Pushkin.

Admit it. At some point, you probably fantasized about meeting somebody that you really clicked with.

And in that fantasy, things are really great.

You're into them, they're into you, you get a little jolt of joy every time you see a text from

their number. Over time, you start to think, huh, I might love this person. Or even, this is the

human I'm going to spend the rest of my life with.

But of course, there are some steps you need to go through before it gets to that point.

Before that happens, I'm going to have to have a relationship at all.

And before that's going to happen, I'm going to have to go on a date.

And before that's going to happen, I am going to have to get a date.

This is Tim Malnar, a social scientist turned dating coach in Boulder, Colorado.

Before Tim became an expert on the science of dating, he was pretty much the opposite.

I had, I think, up until the age of 28, 29, never asked someone out.

My initial approach to love was very much based on this idea that love will happen when it happens.

I just wasn't very proactive. I was spending a lot of time pursuing self-actualization,

and so trying to make sure that I was getting into

the right grad schools. And I was playing soccer over in Europe for a while, learning new languages,

doing all of these things that I thought would make me a more interesting partner. And I realized

that really wasn't moving the needle forward. So Tim decided to look for love in an unlikely place, the world of behavioral science.

I was in a grad program at the time, and I was digging into all this different academic research,

these social psychological frameworks, and I thought there must be a way to be able to use these to help myself in dating.

And I think there's this commonly used expression in academia that our research is often me search.

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