The EA Relationship Escalator

When dating, you may typically encounter the relationship escalator, which is a social script for how relationships are supposed to unfold that is oriented around default societal expectations. Potential partners are supposed to follow a progressive set of steps and achieve specific visible milestones towards a clear goal.

This escalator frequently looks like:

Meet on a dating app
Go on a few dates
Hold hands, kiss
Become romantically exclusive
Fall in love
Meet the parents
Have a long weekend together
Vacation together
Move in together
Get engaged
Get married
Buy a house
Have kids
Have a dog

Of course the steps are approximate and may not unfold literally in this order, but it should be pretty close. Moreover, where you are on this escalator and how long it has been since the previous step is often used to judge whether a relationship is sufficiently significant, serious, good, healthy, committed, etc. and to tell whether the relationship is worth pursuing.

Effective altruists, as a community though, are rarely mainstream like this. This suggests that it may be helpful for EAs looking to date other EAs to have a very different and more customized social script to follow to judge how their unique EA relationship is unfolding.

I recommend the EA relationship escalator look like this:

Meet at EA Global but definitely do not flirt
Re-meet at a house party where flirting is allowed
Comment on their EA Forum posts
Reach out on their “Date Me” doc
Go on a few dates
Become awkwardly personally and professionally intertwined
Thoroughly assess together the conflicts of interest inherent in your relationship
Talk to your HR department
Talk to their HR department
Talk to the CEA Community Health team
Make a spreadsheet together to thoroughly quantify the relevant risks and benefits of your romantic relationship
Decide to go for it
Finally hold hands, kiss
Synchronize your pomodoro schedules together
Create a shared Complice coworking room / Cuckoo coworking room for just you two
Take the same personality tests and quantify each other
Introduce them to your polycule, hope they get along
Fall in love
Move in to the same EA group house
Synchronize your GWWC pledge donation schedules
Have your relationship details exposed by a burner account on the EA Forum
Have the EA Forum moderator team encode your relationship details in rot13
Meet the parents
Vacation together, but exclusively touring various EA hubs
Decide to fight the same x-risk
Raise free range chickens together, start an animal sanctuary
Create a Manifold market around whether or not you will get married
Get engaged
Get married
Maximize utility

Hopefully this EA Relationship Escalator helps give young EAs a social script to be able to find love with each other and be able to understand where their relationship currently is at.

After all, you may spend 80,000 hours of your life in a good marriage so it’s important to get this right!