Dating Apps and our Relationship with Choice

A few weeks ago, I drove to Barnes and Noble near my house in Atlanta with the intention of doing what one is supposed to do at a book store – purchase a book. Yet, I walked out an hour later with no book in hand. In the intervening 60 minutes between walking in and walking out of the store, I had stared blankly at the various bookshelves – Non-Fiction, Fiction, Crime, Mystery, Romance even – yet could not even get myself to pick up a book, let alone purchase one. I even perused multiple Best of 2022 lists but just could not come across anything that piqued my interest. I felt overwhelmed and paralyzed by the sheer number of options at my disposal.

I recently relocated to New York. New York City is amazing, and I would encourage everyone to call the city home at least once in life (at least to the extent that doing so is possible). It's a city with always something to do and full of infinite places to explore, people to meet, foods to eat, and entertainment to consume. There's no chance that you will ever be able to experience it all, though, and that reality, I believe, contributes to the magic of New York. I love this city, and I'm lucky to be able to consider it my home base for now. But, I admit, New York is far from perfect.

If you are between the ages of, let's say, 22 and 28 and have friends in New York, you have likely heard them complain about dating in New York. I had obviously heard this myself but never cared much to try to understand why this is such a widely-held belief. My logic was that how could dating in New York City possibly be so bad; after-all, it's the most populous city in the United States. If you can't date in the most populous city in the country, then how can you date anywhere?

Well, after now having lived in the city for a few months and gone on a few dates (not too many, I'll be completely honest), I'm willing to admit that my naïve assumption was, well, naïve and flawed. My logic that because New York offers an infinite number of options, it cannot possibly be a hard place to date ignored the fact that we as human beings are not wired to digest infinite options – with anything for that matter. Choice fatigue has become foundational to our modern way of life. Never have we had easier access to infinite options for entertainment, music, people, and information. On one hand, this is great – in theory, choice is amazing – but on the other, I view that too much choice can paralyze our very ability to decipher between these choices, and modern dating has become the most obvious (and arguably frustrating) manifestation of this.

Have we always struggled with choice fatigue? It's hard to say because only recently have we actually been granted visibility into all of our choices at our utmost convenience. The digitization of our entire lives over the past decade serves as a major inflection point in how we are able to digest so many options across so many facets of our lives. Streaming services and YouTube provide 24/7 entertainment and access to nearly any show, film, or song ever created, social media enables us to peak into the thoughts and moments of the lives of both friends and strangers at the click of a button, and dating apps display all of our potential romantic partners within geographic proximity, filterable by almost any conceivable factor. Keep in mind, nearly all of these services are offered for free – or at least basic versions of them. Never have we had access to so much for the cost of so little.

I started this blog by mentioning that while New York City has always offered its residents access to limitless options, the impossibility of actually consuming even 1/10th of all of these options fosters a sense of magic of the unknown and peace with all that cannot be explored. The infinite number of restaurants, bars, cafes, and shows does not trigger an overwhelming sense of dread and fatigue that, say, modern dating – and perhaps to a lesser degree, selecting a movie on Netflix – might. In thinking then about our relationship with choice and considering whether choice fatigue is a relatively new phenomenon, I do think it is important to highlight the distinction between activities that, at the end of the day, still universally occur in the real world (such as eating at restaurants, drinking at bars, and consuming live entertainment) and those that now either occur entirely online or are moving more online (such as most entertainment consumption and, of course, dating). My belief is that choice fatigue applies less to the activities that still occur in the real world because we are better able to comprehend the degree to which it is impossible to consume all of our choices. This is not as true for activities that are becoming increasingly digitized, and the reality is that dating now falls squarely in that category.

The proliferation of dating apps over the past decade has not been an entirely bad thing at all. By no means am I arguing that we need to do away with dating apps. I think that the way dating apps have democratized meeting each other is a huge positive, and for many people in many parts of the world, they are a super effective tool. But I'm also warming up to the idea that perhaps these products have made it too easy to meet people. What used to largely be an organic, slightly awkward, but often magical experience now feels like a recurring and boring business transaction. In other words, is it possible that we have lowered the barriers to engagement so much that we've lost sight of the enjoyment that can be derived from the process of meeting and getting to know somebody? Also, should we consider whether the ease in which we can now meet people impairs our capability to commit to one another? After all, if it was so easy to meet one person, how hard might it be to meet another and another?

I also think we should more closely examine the role dating apps have played in making dating just exponentially more exhausting. The biggest benefit of dating apps – democratizing access to people completely outside our existing networks – is likely also their biggest point of weakness. By requiring us to regurgitate the same story and details about our lives to every new face we meet on an app, we've flat out exhausted ourselves. Starting from scratch every time we meet someone is attractive in theory but difficult in practice. I have learned that first-hand.

These questions above are almost entirely rhetorical. There is no right answer. Many of my closest friends and members of my own family have found success on dating apps – some of whom have done so in New York – and who knows, perhaps I will as well one day. There is a reason that up until last year's major drawdown in venture activity, investors had placed tens of millions of dollars in bets on a new crop of hyper-focused dating apps; there is clearly a general consensus that our lives will continue to move more and more online. And maybe hyper-focused dating apps that focus less on quantity and more on quality and compatibility are a better and healthier alternative to the original cohort of dating apps that singularly focused on physical appearance above all else and introduced a Sackler-like swipe addiction to the masses.

We are beyond lucky to live in a world where we are constantly consumed and paralyzed by all of our options. I do not want the obvious benefits of choice to be diminished by its few (but very real) downsides. For me, choice fatigue has pushed me to become far more intentional with my most important asset: my time. As it relates to dating, I have recently attempted to move off of dating apps in an effort to force myself to do the hard work of meeting people more organically. Naturally, this might mean interacting with fewer people, but, I believe, these interactions will be of much higher quality. After all, if there is a city where it should be expected to meet people organically, it is New York.

If you've made it this far, thank you. Please do not hesitate to provide any feedback or pushback on anything that I mentioned in this piece. I hope to start writing here more often (hopefully not much more about dating apps though), and so if you like what I've written, please do go ahead and subscribe.

Also, a quick shout out to Jack Raines and his excellent piece from last year entitled The Paradox of Choice, which inspired some of my initial thinking on this topic.