Modern dating was supposed to solve a problem. Meeting people used to depend heavily on geography, work, friends, timing and luck. Now, an ordinary Tuesday night can place hundreds of potential partners in the palm of your hand.
You would think more choice would make dating easier. Instead, many people are exhausted before the relationship has even had a chance to begin.
The exhaustion is not always dramatic. Sometimes it looks like opening an app five minutes after returning home from a perfectly decent date. Sometimes it is talking to four people at once and feeling genuinely excited about none of them. Sometimes it is meeting someone attractive, funny and interesting, then noticing one small imperfection and wondering whether there is a better match three swipes away.
There is a strange psychological tension developing underneath modern dating: we want to find someone worth choosing while being constantly reminded that we do not have to choose yet.
And researchers are beginning to understand what that does to us.
In a series of studies published in Social Psychological and Personality Science, psychologists Tila Pronk and Jaap Denissen examined what happened as people worked through increasing numbers of potential partners online. Instead of becoming more optimistic as more possibilities appeared, participants became increasingly likely to reject them. Across their studies, the likelihood of accepting a potential partner declined as participants continued evaluating options. The researchers called it a “rejection mind-set.”
That finding turns one of the great promises of online dating on its head. More possibilities do not necessarily make us more open to possibility. Under some conditions, they may train us to become better at eliminating people.
Another study, published in Computers in Human Behavior by Marina Thomas, Alice Binder and Jörg Matthes, reached a related conclusion. In an experiment, participants were shown different numbers of supposedly available dating profiles. Those presented with an abundance of options reported greater choice overload and lower momentary self-esteem, along with greater fear of being single.
Think about the contradiction in that for a moment. Being shown more available people did not simply make participants feel more fortunate to have choices. In the experiment, abundance was also associated with some of the very feelings we might expect choice to relieve.
This helps explain something that numbers alone cannot capture: why dating can start feeling like work even when nothing particularly terrible is happening.
You are constantly assessing. Is this person attractive enough? Interesting enough? Successful enough? Did the conversation flow enough? Was that joke annoying? Why did they take four hours to reply? Is the person you matched with yesterday potentially better? Should you give this one another date, or are you forcing something that should feel effortless?
The brain never receives the satisfying message that the search has narrowed. The store never closes.
There is also a subtle difference between choosing a person and evaluating a profile. Profiles invite comparison because comparison is what the format is built to accommodate. Height can be compared. Photographs can be compared. Careers, interests, lifestyles and clever opening lines can all be placed beside one another.
Human beings become much messier once they leave the screen.
The person who seemed ordinary in photographs may become remarkably attractive when you discover how funny they are. The person with the immaculate profile may leave you strangely cold. Someone can check nearly every box and make you feel nothing, while another person can possess a quality you never thought to put on the list and suddenly make the list feel incomplete.
Research on intimacy offers another important piece of this puzzle. In work published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Jean-Philippe Laurenceau, Lisa Feldman Barrett and Paula Pietromonaco found that intimacy in everyday interactions involved more than simply exchanging personal information. Feeling that the other person was responsive—understanding, validating and caring—played an important role in the experience of intimacy.
That is difficult to capture in a profile.
You cannot swipe on how it feels when someone really listens to you. You cannot filter for the ease that develops when you realize you do not have to perform around someone. You cannot know from six photographs how someone responds when you disagree, whether their curiosity feels genuine, whether they remember the small thing you mentioned two weeks ago, or whether being around them gradually makes you feel more like yourself rather than less.
Those qualities reveal themselves through interaction. And interaction requires something the architecture of endless choice does not naturally encourage: enough attention to find out.
This does not mean people should lower their standards, overlook incompatibility or keep dating someone simply because they seem nice. More options have created genuine opportunities, particularly for people who once had limited ways of meeting compatible partners.
The problem begins when discernment quietly turns into perpetual comparison.
There is a meaningful difference between recognizing that someone is wrong for you and rejecting someone because you have become accustomed to searching for reasons not to choose. One protects your standards. The other can leave you with an ever-improving ability to identify imperfections and very little practice discovering what becomes valuable only with attention.
Perhaps this is why dating with intention matters more in an age of abundance, not less.
Intention does not mean deciding too quickly that someone is “the one.” It means allowing an actual person to become more important than the theoretical catalogue of people who might exist. It means knowing what genuinely matters to you well enough that every minor imperfection does not carry the same weight. And it means recognizing that relationship clarity cannot come entirely from having more choices. Eventually, it comes from learning enough about one choice to make a decision.
That is also where better conversations become surprisingly important. Not because there is a magical question that will manufacture chemistry or reveal a soulmate, but because once you stop treating dating as an endless search, you need a better way to discover who the person in front of you actually is.
Say This, Not That: The Most Powerful Dating Questions to Fast-Track Love was created for that next part. It is for the moment when you want to move beyond evaluating someone from the outside and start having the kinds of conversations that give you something more useful than another option: clarity.
Because the real luxury in modern dating may not be having thousands of people available to you. It may be becoming confident enough in what matters that you no longer need thousands of people to choose from.
Explore Say This, Not That: The Most Powerful Dating Questions to Fast-Track Love
