How to Not Die Alone: The Surprising Science of Finding Love

by Logan Ury

Step 3: Tell others. If you publicly announce your goals to others, you’re more likely to stay focused on them. A team of researchers led by social psychologist Kevin McCaul demonstrated this in a fascinating experiment. They took students who had a particularly hard test coming up and divided them into different groups. They asked one set of students to share their target test score with their group. They instructed a different group of students to keep their goal private. They found those who had shared with others felt more committed to the goal, spent more time studying for the test, and were 20 percent more likely to reach their goal and earn their target score. Tell two to three of your closest friends or family members that you’re going to start dating. Share your deadline with them. You’ll feel more motivated to act once you’ve made this public pronouncement because now your reputation is on the line. (Bonus benefit: Sharing your dating goals with your community opens the door for people to set you up on dates. In Chapter 9, you’ll find practical tips on asking to be set up.) Step 4: Commit to your new identity. We all have different identities: daughter, friend, Beyoncé fan, runner, and so on. We act differently depending on which of those identities we lean into at any given moment. A group of Stanford and Harvard researchers found that we can actually shift people’s behavior