About

Dating in a Dysfunctional Market

Hi there. I’m a male named Brooke Allen. You can learn about me at BrookeAllen.com.

After a divorce in 2024 I decided to try on-line dating hoping to make new friends even if not a partner.

I found the experience dispiriting. Although it wasn’t hard attracting women who wanted to at least talk on the phone, most conversations felt like job interviews from hell.

A woman explained what was happening to me. Everyone on the site had been looking at the same profiles for a long time and when I showed up, I was what they call “fresh meat” so they hopped on me. “Don’t let all the attention go to your head,” she said.

When I explained how much I disliked what felt like interrogations, she explained that I was experiencing what was called The Burned Hastack Method. It was all the rage. The idea is that finding “Mr. Right” is like looking for a needle in the haystack, so you had to “burn the haystack” by eliminating anyone with a “red flag” as fast as you can.

This felt like how the default way the job market works: Run one ad, get hundreds or thousands of resumes. Use a computer to filter the field down to a dozen candidates for phone interviews, call three in for a look-see, and offer a job to one and forget about how you treated all the rest.

Even as an employer, I hated that approach so much that I turned it on its head. I created an inclusive approach to hiring that I wrote about in Science here: Hiring in a Dysfunctional Job Market, and in Qartz here: How my life was changed when I began caring about the people I did not hire.

I was about to delete my profile when I though I’d try something different. What if, instead of looking for that “perfect mate” I looked for someone who’d like to co-create something of value to others. Here are my thoughts in song form.

Minutes after posting my profile I was contacted by Cathy, a retired singer. That evening we met for dinner to talk about what we might create.

At our next meeting we decided to get sex and romance off the table and talk about what we might want to create. I said I’d like to create a website to promote this new way of dating. She suggested CoCreateDate.com and because it was available, I bought it right at the meeting.

Cathy wanted to write a and produce a musical about our first date, so that’s what she did. She called Sparks, andy you can read about it here.

I wanted help building the website and helping others have creative dates while she wanted to get started on the musical right away. I became very interested in using AI in creative ways, and that led to the website AlexBakerloo.com, a collaboration between my alter-ego Len Bakerloo, and my chatbot who named herself Alex. It wasn’t until mid-2026 that I revisited the CoCreate Date project.