The Three Things To Know Before You Date
Likes and dislikes, values, goals — the pre-dating audit that speeds up selection.
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 4
- Confidence
- 93%
Shetty's answer to people who feel they are running out of time is counterintuitive: the fastest route to a good relationship is a short piece of work on yourself first. Three questions — what do I like and dislike about myself and my life, what are my values right now, what are my goals right now — each map onto a mechanical dating advantage. Likes determine where you spend time and therefore who you meet. Values determine who can credibly introduce you to someone compatible. Goals determine whether a promising match is actually going somewhere. It is explicitly a three-month exercise, not a decade of self-discovery, and it exists because decisions made from insecurity and anxiety select badly. Reach for this when dating feels like a numbers game you are losing.
Origin
Shetty offers it in response to the people who fill his DMs saying they are nearly forty and single and it is not working, and to Bartlett's friend in her mid-thirties who thought the answer was a new haircut and a members' club.
Core principles
- 01A decision made from insecurity and anxiety will not be a good one.
- 02Stress makes you settle for someone who merely texts back.
- 03The list should be about you, not about the person you want.
- 04Knowing yourself speeds up selection rather than delaying it.
- 05Dating today genuinely is harder — the work is not a denial of that.
How to run it
- 1
Accept that your current mindset will not choose well
Shetty starts by conceding the difficulty — the landscape has changed from meeting someone within a five-mile radius to a paradox of choice across the world — then names the trap: stress, insecurity and anxiety push you toward an unhealthy relationship, not a healthy one.
Pro tip Reframe the wait as protection rather than delay: you are avoiding settling for less than you deserve.
Watch out Do not skip this acknowledgement. Shetty insists on not negating how hard dating is, because dismissal is what makes people reject the advice.
- 2
Name what you like and dislike — about yourself and life, not about a partner
Write down what you like and do not like as you, deliberately excluding any thoughts about a prospective partner. This determines where you spend your time, which determines who you meet.
Pro tip The payoff is mechanical: liking what you like puts you in rooms full of people with compatible likes.
Watch out Society trains you to write a list of what you want in a person. Shetty's whole instruction is to write the list about yourself instead.
- 3
Name your current values
Identify what is valuable to you personally, right now — again, not about a person. Values are what allow other people to make good introductions on your behalf.
Pro tip A friend who shares a value is more likely to know someone else who shares it, so knowing your values tells you who to ask for an introduction.
Watch out Values change and evolve; the exercise is a current snapshot you will redo, not a permanent declaration.
- 4
Name your current goals
Work out what you are actually trying to do with your life at present. Goals are the filter that tells you whether a relationship is going somewhere, rather than leaving you to find out over years.
Pro tip With all three in hand, Shetty says a genuinely tough selection process gets both faster and simpler.
In the wild
An hour before recording, Bartlett spoke with a friend in her mid-thirties who feels she is running out of time, is not meeting enough people, and wonders whether getting her hair done or joining a members' club will finally produce a partner.
→ Shetty's redirect is the three-question audit, with the explicit reassurance that it does not require becoming a monk for three years, a mountaintop or a yoga retreat — three months is enough.
Bartlett raises a friend who spent seven years in a relationship, was cheated on, and now carries insecurity and low self-esteem. He asks whether it is relationship time.
→ Shetty says not one bit — that is precisely the case of skipping Dharma for Kama, and entering from that insecurity can ruin what might have been the safest, most secure partner available.
Common mistakes
Writing a list of what you want in a person
Shetty calls this what society has set us up to do. It outsources the selection criteria to a fantasy specification rather than to your actual likes, values and goals, and gives you no information about where to go or who to ask.
Letting the clock override the audit
People feel a deadline, especially as relationships start later in life, and conclude they cannot afford the work. Shetty's counter is that the skipped work simply gets done later, inside a relationship, where it slows the relationship down or ruins it.
Is it for you?
Best for
Single people who feel time-pressured and are dating volume-first with poor results.
Not ideal for
People already in a committed relationship — this is a pre-selection tool.
From the transcript
“what do I like and not like as me what are my values personally right now like what's valuable to me not about this person”
“all of that stress and all of that insecurity and all of that anxiety is more likely to push you into a relationship that is…”
“you don't have to become a monk for three years you don't have to go and like live in a Mountaintop”
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