GREEN BAY (NBC26 – A University of Wisconsin-Green Bay professor is helping thousands of women find the needle in the 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 it works, according to Young
- Hear why a problem that Young thought primarily affected women over 50 is a widespread problem
(Below is a transcript of the entire broadcast report with additional details for the Internet.)
If you’ve ever used a dating app to find a steady partner, you might feel like you’re looking for a needle in a haystack. I’m Pari Apostolakos, and I’ve been talking to a professor at the University of Washington in Green Bay who has a strategy she thinks can help women find that special someone, especially over 50.
When Jennie Young, an English professor at the University of Wisconsin Green Bay, downloaded a dating app for the first time in her mid-50s, she wasn’t exactly impressed.
“I thought this was a disaster,” Young said Tuesday in her office on campus. “I feel like I’ve entered this bizarre universe.”
Since she studies rhetoric and the ways of human communication, she was confused as to why she was having such a hard time finding a long-term, monogamous partner online.
“I had no intention of applying my academic expertise to dating apps,” Young said.
But an internet search late one night changed that.
“I Googled, ‘How do you find a needle in a haystack?'” Young said. “If you really want to do that in real life, how do you do it? And the answer is you burn the haystack down. When I looked that up, I literally got goosebumps because I realized that that’s actually the key.”
And the Burned Haystack method with 10 rules was born.
First, Young advises using the app consciously as a tool and not scrolling or swiping endlessly.
Then only interact with valuable messages and do not enable app notifications on your phone.
And according to Young, the rule is the most controversial: block to burn.
Even if you haven’t been insulted, if you don’t want to meet the person, block them to prevent the app from showing you their profile again.
“Blocking is something you do when someone is misbehaving or when they seem dangerous,” Young said. “We use it for everything in Burned Haystack. It’s just used to narrow the field.”
She advises against arguing on apps or becoming “pen pals” with someone who isn’t trying to meet in real life, and against dating men who can’t or won’t plan a date.
“Let’s say a man and a woman meet and he says, ‘Would you like to meet?’ And she says, ‘Yes,’ and then he says, ‘Great,’ and then she does all the work,” Young said. “That kind of sets the tone to exacerbate these very gendered labor practices and emotional labor practices … that we’re trying to rebalance.”
Young’s method attracted national attention, especially after an article in HuffPost and its presentation in media outlets such as the New York Times.
The Facebook group “Burned Haystack Method” has more than 90,000 members and the Instagram account is followed by almost 50,000 people.
“If I have to go through this myself, I’m going to share it with other women and make it freely available,” Young said. “For women my age, there was no discussion about setting boundaries, recognizing warning signs or being able to recognize narcissism.”
In conversations with her students, Young learned that her age group was not the only one facing these challenges.
I spoke to two women in their twenties who work in Green Bay and haven’t had the best experiences with dating apps.
“You find a lot of people who use fake pictures and don’t show who they really are. They are scammers,” said former dating app user Averie Schouten. “I don’t think I would use dating apps again.”
“He is a stranger, so we don’t know exactly what his intentions are,” said Anna Dercks.
According to the Pew Research Center, a majority of women under 50 who have used dating apps report receiving unwanted sexually explicit or offensive messages. One in 10 of them have been threatened with physical violence, according to the Pew Research Center.
“When a group of young women say, ‘We’re being attacked on dating apps, we’re being attacked and raped on dates with people we met online,’ it’s no longer such a superficial problem,” 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 more traditional methods of finding the right match, such as matchmaking.
“Online dating just comes with a lot of problems. In fact, less than 10% of all relationships start online, so people are looking for an introduction,” Davis said Wednesday via Zoom.
Davis says that paying a matchmaker is a sign of how serious her clients are about finding a partner.
Young says the same thing about people who are willing to pay for premium versions of dating apps where some profiles are hidden behind a paywall.
So is it all worth the effort?
Young says that the search for a partner can easily be dismissed as trivial, but she disagrees.
“What are communities, cities and cultures built on? They are built on family structures, relationship structures,” Young said. “So if we care about the dynamics of society, we should also care about the origins of the structures that form in society.”
Young says she wants to give a message to people who are struggling to find love online: It’s not you, it’s them. In Green Bay, Pari Apostolakos NBC 26.
