Can They Commit to the Bit?

If I’d put the hours I spent swiping on dating apps into learning Mandarin, Hindi, and Arabic, I would have unlocked roughly two billion additional romantic prospects by now.

Instead I developed Phantom Tinder Thumb and found myself mentally swiping left or right on strangers in real life.

Now that I’m single again—for the first time in five years—my friends keep asking me the same question: “Are you on the apps?”

Hard no. I already gave the apps years of my life and I want them back.

So what am I doing instead?

Bits.

A bit is a bid for connection. You invent a tiny, absurd world together and see if the other person follows you into it. You serve up a piece of nonsense; they make sense of it, or they don’t. Whimsical verbal tennis. Either way, the rally tells you what you need to know.

Within seconds, I learn more about a person than any profile could tell me—a compression algorithm for chemistry. If a picture is worth a thousand words, a bit is worth a hundred thousand.

My last relationship sprang out of a Mango Bodega Crawl. I invited a guy to wander around Brooklyn with me, sampling dried mango from every corner store in the neighborhood to determine a winner. (Sun-dried took the crown.) We dated for four and a half years.

The Hand Lick

A tall, beautiful stranger sprawled out on a daybed in the quiet room at a Brooklyn house party. It was the part of the night when people politely negotiate their recreational chemistry, and he asked what I was into.

“I don’t do drugs,” I said. “I am drugs.”

He looked at me, considering. Then he reached over, took my hand, and licked it. He wanted to try Devin.

For the next two hours, we became improvised pharmacologists in our own little bubble on the daybed. We catalogued the side effects of the Devin drug and his own personal drug, Eric. The proper dose and setting for consumption, the contraindications. I told him I wasn’t as big a risk taker as him and needed to read the waiver before I tried Eric. I had him hold out his hand and scrolled through an invisible document, pinching and releasing my fingers on his palm to enlarge the fine print about monogamy and children and where he wanted to live. I read each clause out loud.

Two hours. Two hours meandering through our life stories and philosophies. Every question you’d want answered on a first date, answered. No awkwardness. Eventually I asked if he wanted to re-up his dose of Devin. He said it had worn off, and that he wanted to take a page out of my book and be sober for the rest of the party. We went our separate ways. It was not a waste of a night. It was the world’s spiciest improv class.

A good bit compresses six dates into one.

It also solves a design problem. Meeting a stranger is awkward. Two people, no context, an unspoken pressure to perform. A bit hands you structure. Suddenly you're not two strangers fumbling for conversational footing—you're two collaborators in on the same joke. It generates the conversation for you.

The Three-Minute Marriage

I went to a matchmaking party. I was circling the airy Chinatown event space looking for anyone I found cute when he walked in. We locked eyes from across the room in a way that felt unmistakably cinematic.

I waited thirty minutes for him to approach me and he didn’t. So I went to him.

The group around him scattered the second I arrived. He scattered with them. I found him again three minutes later and walked up like I had something to say.

A bystander squinted at us. “Do you two know each other?”

He didn’t blink. “That’s my wife.”

The bystander turned to me for confirmation. “How long have you been together?”

I looked up at the tall stranger next to me. “Three whole minutes.”

I glanced at the silver chain around his neck and apologized for not wearing the matching one he’d bought me. We needed to find a wedding venue immediately, I told him. He put his hand on the small of my back and we excused ourselves to scout which corner of the room made the best venue. We considered a large ficus. We considered a poster of a rapper. We chose the rapper.

His friends came over and he introduced me as his wife. I offered them relationship advice from a successfully married couple. Some people wait to have sex until marriage, I explained. We wait to share our names. Keeps the mystery alive.

We wandered off to a couch and I asked him why he hadn’t approached me earlier. He said meeting eyes with me felt mythic and otherworldly, like he was seeing the woman in the red dress from The Matrix, and he panicked. I welled up with fake tears. “We could have been married thirty minutes earlier.”

He apologized.

We stayed in the bit for three more hours, including a hand-holding walk through Manhattan at midnight, until the bit revealed where our actual romantic compatibility broke. The next day we agreed to be friends. And I think we will be.

You may have noticed something. The hand-lick man went home sober. The husband and I now swap songs, not vows. Two electric nights, zero relationships. If you’re keeping score, this looks like a system that doesn’t work.

It’s the opposite. The filter is the point.

The philosopher James Carse had a name for this—the infinite game. Finite games are played to win, to end them. Infinite games are played to keep playing. A bit is an infinite game. You’re not interviewing a stranger for a role; you’re finding out whether there’s a world the two of you can build, and then living in it for a few hours regardless of where it leads. When the romance doesn’t blossom, you haven’t wasted the night. You’ve made a friend, and a story.

The relationship that lasted four and a half years started exactly like the ones that didn’t—a piece of nonsense, and a stranger who said yes. Some of my favorite friendships started the same way, no romance ever on the table. The filter works either way.

Do You Like Fun?

What a bit really measures is fast and ruthless: whether play is oxygen to someone or a threat. Whether being with them would feel like a vacation or a tax audit.

And bits work on the apps too. As a filter, they might work even better there.

Years ago I’d been messaging with a man for a few days, and when he proposed something conventional like grabbing a drink, I countered with “What if we went to the open house for a multimillion-dollar apartment and pretended we were thinking of buying it together?”

He responded: “That’s weird.”

Oh, the relief.

This tan, six-packed, chiseled-jawed man was allergic to fun and magic, and he had told me so in two words. I closed the app. I made myself dinner. I got my Sunday back.

A bad bit is a bad bit. A rebuffed bit is a gift wrapped in a bow.

The Audition

It’s been said that when you choose a life partner you’re choosing your parenting partner, your eating companion for twenty thousand meals, your travel companion for a hundred vacations, and someone whose day you’ll hear about eighteen thousand times.

Fine. I have other metrics. A hundred thousand bits. Ten thousand inside jokes. One person who sees the suggestion “let’s tour an apartment we’ll never buy” as an invitation instead of a red flag.

My life partner will be my best friend. The person I can’t keep my hands off. Also the person who will riff in a British accent with me while we wait in line at the DMV. Who will do a bit in the hospital waiting room, or while we’re assembling IKEA furniture and discover a dowel is missing, or at three in the morning when the kid won’t sleep and neither will we.

Here is what a good bit actually is: two people leaning in, each pushing back with the exact pressure that lets the connection spark. No leader. No follower. Two bodies improvising a third thing neither could reach alone.

Because I want a partner who understands that everything in life is made up, a series of choices, and who chooses to make up a better world with me.

Because life will hand you pain, boredom, grief, errands, invoices, missing screws, long lines, weird medical appointments, and Tuesdays. Love is not only about who looks good across a candlelit table. Love is who helps you build a tiny, whimsical world when the real one gets too heavy.

So when you’re choosing who gets your attention, your time, your body, your tenderness, ask a better question than “Are they my type?”

Ask: Can they build a world with me out of nothing? Can they meet my weird with warmth? Can they commit to the bit?

Because the bit is never only the bit.

The bit is the audition for the life.

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P.S. I love hearing from you in the comments—tell me all about your favorite bits. I’ll write back.

P.P.S. If someone in your life would do a bit with you in a hospital waiting room, send this to them.

I’m an executive coach who helps smart, heady people drop out of their heads and into the genius of their bodies—usually through methods they didn’t see coming. For more unconventional takes on life, love, and career, subscribe to my newsletter or book a 15-minute discovery call.