Blogs are a genre that work beautifully for projects with clear rules and goals that can be tracked in daily posts. Lose weight, cook everything in Julia Childs’ cookbook, stop buying things, declutter the house, only wear clothes you have made yourself, wear just one dress for a whole year, survive cancer – I wrote a post about these project blogs a while ago.

One example I’ve written about several times (including in my book Blogging – second edition due out in October!) is The Date Project, which I discovered in 2002 when John Hiler dissected it and other dating blogs. As I wrote back then, Hiler points out a problem with real life blogs as narratives: real life just doesn’t respect the suspense and the dramatic curve we love in narratives. Hiler wrote:

I’m realizing that the whole fun of dating blogs comes from vicariously experiencing the frustrations and humiliations of the dating circuit.  It’s no fun when someone finds true love in, say…  twenty-seven days (?!).  It’s like Bridget Jones getting married in the first chapter, or Carrie Bradshaw meeting Mr. Big in the first season (oh wait, that one did happen).

I came across a new, far more fancily designed dating project blog today: 40 Days of Dating. They’re up to day 21 and true love is not yet clearly apparent, but then, this project has a rather different premise to The Date Project. While the guy in The Date Project committed to meeting new people and asking women out, hoping to get a girlfriend out of it, 40 Days of Dating is actually written by a couple. The catch is that the couple is not a romantic couple – yet. They write:

Two good friends with opposite relationship problems found themselves single at the same time. As an experiment, they dated for 40 days.

Of course there’s always the possibility of romance. And due to the delayed publication – they’re just now publishing the daily interviews that they wrote this spring – we know that the project will indeed last for forty days. Perhaps it will work better as a narrative than The Date Project did in 2002?