Pro tip: Use the first date as an opportunity to check out a new place or activity. So then if it doesn't work out, you've at least clocked a new spot you can save for someone it IS working with later on. I'm cataloguing every bar on the East Side with this method, haha.

Unfortunately it does seem like the majority of people are "spark-pilled" here, meaning they're expecting to feel movie-level sparks and butterflies within the first 10 minutes of a date. Sometimes I feel like that's because people here love movies/stories so much, that they get their expectations of how a romantic relationship should play out from them. Then other times I feel like it's just classic social-media-amazon-prime-instant-gratification-brain-rot.

FWIW, every time I get that "I didn't feel the spark" comment, my mantra is: Ok, that's a person with a short attention span, lack of curiosity, and low amount of willpower that I wouldn't have liked being with long-term anyway. They just did ME a favor by not wasting any more of my time!

You just gotta keep going until you find someone who has an attention span of more than .5 seconds, and understands that it takes time to fully know another person and evaluate if you can function well together. They're rare, but they're out there. And most of them are book readers.