The Problem with Dating Apps

People are spending more and more time alone. They suffer from loneliness and have a harder time meeting other people, whether for friendship, networking, or dating. Current solutions are bad. What would be a better way to help people meet?

People Spend More and More Time Alone

As I shared in A Mental Epidemic:

There are so many one-person households now—and ever more!

As I shared in this update:

• From the late 1970s to the late 1990s, the frequency of hosting friends for parties, games, dinners, and so on declined by 45%. Then it got worse. Between the early 2000s and the latest data, the average amount of time that Americans spent hosting or attending social events declined another 32%.

• From 1965 to 1995, the typical adult gained 6 weekly hours in leisure time. They funneled almost all of it into one activity: watching TV.

• The share of boys and girls who say they meet up with friends almost daily outside school hours has declined by nearly 50% since the early 1990s.

• According to Princeton's Patrick Sharkey, today's adults spend an additional 99 minutes inside their homes on any given day, compared with 2003.

• The share of U.S. adults having dinner or drinks with friends outside the home on any given night has declined by more than 30% in the past 20 years.

• 74% of all restaurant traffic now comes from “off premises” customers—takeout and delivery. And according to data gathered by OpenTable, solo dining has increased by 29% in just the past two years. The top reason given? The need for more “me time.”

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The US Surgeon General summarized it this way:

The Impact on Young Adults

Who suffers from this the most? Young adults:

Source: FT, via this

People under 35 years old are spending more and more time alone. This is more true before they partner up and have children. They spend the most important period of socialization in life, when core social ties are formed, alone.

At the same time, fewer young adults get drivers licenses, have tried alcohol, work for pay, and have ever dated.

And nowhere is this more apparent than in the dating market.

Dating Is Now an Internet Phenomenon

This lack of socialization means the share of people who are single today is higher than ever.

More than half of young adults don’t have a spouse or steady partner now.

And it’s not like this is desired. Most singles want to find a relationship, they just don’t know how to do it.

Greece and China were the two countries available in the study

Total Addressable Market

According to the US Census, 78% of Americans are adults. Since there are 340M Americans, that’s 265M people. Of those, 15% are looking for a partner. That’s 53M singles.

And the vast majority of them are already using online apps.

We can expect this number to reach ~80% of all couples in the coming years, which means the Total Addressable Market for dating apps is ~42M people just in the US, and about 10x that internationally. At $10 per month, that’s billions of dollars in potential revenue every year.

Why have dating apps worked so well, and do they contribute to loneliness?

Why Dating Apps Have Succeeded

1. Market liquidity

In real life, you only meet so many people, because you’re physically limited in time and space. You can only go to a bar a few times a week, and then only be in one bar at a time, and only in bars in close proximity to you. That means you only meet a few candidates at a time, and the likelihood is low that two people who like each other will meet.

Online, that’s not the case. You can browse all the people in your city at once, all day and all night. It’s very likely that there are at least a few people you like. And you save time, money, and hassle.

2. Friction

In real life (IRL), once you find somebody you’re interested in, you need to get up and go talk with that person, getting into an awkward initial conversation, and facing the fear of rejection.

That doesn’t happen in online dating apps. You put your profile up, and don’t see all the people who reject you. You do see all the people who like you, which makes you feel good, and you can immediately learn a bunch of things about them. You can then have several conversations with flirts in parallel. By the time you meet, you will have been able to weed out many non-contenders.

3. Safety

IRL, you never know whether the person might physically harm you. Online, you can check people out first, increasing the chances that the person is normal and safe.

These are the main reasons that dating apps have been so successful. Unfortunately, despite these advantages, dating apps are not solving the problem: There are many apps, but many people don’t like using them.

Source

What’s Wrong with Dating Apps?

The number of users of dating apps has been dropping precipitously since the end of the pandemic.

As a result, the stocks of companies like Match Group and Bumble, owners of some of the most famous dating apps, are at historic lows, down 85% and 95% respectively.

