The Hobby I Used to Apologize For

For about ten years I had a sentence ready.

It came out somewhere in the second hour of a first date, usually after she’d said something about hiking or her sister’s wedding, and it went: “I mean, I game a little. Not like, seriously. Just to unwind.”

Every word in that sentence was doing damage control. “A little” was a lie. “Not seriously” was a bigger one. “Just to unwind” was there to file the whole thing under the same heading as a glass of wine, so that it would sound like a thing I did instead of a thing I was.

I had rehearsed that sentence. I want to be clear about that, because I think a lot of people reading this have one too and have never said out loud that they wrote it in advance. I had thought about the wording. I had a version for coworkers and a slightly braver version for dates. I had, functionally, a media strategy for my own weekend.

What it actually costs

The obvious cost is that you spend an evening being a slightly fake person. That one’s fine, honestly. Everyone’s a little fake on a first date. Nobody leads with their sleep schedule.

The real cost is downstream and it took me years to see it. When you pre-apologize for something, you teach the person across the table how to feel about it. You hand them the frame. You say “not seriously” and they hear “this is a minor thing that will presumably shrink over time,” and then six months later when it hasn’t shrunk — because it was never going to, because it’s not a phase, because it’s how I’ve relaxed since I was eleven — they’re not being unreasonable when they’re confused. They’re working off the spec I gave them.

And then you’re in a negotiation. Not about hours, though it always sounds like hours. About whether the thing you actually are is acceptable, conducted in installments, forever, at increasing volume.

I have talked to a lot of our members over thirteen years. That negotiation is the single most common story I hear. Not “my ex hated games.” That’s rare. The common one is: I spent three years slowly explaining myself to someone who was fine with it in principle, and I got tired.

The phone call

People know the founding story by now — Pat called me from Hawaii, late, on a Tuesday. What people usually quote is the exchange itself. “You said you could make a dating site for gamers, right?” “Yeah. I’ll need your help, but yes — we can do it.” “Alright. We’re doing it then.”

What I remember more clearly is what we didn’t have to say. Pat was on a Marine base four thousand miles away and I was grading papers in Georgia and neither of us had to explain to the other one why this was a problem worth eight years of nights. We both had the rehearsed sentence. We both knew exactly what the other one meant.

The line I keep coming back to, and it’s the one I actually wrote down at the time: we wanted to give other people a clean, tasteful dating site for mature gamers — the thing neither of us had. Not a filter. Not an interest tag on a mainstream app that lets you flag it like a dietary restriction. A place where the whole premise is settled before anyone types a word.

I gave up things for it that I’m still occasionally annoyed about. Two coaching jobs, one of them varsity boys basketball, which if you know me is not a small thing. An invitation to teach a higher-level curriculum, which as a young non-tenured teacher was somewhere between unwise and career suicide. I said “sorry boss, I have other work to do” more than once and meant something I couldn’t explain to the boss.

“She’s cool with it” is the lowest bar in the world

Here’s what I’ve changed my mind about, and it took the research to get me there.

For a long time I thought the goal was finding someone who didn’t mind. That’s the bar I was aiming at in my twenties: a person who wouldn’t make it a thing. Tolerance. I would have taken tolerance and been grateful for it.

Tolerance is a truce. Truces require enforcement, and enforcement is exhausting, and the person doing the enforcing eventually gets tired too. Every couple I know who ran on tolerance ran out.

The thing on the other side of it doesn’t have a great name. It’s not “she plays too,” although that helps. It’s closer to: the hobby is not an item on the agenda. Nobody’s tracking it. It never comes up as a topic because it isn’t a topic, the same way nobody’s partner has a standing objection to their taste in books. The research calls it acceptance, and when I read that word in a paper I recognized it immediately as the thing I’d spent a decade not knowing how to ask for.

I had been optimizing for “won’t be a problem.” The thing worth wanting is “isn’t a subject.”

What we built instead

LFGdating is, structurally, one idea: remove the disclosure. That’s it. That’s the whole product thesis under the profiles and the messaging and thirteen years of me answering support email from my personal address at eleven at night.

If everybody on the site already plays, then nobody has to introduce it. Nobody writes the rehearsed sentence. Nobody spends the first date establishing that they are a normal adult who also does this. You get to skip straight to the part where you find out whether you actually like each other, which — and I say this as someone who spent his twenties on the other kind of site — is a shockingly large head start.

We opened the beta in January 2012 and launched properly in February 2013. Thirteen years. In that time I have watched a lot of dating products decide that “gamer” is a growth segment and bolt an interest tag onto something that was never built for it. That’s a filter. A filter tells you the other person tolerates it. It cannot tell you they’re glad.

The version of this I want for you

I’m not going to tell you that a relationship fixes anything, or that finding a player two is the answer to any question larger than “who am I spending Saturday with.” It isn’t. That’s a different kind of blog and I’d rather not run one.

What I’ll say is narrower and I think it’s true: you shouldn’t have to have a sentence ready. The rehearsed thing, the wince, the “not seriously” — that’s a tax you’ve been paying so long you probably don’t notice you’re paying it, and it is not a required cost of being an adult who plays video games. There are, at last count, a couple hundred million Americans doing this every week. The stigma is running on fumes and inertia.

Delete the sentence. If you want a place where it was never going to come up in the first place, the LFGdating app is free on iOS and Android, and Pat and I are still the ones reading the support email.

Stay classy,
Casey