Is This the Trick to Online Dating?

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By Denise K. James 

When it comes to finding love these days, we all need a strategy. At least, that’s what Jennie Young thinks. Young is the founder of the Burned Haystack Method, which ascribes a set of guidelines to dating apps with the goal of whittling your selection down to actually eligible partners. One of its key tenets: ruthlessly blocking anyone who doesn’t meet your standards. 

At first glance, this may seem harsh. But Young stresses that her method is based on sound theory, an application of the discourse analysis and rhetoric she teaches at the University of Wisconsin. In non-academic terms, she explains that discourse analysis looks at what people reveal to you without meaning to — in other words, what is a man who says one thing but does another really communicating? It sounds complex at first, but she assures me that even her 19-year-old students latch onto it with ease. 

“I teach this to undergrads; now they are wizards,” she laughs. “And I see now in the Burned Haystack Facebook group how savvy these women are becoming — you can teach people to decode language.”

It all started a few years ago. She was in a relationship with a “great guy,” and began reflecting on the tactics she’d used to meet him online. She soon built her method, shared it with others via her blog, and now says social media, notably the Facebook group, has “exploded.”

It all comes down to aggressive blocking, aka burning. “If you were to set a match to a haystack with the intention of burning it to find the needle, you’d want the entire haystack to burn down to the ground, making it really easy to spot the needle; you wouldn’t want it to just burn it halfway, leaving you to dig through scattered burnt hay and piles of ashes,” Young explains on her blog.

“If you keep men you’re not interested in circulating through your accounts — even if they’ve done nothing wrong — that’s what you’re doing. You’re not really burning the haystack so much as moving little parts of it to the side, but the hay keeps blowing around and back into your way, making it hard to see the needle…You’ll have to figure out your own system, but basically, unless it’s a ‘hard yes,’ it’s a ‘hard no.’ You need to Marie Kondo these guys.”

With just a handful of men to choose from, your options become clearer. This also may curb some of our more delusional dating tendencies. That man who lives two hours away and says he may or may not be interested in a long-distance relationship? Blocked. The man who asks you to come over to his apartment instead of inviting you to a restaurant? Also blocked.

For Janis, 46, the fact that Young is a college professor makes her more trusting of the method. 

“Jennie is not a dating coach or dating professional. She isn’t trying to get anyone in the group to be her client,” she says. “She’s trying to navigate the experience through rational, critical intelligence.” 

The metaphor part of the strategy — burning a haystack to find the needle — is another important component, known as primary metaphor analysis. “There are organizing metaphors that control our lives and behaviors,” Young says. “Sometimes these metaphors are incidental, and other times we choose them for a goal. In this case, I created a metaphor — burning the haystack until there’s a needle left behind — for the goal of meeting someone.”

While I’ve certainly been “burning” men on dating apps, I was not applying any particular method to the madness. Instead, I found my energy was spent in off-the-wall conversations or trying to figure out whether someone was appealing. I rid myself of numerous dudes by correcting their grammar, describing myself as hilarious and brilliant, or saying that I think one-night stands are disgusting. But Young argues that we should not be fighting with men or pushing their buttons. It’s Rule #5 in her rule book, otherwise known as “The Rules for Profile Management.” The other rules are similarly useful, from “Don’t Be a PenPal” to “No Notifications,” to the most iconic of the rules, “Block to Burn.” All are designed to be time, energy, and sanity-saving. 

The “burning” part of the method — when to block, therefore severing any chance of contact, and when not to — did take some getting used to. It’s not just for people you haven’t spoken to; it’s also for men you might have gotten your hopes up about…and then they said something unaligned with your values. As a 43-year-old single woman, I’ve been guilty of making allowances for men. They aren’t as plentiful as they were 20 years ago, and if I find someone attractive, well, who’s to say that I shouldn’t give him a million chances? But it’s this kind of thinking that Burning Haystack aims to snuff out. 

“For nearly two decades, all my online dating matches were so incompatible that I compromised on location, ideology, interests, and personal characteristics just to have a date once in a while,” admits Miranda, who is part of the Burned Haystack Facebook Group. “It seemed there were no compatible men. I went on a number of uncomfortable first dates and a handful of reasonable ones that resulted in a couple of longish-term relationships. Those relationships were not what I really wanted, and they all eventually ended because of it.”

Burned Haystack also encourages the algorithm to provide additional options. While none of the more popular apps, like Bumble or Hinge, have revealed how exactly their algorithms work, the burners are noticing a difference. 

“I'm new to the method, but I've already noticed a difference in just a week,” says Pamela, another group member. “Dating apps have been frustrating because they kept matching me with men of the opposite political persuasion, despite my setting it as a deal-breaker. Since I've started blocking them, I'm *finally* getting matches who share my alignment.”

The method is still new — Young says the majority of Facebook group members joined in the fall after her Huffington Post story — so success stories are still forthcoming. Still, the idea of reclaiming their power was already a welcome step out of what had become a dating wasteland for many women. 

“The Burned Haystack method is speeding things up for me because I’m not having to wade through a lot of men,” says Bridget. “It took time upfront to block all the ones that I didn’t find appropriate, but now that I have, I only see one or two men every few days. And that’s a much better situation for my mental health.”

As for me, while I’ve taken a break from my recent Hinge spree to focus on work and travel, I’ve found myself burning my haystack in another important way: by blocking my father, the original man in my life who doesn’t meet the standard. Cheers to true love: of the self and otherwise.