See how they compare to the broader market:

Why?

1. Too Many Options

Source

If you're 20 and you want to be married by 30, you should date a lot of people until you’re 23 without committing to anyone, and then marry the first person you meet that’s better than all your former partners. Why? This is called the explore-exploit algorithm.

When you want to find the best pick out of a pool of options, you need to first know the pool of options, and then pick the best. That means you need to explore the quality of the pool first, and once you know it, you can pick the best option.

In a restaurant you go to frequently, that means exploring the menu and tasting different dishes, finding the best ones, and then sticking to those. The exploration phase is when you try all the dishes, the exploitation when you have found the good ones and now enjoy them.

Something similar happens with dating: There are millions of options, so how do you know who to pick for marriage? The best way is to date a bunch of people for a certain period, in which you don’t commit to anybody. That’s the exploration phase. Then, once you know what a good partner looks like, you move to the exploitation phase: Stick to the first partner that is better than any other one you’ve met before. If you can’t ever date past partners, the optimal time to spend exploring is 37%. Hence dating lots of people until you’re 23 and committing to the best one that comes along after that.

The problem is that this explore-exploit algorithm gets miscalibrated in the modern age.

We have not evolved in a world with infinite candidates. We evolved in a world where we had at best a dozen suitors, and selected our partners among them. That means your exploration phase could be very short. We have evolved to satisfice: Find the best within what’s accessible.

When thousands of candidates pass in front of your eyes, you get overwhelmed. You spend hours and hours swiping left and right. Since there are so many candidates, you believe you can find the perfect one, and get trained to let go of most. But nobody is perfect, so after meeting, you find something wrong with your date, and go back to try again. There’s always somebody better. In other words, you get stuck in exploration mode.

"People think that they just have a million options. It's like when you want to watch a show, and you put on Netflix, and you literally find yourself not being able to decide for an hour, and then you wind up not watching anything."—26 yo

This cycle becomes infinite and annoying, and even if you want to get out of it, others on the dating apps are trained to do the same, so it’s hard to escape that vicious exploration circle.

Source

2. Visual Filter

Because there are so many candidates to sift through, and reading takes too long, candidates are more efficiently selected visually: A picture is worth a thousand words.

It’s not fun, it’s so superficial and it’s also just like really exhausting.—TikTok influencer, via The Economist.

The consequence, though, is that people who look good are more likely to find partners. This means people who don’t look good have a very hard time on dating apps, even though they might have many other great assets.

3. Sexual Asymmetry

Usually, men are more interested in sexual relations early on, and women in commitment.

Source

This results in lots of men joining dating apps for casual sex. Women get overwhelmed with this demand, and reject most men.

Half of women surveyed by Pew said they felt overwhelmed by the number of messages they received. It doesn’t help that 84% of Tinder users are men. So are 61% of those on Bumble, which is targeted at women. Many users also fret about scams.—The Economist.

However, since women feel that they are in high demand and can therefore pick, they go for the most attractive men.

These men get lots of attention, and realize they can have all the sex they want, without having to commit. As a result, they behave accordingly with women.

Women then notice that men are non-committal, feel used for sex, and also feel alienated by the apps.

Meanwhile, all the men who are not at the top of attractiveness feel rejected and drop out of the dating pool.

We end up with two small group of winners:

1. Hot men who get all the sex they want

2. Women who love having sex

And two big groups of losers:

3. The majority of men, who can’t even get dates

4. The majority of women, who would prefer commitment

4. Assortative Mating vs Elo Ranking

One of the most replicable findings in sexual research is that men and women who are similar pair up:

Source

Dating apps have tried to emulate this with an Elo rating. What is that?

In games like chess, tennis, or international football (soccer), where not every player or team can face each other, they are ranked based on who they win or lose against. The better the player, the more a win counts to increase your Elo score, and vice-versa: If you lose against a very bad player, he will gain lots of Elo points while you will lose many. This results in a complete stack rank of all players or teams.

