Your Network Is a Dating Pool.

Let’s Stop Pretending It’s Not.

February is a month that tends to lean romantic, and whether you celebrated Valentine’s Day with someone special or treated it like any other Saturday, I hope love found you in some form last week.

Because love, real and lasting love, extends so far beyond romantic partnerships. The girlfriend who checks in when she hasn’t heard from you in a few days. The family that shows up in ways you didn’t ask for but quietly needed. The steady knowledge that the ones around you would choose you again without hesitation. That kind of love has carried me through some of the most uncertain seasons of my life, and I never want to take it for granted.

But yes, February does lean romantic. And so does this week.

Last week, I decided to play a little with the internet. I made an Instagram reel about adding “open to dating” to my LinkedIn profile. It was an experiment, something curious and a little provocative, not meant to be taken entirely at face value. What I did not expect was for it to cross 650,000 views. A concept that most would consider off-brand or inappropriate for the platform, and yet the response was overwhelmingly warm.

The template got requested more times than I could count, and the conversation it started confirmed something I had already been sensing: collectively, we are exhausted by the current options. Exhausted by the apps, by small talk that leads nowhere, by the experience of starting over again and again with strangers who have no real context for who you are.

It made me think about how we used to find each other, and what we have quietly given up in the name of convenience. Before dating apps and matching algorithms, connection happened through networks and proximity. Someone walked up to you and started a real conversation, a small act of courage that has become increasingly rare.

More often, someone who knew both of you thought to make an introduction. The girlfriend who immediately thinks of you when she meets someone worth knowing. The colleague who bridges a gap. The family member who is perhaps a little too invested in your personal life but turns out to be surprisingly insightful about what you actually need. There was a time when leaning on the people around you, not just professionally but personally and intentionally, was simply how it was done.

And then, gradually, we stopped. We handed the whole process to an app and hoped it would know us better than our own people do.

Here is what I keep returning to: your professional network knows something about you that no dating profile ever could. They have watched you operate, seen how you communicate, how you show up when things get hard. They may not know your love language or what you always order at brunch, but they know how you move through the world, and that is actually one of the most relevant things to understand about a person.

I will be honest, I have absolutely pulled up someone’s LinkedIn after a first date or two, not out of obsession but out of discernment. It is considerably harder to fabricate a fifteen-year career history than it is to write a charming bio on a dating app.

But the deeper question was never really about LinkedIn. It was about whether we have stopped asking the people who actually know us to help us find the ones we are looking for. There was a time when we trusted our networks to understand not just who we were, but what we needed. Somewhere along the way we started to feel embarrassed to ask, as if wanting love is something we should figure out quietly and alone, without making it anyone else’s business.

I understand the caution, especially as a woman. We keep our guard up because we have to. Unwanted advances are real, and the weight of being perceived as available is something we navigate constantly. These are not small concerns and I am not dismissing them. But I want to be clear: this is not a conversation about desperation.

Most of the women I know who are navigating the dating landscape are doing so with tremendous intention, simply waiting for someone who is actually worth their time. The introduction of a well-vetted, genuinely compatible person is not something any of us would turn down. That is not settling. That is wisdom.

And this is where I want to speak directly to those of you who are married, partnered, or otherwise spoken for, because this conversation belongs to you just as much as anyone else. You are sitting on something valuable and you may not even realize it. You know good people who are decent, emotionally available, professionally grounded, and worth knowing.

And somewhere in your circle, there is likely someone who is open to meeting exactly that kind of person. The act of making that introduction, of saying “I know someone and I immediately thought of you,” is one of the most generous things you can offer the people you care about. It costs nothing and it could mean everything.

We have outsourced so much of our social lives to platforms and algorithms that we have forgotten the quiet power of simply knowing someone well enough to connect them. That used to be one of the highest forms of care and I think it still is.

So whether you are single and open, or happily partnered with good people in your orbit, consider this a gentle nudge. Pay attention to who is around you. Think about who you know and who might benefit from knowing each other. You do not need an app for that. You just need to be the kind of person who notices and is willing to say something.

The reel went viral because somewhere underneath the humor, more than half a million people recognized something true. We are lonely in ways the apps have not fixed, and tired in ways that more options have not solved.

Perhaps what we actually need is not a better algorithm. Perhaps what we need is to lean back into our people, to let ourselves be known by them, and to trust that being known is exactly the right place to start.

Après Me,

Sherita