The Post-Date Eight
- Difficulty
- Starter
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 5
- Confidence
- —
A post-date reflection scorecard built on the psychology of gratitude journals. The mechanism is priming: if you know you must write down three things you're grateful for at the end of the day, your brain looks for them all day. Applied to dating, knowing you will answer a fixed set of eight questions after the date changes what you notice during it — you stop tracking height and job title and start tracking how you felt. The coach is explicit that the usual mental checklist is worse than useless because it contains the wrong criteria; this is a checklist deliberately engineered to point at what the research says predicts long-term compatibility instead of what people assume matters.
Origin
Extracted from Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal
How to run it
- 1
Throw out your existing checklist
Discard the running list of height, income, perceived success and shared hobbies. Those criteria reflect what we think matters in long-term relationships, which the research shows is not what actually matters.
Pro tip Be willing to date someone who is not your type — the person who makes you happiest long-term is very possibly not the person you thought you'd be with.
- 2
Learn the questions before the date
Read the eight questions in advance so they are loaded in your mind. This is the priming step that makes the whole thing work — what we do at the end shapes what we look for throughout.
Watch out Do not consult them mid-date. The point is that they run in the background, not that you interrogate the evening.
- 3
Answer the eight questions immediately afterwards
At the end of the date, work through the list: how did I feel in my body around this person, do I feel curious about this person, what side of me did this person bring out, and the rest.
Pro tip 'What side of me did this person bring out' is the highest-yield question — great on paper but brings out a bad side of me is a decisive, useful insight.
- 4
Run the energy test
Ask whether you felt more energised or less energised after the date. Map it against people you already know: a penthouse person lifts your energy and makes you feel creative and inspired; a basement person leaves you depressed and de-energised.
Pro tip Identify your existing penthouse people first — friends, siblings, housemates — so you have a calibrated benchmark.
- 5
Decide on a second date from the answers
Use the completed set to decide whether you want to see this person again, deliberately overriding impressions based on their job or how much you have in common on paper.
Watch out Expect this to contradict your instinct sometimes; that contradiction is the framework doing its job.
In the wild
The coach reports that in the coaching she has done since publishing, one question does most of the work: what side of me did this person bring out? Someone returns from a date with a person who is impressive on every conventional axis — good job, right age, plenty in common — and the honest answer to that question is that they brought out a defensive, competitive, slightly diminished version of them. That single answer resolves the decision. It is described as a really helpful insight precisely because the paper qualities would otherwise have argued for a second date.
→ A conventionally strong match is correctly declined on the criterion that actually predicts the long term.
Asked to name his own penthouse people, Ali lists a few university friends, his brother — which is why they decided to start a podcast together — and his current housemate. The exercise works as a calibration device: before you can judge whether a date energised or de-energised you, you need to know what being around a penthouse person actually feels like in your body. Having named them, the post-date question stops being abstract and becomes a comparison against a felt reference point you already carry.
→ The energy question becomes a concrete comparison rather than a vague feeling.
Common mistakes
Scoring dates like a hiring scorecard
Ali raises the analogy of evaluating candidates against a job scorecard, and the coach rejects it in that form — having a checklist is not helpful because what tends to be on it is the wrong stuff. The Post-Date Eight is a checklist only in structure; its content is deliberately inverted.
Reflecting days later instead of the same night
The gratitude-journal mechanism depends on the end-of-day ritual being reliable enough to prime attention beforehand. If you know you'll write it down that night, you notice things during the date; if you leave it a week, you are reconstructing rather than recording.
Weighting impressiveness over energy
The questions explicitly ignore whether you thought they had an impressive job or whether you had enough hobbies in common — the stuff people think matters but really doesn't. Letting those creep back into the scoring defeats the design.
From the transcript
“in my book i offer this exercise called the post date eight the post date eight is based on research on gratitude journals”
“i've taken what i believe and what the research shows matters for evaluating a date i've turned it into these list of eight questions things…”
“in general i think that having a checklist is not helpful”
From the episode
6 Lessons That Improved My Life - Season 2 Round Up
Season 2 Round Up