About Smart Dating

Smart Dating is a journal about dating and relationships in the United States. We write for single adults with full lives and busy calendars who date because they want a relationship, and who want straight answers to the questions that come up along the way: where to go on a first date, what to ask, what a new word means, when it becomes a relationship.

Our guides take those questions seriously. They start with the answer, then show where it comes from: the study, the survey, the dictionary entry or the published price. Where the evidence is thin or disputed, we say so.

Who writes Smart Dating

Smart Dating is published by the Smart Dating Editorial Team, and every guide carries the team's byline. The team researches each topic, writes the guide and checks it against its sources before it is published. When we quote someone, it is a real person, named with their real role, quoted with permission or from a published source.

What we are trying to do

Dating advice is easy to find and hard to trust. Much of it repeats the same rules without saying where they came from, and much of it is written to be clicked rather than used. We want Smart Dating to be the calm alternative: guides that are specific, sourced and dated, and that leave you better prepared for an actual evening with an actual person.

We also publish our own data. The First Date Cost Index prices a first date for two in 25 US cities from menus, museum pages and official taxi tariffs, and the full dataset is free to reuse.

How we choose topics

We start from the questions people actually ask: what they search for, the questions that search engines surface alongside those searches, and the threads where people describe their own situations in their own words. For each topic, we read the guides that already exist and look for what they leave out, whether that is a missing source, an unanswered question or a number nobody has checked.

A topic makes it onto our list when we can answer it better than what is already published, with sources a reader can check.

What we don't do

• We don't publish invented experts, reader letters, testimonials or statistics.
• We don't run top-ten lists or write headlines designed to mislead.
• We don't collect your name or email address: there are no sign-up forms, accounts or newsletters on this site.

Independence, corrections and contact

How we check facts, and correct mistakes is set out in our editorial policy. To report an error, see our contact page.