Imagine two very close long-time friends. One dives into serious relationships, the other is afraid of commitment. Stuck together in a crazy experiment, can the two find love and themselves in 40 days?
Sounds like a cheesy romantic comedy? Perhaps. But the cliché is at the heart of “40 Days of Dating,” a modern-day social experiment by New York-based graphic designers Jessica Walsh, 26, and Timothy Goodman, 32, both of whom are in search of answers to their relationship woes.
From March 20 to April 28, Jessica and Tim committed to date each other exclusively. They saw each other every day, went on at least three dates a week and saw a couples therapist once a week. Their experiment culminated in a final weekend getaway, where they then had to confront the question: What happens to their relationship after 40 days?
“I wonder if putting two people together with opposite issues could help,” Jessie wrote before starting Day One. “I want to learn about love and relationships in an attempt to figure out why.”
In this rom-com come to life, Jessie is the typical quirky girl up for crazy adventures, yet deep down wants to find a love similar to her parents’ and grandparents’, all of whom are in happy, stable relationships.
Tim, on the other hand, is the typical ladies’ man who enjoys his job and his freedom, but wonders if he is really ready to settle down.
Not so typical was how the pair addressed their problems. In a series of graphics, photos and videos, the pair documented every moment through a shared blog. At the end of each day, the two answered the same questionnaire to verbalize their findings on one another and themselves.
Visual storytelling
When Jessie and Tim decided to share their experiment online, they also wanted to approach the storytelling as a design project. The end product reflected their heavily creative backgrounds—a colorful, multimedia website that sought to highlight every aspect of the experiment.
Each day had its own separate post, where Jessie’s and Tim’s entries were posted side by side. Graphic headers done by artist friends and colleagues accompanied every entry, helping summarize their thoughts.
As the experiment progressed, a reported 300,00 people checked the blog every day to watch the progression. Jessie and Tim said they were surprised at the thousands of e-mails sent by avid fans.
“We’ve had people write about how enlightening it is to see the male/female perspective. We’ve heard numerous people write about how much they can relate to our fears and insecurities, and how that has comforted them,” Jessie said in an interview with US publication Metro.
“Reading these e-mails is amazing. It’s incredible to put something out in the world that touches people,” she added.
The end
The numbers continued to increase after the months-long delay in the release of the last four blog posts detailing the duo’s thoughts and feelings throughout their weekend trip to Disneyland.
“40 Days” played out over the course of 133 days, culminating on Sept. 9, when Jessie and Tim decided against pursuing a more serious relationship. They left each other at 11:57 p.m.
As the last blog post went up, Jessie and Tim had already sorted through their disappointments in private, and were now closer than ever after everything they’d been through.
“Nothing was natural about it,” Tim later admitted in The Today Show, but Jessie and he said they regretted nothing about the experience.
The two are still friends and are now design partners, having signed a deal with talent agency CCA in Hollywood as a duo.
On Wednesday, Warner Bros. bought the rights to a film, rumored to be directed by Michael Sucsy of “The Vow” with a screenplay by “Nick and Nora’s Infinite Playlist” scriptwriter Lorene Scafaria.
Critics, critiques
But the sudden yet unsurprising popularity of “40 Days” drew equal amounts of praise and flak from netizens, and even the pair’s closest friends.
The New York Observer, for example, called it “dating intellectualized to the nth degree,” while Jessie and Tim’s friends felt—as narrated in the blog—that the two were merely playing with each other’s feelings.
Even Jocelyn, the pair’s couples therapist, early on called the experiment “cowardly.” More than a few of Jessie and Tim’s friends addressed the all-important question: Why not just date like a regular couple without all the requirements and fuss?
The criticisms led others to question how genuine Jessie and Tim really were when they answered the questionnaire every day—which, unfortunately, is not uncommon in the thousands of blogs on the Internet today.
Like many young adults who share their lives on social networking websites, Jessie and Tim took an intensely personal experience and broadcast it to the world in spectacular, visually arresting fashion. They did not do it for the attention, necessarily, but that is exactly what they got.
Bigger questions
The funny nature of the Internet allows us to share our innermost thoughts to strangers without even showing our true selves. But is it all spectacle, all pomp?
Maybe. But to truly appreciate “40 Days,” one has to go beyond the question of “will they, won’t they” and the doubt cast by the nature of the experiment. Sure, a happily-ever-after ending for Jessie and Tim would have melted the hearts of thousands of fans, but audiences will never know for sure how genuine the two were throughout the 40 days.
Tim said it best on Day 38, just as he was deciding whether he wanted to pursue a relationship with Jessie after Day 40:
“[This] entire experiment has been about asking bigger questions … when we could have just kept going with our regularly scheduled program.”
At the heart of the project, Jessie and Tim took on the experiment for personal, and creative, reasons. Their story is one many young adults in search of love can relate to; their website, a prime example of how a simple story posted online can resonate beyond static words and images.
Through this experiment, Jessie and Tim learned a little more about the complexities of love, lessons outsiders like us can only really speculate on. And whether we’re romantics or cynics, we the audience learned a little something, too—even if the lesson is that, sometimes, you really can’t pluck someone out of the “friendzone” no matter how hard you try.
Visit fortydaysofdating.com to view the whole experiment.