, I think I’m finally ready to invite her to my personal kanban.
Oh boy, the asymmetry of modern dating is really something.
Just imagine if a man tried to do what this woman is doing. Just imagine being a man and asking a woman you're dating to "approach our relationship as an experiment" that runs in 2 week "sprints" where you require your partner to "commit to radical transparency and empathy" and "commit to continuous improvement" to find out every 2 weeks if you dump them.
I guess being a woman means you can "co-create" your own rules for dating and men will just line up to compete each other for your favor. No matter how many obstacles you throw in your own way, you can still find happiness, because the world will bend over backwards to accommodate your every whim. Must be nice.
I don’t think any of this is really “obstacles”; the start of most relationships I’ve been in usually does feel like some kind of experiment where I and the other person are figuring out if when we mix, there’s chemistry, and, at least in the better ones we do talk about how it’s going (“retro”?) so if it turns out we’re both tepid on something we can try something else. I ask everyone I’m close to for transparency and empathy. I don’t really vibe with the specific and somewhat rigid Agile Nomenclature the author enjoys but generally the spirit of the ideas here make good sense to me and don’t seem wacky to do if you’re a he, she, or they.
I’ve felt the big asymmetry in trying to find women to date online as a man, but after you start talking to someone enough to discuss what you want in a relationship, if they’re not excited about the stuff you’re excited about why bother?
> I ask everyone I’m close to for transparency and empathy.
Asking for transparency I understand, but asking for empathy I don't understand. Empathy is a personality trait. Asking a person for more empathy will not make them more empathic, so what is the point of asking them? It's unreasonable and offensive.
> I’ve felt the big asymmetry in trying to find women to date online as a man, but after you start talking to someone enough to discuss what you want in a relationship, if they’re not excited about the stuff you’re excited about why bother?
If the "stuff you're excited about" is an Agile Menifesto intended to change your partner and/or their behavior, then it shouldn't come as a surprise if they're not excited about it (asking someone to change their behavior is of course more acceptable than asking to change their personality, but I wouldn't expect anyone to get excited about either of those things).
> generally the spirit of the ideas here make good sense to me and don’t seem wacky to do if you’re a he, she, or they.
Many ideas might sound good on paper. If you actually tried this (as a man who is not in the top 5% of men or whatever), you would quickly find out that all women will simply stop dating you when you start making these questions. The very first diagram that you draw in your kick-off meeting will be the point where they decide they will dump you. Each and every one of them.
> The very first diagram that you draw in your kick-off meeting will be the point where they decide they will dump you
Maybe you and I are living in different cultural contexts? I lived in SF and hang out mostly with tech professional flavored people. I think the reaction of anyone I’ve dated in the last 10 years would fall somewhere between “amused and reluctantly playing along” to “enthusiastic/excited”. I’ve never really thought about my Percentile Of Men but I feel pretty mid except for my humor / personality possibly. ¯\_(?)_/¯
> Empathy is a personality trait
Empathy is a behavior/skill and so it can be practiced!
I think the fundamental concepts introduced in the article make sense (e.g. know what you want, check in with one another regularly, etc.), but the framing of it in terms of "Agile", and the co-opting of agile terminology, does the article a disservice. Agile in practice is oft perverted to dysfunction by corporate agents, so associating dating with Agile triggers a visceral skepticism.
There is no clean way to bond your life with another life. No clean way to procreate, or die or grieve.
It’s all messy and stressful. But when you turn courtship into a “lifehack” you are not increasing authenticity and control, you are alienating yourself from your own process.
An authentic way to approach “Agile dating” would be to be clear with yourself about who you are and what you want. Then act from that. Don’t accept any best practices. Apply heuristics that seem reasonable. If that happens to map to the elaborate process that this author calls agile dating, so be it.
But I’m guessing that a simpler approach would work better for most of us.
After years of working as a dev in several "agile" shops, reading this just gives me the creeps.
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