Overthink / Blog

About the Voices on This Blog

Two names appear under posts on this blog: Maya and Adam. Neither is a single person you could meet. We want to be transparent about that, because dating-advice content has a long tradition of inventing fake authors, and we are trying very hard not to do that.

Here is what each name actually is.

Maya
Maya

Maya is the name we publish Overthink's editorial writing under. It is a consistent editorial voice, not a single individual. The patterns Maya describes come from real conversations our users have inside the app, anonymized; from research we read; and from a small editorial team's work to put it all together.

We chose one name for continuity -- it reads more naturally than "by the editors," and more honestly than inventing a fake biography for a person who does not exist. Anywhere Maya cites specific user quotes or numbers, the underlying source is real and stripped of identifying details.

Adam
Adam

Adam is the pen name the founder of Overthink writes under. He is a real person -- one specific man, not a composite. He uses a pen name because he prefers to keep his legal name off the front page of a women's-dating publication, not because the perspective is invented.

He is not a therapist. He is a guy who got obsessed with the patterns in the texts women paste into the app, and noticed he could read them differently because he has been the man sending some of them. When a piece needs the male-insider perspective the editorial voice cannot earn, Adam writes it. Roughly 30% of posts.

Why we are telling you this

The dating-advice space is full of women's-magazine articles attributed to authors who do not exist, and Instagram pages run by anonymous men pretending to be female "experts." We did not want to do either of those things, but we also did not want to attribute everything to a generic "the team," because that produces writing without a center of gravity.

Maya is a transparent editorial alias. Adam is a transparent personal one. Both are real in the sense that matters: there are real people behind the words, the quotes are real, and the patterns are pulled from real conversations. The names are just the byline.

If a post is by Maya, you are reading Overthink's editorial point of view. If it is by Adam, you are reading the founder's first-person perspective. The difference matters more than you might think -- some of the texts men send are best decoded by analyzing what they accomplish, and some are best decoded by the man who has sent that exact text explaining what he was actually doing.

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