GREEN BAY (NBC26 — A professor at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay is helping thousands of women find their needle in a haystack with her online dating strategy.
- Meet Jennie Young, the professor and unlikely dating app guru behind the Burned Haystack Dating Method
- Learn what "Blocking to burn," means and why Young says it works
- Hear why a problem Young assumed was mostly affecting women ages 50 and older is a more widespread issue
(The following is a transcription of the full broadcast story, with additional details for the web.)
If you've ever used a dating app to find a serious partner, you may think it's like trying to find a needle in a haystack. I'm Pari Apostolakos and I spoke with one UW-Green Bay professor who has a strategy she says can help women find that special someone, especially over the age of 50.
When Jennie Young, an English professor at the University of Wisconsin Green Bay, first downloaded a dating app in her 50s, she was less than impressed.
"I thought, well, this is a disaster," Young said in her office on campus Tuesday. "I feel like I've entered this bizarre-o universe."
Since she studies rhetoric and the way people communicate, she was confused why she was having a hard time finding a long term, monogamous partner online.
"I had no intention of applying my academic expertise to the dating apps," Young said.
But a late night internet search changed that.
"I google searched 'how do you find a needle in a haystack?'" Young said. "Like, in real life, if you really wanted to do that, how do you do it? And the answer is that you burn the haystack to the ground, and I literally got chills when I looked that up, because I realized no, that's actually, that's actually the key."
And the 10-rule Burned Haystack Method was born.
First, Young says to use the app intentionally as a tool, rather than endlessly scrolling or swiping.
Then, only engage with worthwhile messages and do not enable app notifications on your phone.
And what Young says is the most controversial rule: block to burn.
Even if they haven't offended you, if you don't want to meet that person, block them to prevent the app from showing you their profile again.
"Blocking is considered to be, like, something you do if someone's behaving badly, right? Or they seem dangerous," Young said. "We use it for everything in Burned Haystack. It's just used to narrow the field."
She discourages fighting on the apps, being a "Pen pal," with someone who doesn't try to meet in real life, and says not to go out with men who can't or won't plan the date.
"Let's say a man and a woman meet, and he says 'Would you like to meet?' And she says 'Yeah,' and then he's like 'Great,' and then she does all the work," Young said. "That kind of sets the tone to exacerbate these very gendered labor and emotional labor practices ... That we're trying to re-balance."
Young's method has garnered national attention, especially after writing an article in HuffPost and being featured in outlets like The New York Times.
The Burned Haystack Method Facebook group has more than 90,000 members, and the Instagram account is followed by nearly 50,000 people.
"If I have to survive this myself, I'm going to share it with other women, I'm going to make it freely accessible," Young said. "For women my age, there were no discourses about like, setting boundaries, or recognizing red flags, or being able to read for narcissism."
In conversations with her students, Young learned her age group wasn't the only one facing these challenges.
I spoke with two women in their 20s working in Green Bay who haven't had the best experiences with dating apps.
"You can find a lot of people who are using false images, and like not showing who they actually are. Kind of like scam people," former dating app user Averie Schouten said. "I don't think I would use dating apps again."
"It's a stranger, so you don't know their intentions completely," Anna Dercks said.
According to Pew Research Center, a majority of women under 50 who have used dating apps report receiving unwanted sexually explicit or offensive messages and Pew says one in ten of them have been threatened with physical harm.
"If a bunch of young women are saying, you know, 'We're being aggressed against on the dating apps, we're being assaulted and raped on dates [with] people we met online,' Like, it's not such a fluffy problem anymore," Young said.
April Davis is the founder of Luma Luxury Matchmaking, which serves people in Green Bay and other parts of the country. Davis says frustration with dating apps has led some people to seek out more traditional methods to find the one, like matchmaking.
"There's just a lot of issues with online dating. It's less than 10% of relationships actually that even start online, so people are looking for [an] introduction," Davis said over Zoom Wednesday.
Davis says paying for a matchmaker speaks to how serious her clients are about finding a partner.
Young says the same thing about people willing to pay for premium versions of dating apps, which put some profiles behind a paywall.
So, is it all worth it?
Young says the quest for a partner can easily be dismissed as trivial, but she begs to differ.
"What are communities and cities and cultures built upon? They're built upon family structures, relationship structures," Young said. "So if we care about the dynamics of society, we ought to care about the origins of the structures that are forming in society."
Young says her one message to share with folks struggling to find love online is, it's not you, it's them. In Green Bay, Pari Apostolakos NBC 26.