This is basically the same process that all dating app algorithms use to rank their users:

• Each time somebody Likes you (swipe right), your Elo score goes up.

• If “hot people” (= high Elo score) Like you, your score will go up a lot. If they don’t ike you, it won’t impact you much. Conversely, if a person who Likes everybody also likes you, it won’t impact your score much. But if that same person doesn’t like you, you’ll lose a load of points.

The result is that all users of a dating app are stack-ranked, from hottest to least attractive. Then, filters are applied to that ranking to only show the ones that fit your criteria—for example, only people of a certain age, height, or smoking habits.

And since people Like others mostly based on their appearance, what this means is that, within your filters, hot people are shown to hot people, and normal people to normal people, and that’s the main criterion to match people.

But this is not how the world works! Looks are just one of many dimensions of assortative mating. Religion, intelligence, education, money… They all matter, but none of them appear in apps as key inputs in the overall rating. In the end, they serve well physically attractive people and those interested in casual sex, but few others.

An illustration of this is Grindr: Targeted to the LGBTQ community, its stock is reaching historical maxima.

This makes sense because LGBTQ are a minority who have a hard time finding each other, and never had widespread options of safe places to meet in real life. Additionally, Grindr is geared towards sex more than relationships. All this makes an app ideal to solve the need:

• Since there are few LGBTQ people, concentrating them all in one place increases the market liquidity dramatically.

• Since LGBTQ is still stigmatized in some places, the anonymity of an app is ideal.

• Standards for sex are lower and much easier to assess than standards for a long-term relationship.

5. Plausible Deniability

Many people find dating apps too straightforward, a meat market where it’s all about sex and very little about finding meaningful connection. They would prefer a more natural way of meeting people, where sex is a potential outcome, but not the primary one. This is why parties or activities with friends used to be such a common way of meeting new partners: Go for the activity, come back with a partner.

This is especially true for women: As we have seen, they have a strong incentive to look chaste, because then the man can have confidence any resulting child is his, and he’s not spending resources on someone else’s child. A woman who is on a dating app is strongly indicating openness to new partners and to sex, which makes chastity signaling more difficult.

6. Presence-Based Information

Another benefit of traditional dating is that, without noticing, you’ve already hyperselected candidates into a pool you’re more likely to be attracted to:

Dating apps mess up the natural dynamic of meeting someone, being acquaintances for a while to observe and measure compatibility, and then beginning a friendship with the purpose of measuring mutual interest. Dating apps skip all of those steps.

An obvious way this is true is crime: Your friends are likely to avoid criminals. At a minimum, they will likely know if one of their friends is a criminal, and will relay that info to you if you need it. That’s not the case in dating apps:

Source

40% of women reported having been called an offensive name while using dating sites. More than 10% had been threatened with physical violence.—Source

We’re also more used to the organic process of getting to know somebody than the transactional one of assessing each other’s viability:

I’ve never had a single boyfriend who I met once and immediately started dating. Every single person I either met as a friend and either talked to a lot or saw around at various gatherings constantly before we started a romantic relationship. Meeting people in recurring settings, like church hobby classes, or local board game nights, seems to make a lot of sense.—Lehoho

Takeaways

Dating apps are great because they’re easy to use and they present many potential partners. The issue is that sifting through lots of people is hard. But processing photos is easy, so that’s what these apps prioritize. The result is that the apps are based on appearances, which pushes them to gear towards sex. Additionally, since they assess all customers based on an Elo score, they end up stack-ranking them based on looks and matching them accordingly, which is not how humans partner up in real life. It also just feels dirty to many to date through apps.

These are all the issues that customers face when using these apps, why dating apps are losing customers, and why most people using them feel frustrated.

This, in turn, is a major contributor to why many people feel alone today, especially young adults. If we want to alleviate loneliness, we need to solve this problem.

What would be a better solution than dating apps? I’ll write about it in the premium article of this week.

If you know anyone building new apps in this space, let me know!