There’s another problem with talking about dating apps as though everyone is playing the same game: men and women often aren’t experiencing the same marketplace.
Obviously this varies enormously depending on age, attractiveness, location, the app and what someone is looking for. But heterosexual dating apps have a familiar asymmetry. Many women receive considerably more inbound interest than many men do, while men tend to do more of the initiating.
That changes how the exact same app feels from either side.
For a lot of men, dating apps can feel remarkably like applying for jobs. You send out applications knowing most will go nowhere. A match is getting through the first screen. Then you have to start a conversation, hold someone’s attention and hopefully turn that into a date. When a match you’re genuinely excited about appears, it can feel unusually valuable because you don’t know when the next one will arrive.
For a woman receiving a large amount of attention, the problem can be almost the opposite. She can’t seriously evaluate everyone who likes her. She has to filter. The experience starts looking less like applying for something and more like shopping: here’s a large inventory of people who have already indicated some level of interest, now decide which ones are worth spending time on.
I don’t mean that as a criticism of women. If I opened an app and found hundreds of people waiting for my attention, I’d filter aggressively too. There are only so many conversations anyone can have.
But this creates a strange situation when two people finally match. They may enter the exact same conversation with very different perceptions of scarcity.
He might be thinking, Finally, someone I’m actually interested in. Don’t screw this up.
She might be thinking, He seems interesting. Let’s see.
Neither reaction is irrational. They’re responding to the market each of them can see.
Likes aren’t options
The problem is that the market can also give people misleading information about their options.
A like is cheap. A match is cheap. Wanting to go on a date with someone is a higher bar. Wanting to sleep with someone is different again. Wanting to build a relationship with them is another thing entirely.
Dating apps tend to put all of those intentions uncomfortably close together.
If someone receives hundreds of likes, it’s very easy for that attention to feel like hundreds of available options. But someone willing to swipe right on you isn’t necessarily someone willing to date you seriously, and someone willing to date you isn’t necessarily someone willing to commit to you.
Those are different markets, even though the app makes them look like one.
This is where I think perceived value can get badly distorted. Not someone’s actual value as a person, whatever that would even mean, but their estimate of the alternatives available to them.
If twenty extremely attractive people match with you, a perfectly understandable conclusion is that people like those twenty are your dating pool. Maybe they are. But you’ve only learned that twenty people were willing to match with you. You’ve learned much less about what any of them would want after meeting you.
Men can get the opposite distortion. If a man gets very few matches, it’s easy to conclude that he simply isn’t desirable. But his real-world attractiveness and his ability to generate a positive response from a few photographs in a marketplace where the other side is drowning in attention aren’t necessarily the same thing.
So one side can walk away from the app thinking, I have endless options.
The other can walk away thinking, I have almost none.
Both may be learning something from the app. Both may also be learning the wrong thing.
A feedback loop
There’s a feedback loop here too.
If men aren’t getting many matches, one obvious response is to become less selective while swiping. Instead of carefully considering ten profiles and liking two, like six and sort things out if somebody matches.
But multiplied across thousands of men, that behavior increases the amount of inbound attention women receive. Women now have even more people to sort through, so becoming more selective makes sense. That leaves men with even fewer matches, which gives them an incentive to cast an even wider net.
Nobody has to design this outcome.
Each person can be responding reasonably to the environment in front of them while collectively making the asymmetry worse.
The paradox of choice
And then the paradox of choice kicks in.
Having options is obviously better than having none. Having effectively unlimited apparent options is more complicated.
Say you’re seeing someone you genuinely like. He’s attractive, funny, intelligent, and you look forward to seeing him. But now you know there are dozens of other people sitting in your match queue.
The person you’re dating has an unfortunate disadvantage: you’ve actually met him.
You know his flaws.
Maybe he lives farther away than you’d like. Maybe he has an annoying habit. Maybe he made a stupid joke. Maybe the first date was great but not magical. Maybe he’s perfect on nine things and merely fine on the tenth.
The next person doesn’t have any of those problems yet.
He’s still a profile.
You haven’t discovered what annoys you about him.
So the real comparison isn’t necessarily between one person and another person. It’s between a real human being, whose imperfections are becoming visible, and a collection of hypothetical humans whose imperfections haven’t been revealed yet.
The hypothetical person wins surprisingly often.
There’s always the possibility that the next profile will have everything you liked about this person without the things you didn’t. And because checking costs almost nothing, why not look?
That’s where the abundance created by dating apps can become self-defeating. The question quietly changes from Do I like this person enough to keep seeing them? to Is this the best person I could possibly get?
Those are completely different questions.
The first one can eventually be answered.
The second one can’t.
There are millions of people you haven’t met. Somewhere out there is almost certainly somebody who beats your current date on whatever dimension you’re thinking about today.
If that’s the stopping rule, you never stop.
Scarcity meets abundance
And this is why the asymmetry matters to the game-theory problem. One player may be operating under scarcity while the other is operating under abundance. Scarcity encourages pursuit and makes individual opportunities feel valuable. Abundance encourages filtering and makes the cost of rejecting any individual option feel low.
Put those two people together and their behavior can easily reinforce the other’s worst assumptions.
The man who feels he has few options invests heavily when he finally gets a promising match. She has plenty of apparent options, so his investment isn’t necessarily unusual from her perspective. If she remains cautious, he may try harder. That can make him appear overly invested, which makes her less interested, which makes him feel that matches are even harder to convert.
Or he learns the opposite lesson and starts pretending not to care.
Then we’re right back to playing games about the game.
The interesting part isn’t that men are doing dating wrong or women are doing dating wrong. It’s that the same marketplace can present one group with scarcity and another with abundance, and then put them across a table from each other as though they’ve been receiving the same information.
They haven’t.