Romance as a gathering purpose undermines itself because people fake a "more likeable" persona instead of being vulnerable

(for straight dating, anyway, and ignoring the problem of cheaters among other things)

When people set out to pursue romance, they usually do it by putting their "best selves forward." That is: Their most generally appealing selves, not their most strongly appealing selves. That means hiding everything about their life and opinions that is shameful, unpopular, or inconvenient. In other words, there's no vulnerability, and no connection.

No vulnerability means interacting in a way that feels fake because it is. It's like the high-minded abstract professional philosophizing that streams through my inbox (and into the trash bin) from LinkedIn. It's not what anyone wants. It's no fun, unromantic, and gives us nothing to connect to. It sucks.

So, romance as a gathering purpose tends to undermine itself. People think, often, that they can't be loved as they are, so the way to pursue love is by pretending to be someone else that can be loved. When this works, it's a Faustian bargain. It usually doesn't work. People keep trying it anyway hoping that eventually it will work, because it's emotionally safer than the alternative. Breaking out of this mindset is hard.

Could a host get around this by gathering around a purpose of being vulnerable and making real connections in pursuit of romance? I suspect this could work on a small scale if managed well, but I'm skeptical it scales. I think with say 15 to 30 people, this might work. But if the gathering is large or run by a host who's not very skillful or connected to the purpose, I suspect people start pretending-to-be-vulnerable instead of actually risking anything, and then the value of the gathering collapses.

(This is one reason I don't trust speed dating events to be any use. You take a bunch of people used to faking a more appealing persona and ram them into each other, three minutes each, for an hour, under a host who barely gives a shit as evidenced by reusing the standard speed-dating frame? You will not go to space today.)

I wonder: Can one design countermeasures into the gathering? The Art of Gathering, print pages 140-141 mid-chapter 4, describes a rule at a consulting company retreat where consultants often returned to sessions late because they were talking to clients. The rule was, if you come in late you have to do a set of push-ups. Could something like this work? I think not in any scalable way — if you set a rule to "start interactions by sharing something about yourself that the other person may not like," there's an implied extra rule to not subvert the spirit of the rule by saying something that technically satisfies it while minimizing risk. But that's a tricky judgment call and hard to scale.

Still: Maybe it's possible? I have no personal experience with them, but from reading and hearing others' experience, Authentic Relating and Circling groups seem to work, somewhat, some of the time. Those haven't reached the scale of the speed dating meme, so maybe they will break at that scale. But this suggests that a better romantic gathering format might work well under a similar structure/growth pattern to AR/Circling — not to mention, would benefit from the success of AR/Circling groups.