After spending all this time thinking about dating as a game-theory problem, I’ve ended up somewhere I didn’t expect.
I don’t think game theory gives you a particularly good strategy for dating. If anything, trying too hard to use it probably makes you worse at dating. You start treating ordinary behavior as moves, looking for signals in everything and responding to what you think the other person is doing rather than what is actually happening.
The six-hour text becomes a strategy. The cancelled date becomes a strategy. Who pays becomes a signal. Being available on Saturday says something about your value. Before long you’re not getting to know someone anymore. You’re getting to know your model of them.
And the model is built from terrible data.
Dating apps make that worse because the data they’re giving us isn’t neutral either. Men and women can be shown very different versions of the same market. One person experiences scarcity, another abundance. One starts applying more broadly because matches are rare; the other filters more aggressively because attention is cheap. Those perfectly understandable responses feed back into the system and exaggerate the conditions that produced them.
Then both people finally meet and wonder why the other behaves so strangely.
The imaginary person has an advantage
I think this is where the paradox of choice becomes particularly destructive. The person sitting across from you is real. After a few dates you know some of their flaws, their awkwardness, the things you disagree about and the little things that annoy you. The next person on the app has none of those problems yet. They’re still six photographs and three prompts. You’re comparing somebody you know against somebody you can still imagine.
The imaginary person has a hell of an advantage.
None of this means you should settle for someone you don’t want or ignore obvious incompatibility. It means the question Could somebody better exist? is useless. Of course somebody better exists on some dimension. There are billions of people in the world. If that’s the standard, the search has no stopping condition.
A more useful question is whether the person you’re actually seeing makes your life better, whether you enjoy being around them, whether the important things line up and whether the effort is being returned.
That last part matters because I also don’t think the answer is to become naive. Sometimes the slow replies really do mean they’re losing interest. Sometimes the repeated cancellations mean you’re an option rather than a priority. Sometimes someone tells you exactly what they want and you should believe them.
Patterns are harder to fake
You just don’t need to decide what a single observation means.
Time solves a surprising amount of this. Patterns are much harder to fake than individual signals. Someone can manufacture scarcity for a week. It’s harder to manufacture genuine interest for six months. One cancelled date is noise. Consistently finding reasons not to see you isn’t. You don’t need a theory explaining why someone never meets you halfway before deciding that you don’t want a relationship where you’re always walking the extra distance.
Maybe that’s where game theory is useful after all. Not because it tells us which move to make next, but because it shows us how easily reasonable decisions made with incomplete information can produce completely unreasonable outcomes.
And dating might be one of the worst places to believe you’ve solved that information problem.
The other person isn’t a rational agent with a payoff function waiting to be discovered. They’re a person who may be uncertain, contradictory, emotional, changing their mind and trying to understand you at the same time you’re trying to understand them.
An unstrategic strategy
So perhaps the best strategy is a fairly unstrategic one.
Be clear enough that the other person doesn’t have to reverse-engineer you. Don’t manufacture scarcity when you’re actually interested. Don’t confuse attention with compatibility or matches with real options. Don’t assume the next profile is better simply because you haven’t discovered what’s wrong with them yet. Give individual moments enough uncertainty that they don’t become entire stories in your head, and give repeated behavior enough weight that you don’t spend months explaining away what is happening in front of you.
Most importantly, remember that you aren’t trying to beat the other player.
If dating goes well, there isn’t supposed to be another player.
That’s probably where the analogy finally breaks.