Once you’ve initiated an encounter with someone, you enter the experimenting stage, during which you exchange demographic information (names, majors, hometowns). You also engage in small talk—disclosing facts you and the other person consider relatively unimportant but that enable you to introduce yourselves in a safe and controlled fashion. As you share these details, you look for points of commonality on which you can base further interaction. This is the “casual dating” phase of romance, and most involvements never progress beyond this stage. We go through life experimenting with many people but forming deeper connections with very few.