The advice about not looking for love is good but incomplete. I think that some people (myself included) have to put some thoughtful effort into dating if they want a partner. For others, it comes more naturally for one or two simple reason(s): they have a wide social circle and/or they have lives that consistently put them in contact with a lot of other people. In a lot of ways, it truly is a numbers game.

Since I’m not one of those people, I took a systematic approach to dating and sought to replicate that network effect while still staying true to myself. I upgraded to the paid version of Scruff (I’m a gay man) after realizing that it was far easier for me to make friends than date where I was. The immediate goal was not to find a boyfriend, it was to practice chatting with men in a platonic manner. The secondary goal was to make a friend or two. I made a goal of chatting with 4-5 people each week.

In the meantime, I started delving more into my hobbies by taking classes and going to meetups because they exposed me to more people. Also, hobbies are a good source of conversational topics.

After 3-4 months of doing this, I received a message on Scruff at 2:00 one morning. My sleep schedule at that time was messed up, so I was actually awake then. I looked at his profile and saw that he was interested in maps (one of my special interests). So I responded and we just hit it off. If you’ve ever met someone and just clicked with them, you’ll understand what I mean by that. We became good friends within a month or two, then things got a little more serious. The downside was that he was literally on the other side of the continent and we both had careers that were dependent on our locations, so we agreed to keep things platonic. We met in person the following month and found that the attraction was still there, only stronger.

We’ve been together for over four years now and have lived together for 3.5 of them. He also has ADHD, which is probably part of why we get along so well. Perhaps I just got lucky, but if I hadn’t pushed myself to socialize with others (I consider text-based conversations to be a form of socializing), we would never have met.

tl;dr: The closest thing there is to a magic formula is to be kind, interesting, and interested in other people. And “interesting” means different things to everyone, but in my experience, hobbies and special interests tend to be a bit of an advantage. Also, a good first step is to widen your social circle (use your favorite search engine to learn more about the weak ties theory, if you want to nerd out about how that works…this is also a good start: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpersonal_ties).