ARTICLE: The ‘Dating Market’ Is Getting Worse by Ashley FettersKaitlyn Tiffany

Ever since her last relationship ended this past August, Liz has been consciously trying not to treat dating as a “numbers game.” By the 30-year-old Alaskan’s own admission, however, it hasn’t been going great.

Liz has been going on Tinder dates frequently, sometimes multiple times a week—one of her New Year’s resolutions was to go on every date she was invited on. But Liz, who asked to be identified only by her first name in order to avoid harassment, can’t escape a feeling of impersonal, businesslike detachment from the whole pursuit.

“It’s like, ‘If this doesn’t go well, there are 20 other guys who look like you in my inbox.’ And I’m sure they feel the same way—that there are 20 other girls who are willing to hang out, or whatever,” she said. “People are seen as commodities, as opposed to individuals.”

It’s understandable that someone like Liz might internalize the idea that dating is a game of probabilities or ratios, or a marketplace in which single people just have to keep shopping until they find “the one.” The idea that a dating pool can be analyzed as a marketplace or an economy is both recently popular and very old: For generations, people have been describing newly single people as “back on the market” and analyzing dating in terms of supply and demand. In 1960, the Motown act the Miracles recorded “Shop Around,” a jaunty ode to the idea of checking out and trying on a bunch of new partners before making a “deal.” The economist Gary Becker, who would later go on to win the Nobel Prize, began applying economic principles to marriage and divorce rates in the early 1970s. More recently, a plethora of market-minded dating books are coaching singles on how to seal a romantic deal, and dating apps, which have rapidly become the mode du jour for single people to meet each other, make sex and romance even more like shopping.

The unfortunate coincidence is that the fine-tuned analysis of dating’s numbers game and the streamlining of its trial-and-error process of shopping around have taken place as dating’s definition has expanded from “the search for a suitable marriage partner” into something decidedly more ambiguous. Meanwhile, technologies have emerged that make the market more visible than ever to the average person, encouraging a ruthless mind-set of assigning “objective” values to potential partners and to ourselves—with little regard for the ways that framework might be weaponized. The idea that a population of single people can be analyzed like a market might be useful to some extent to sociologists or economists, but the widespread adoption of it by single people themselves can result in a warped outlook on love.

Moira Weigel, the author of Labor of Love: The Invention of Dating, argues that dating as we know it—single people going out together to restaurants, bars, movies, and other commercial or semicommercial spaces—came about in the late 19th century. “Almost everywhere, for most of human history, courtship was supervised. And it was taking place in noncommercial spaces: in homes, at the synagogue,” she said in an interview. “Somewhere where other people were watching. What dating does is it takes that process out of the home, out of supervised and mostly noncommercial spaces, to movie theaters and dance halls.” Modern dating, she noted, has always situated the process of finding love within the realm of commerce—making it possible for economic concepts to seep in.

The application of the supply-and-demand concept, Weigel said, may have come into the picture in the late 19th century, when American cities were exploding in population. “There were probably, like, five people your age in [your hometown],” she told me. “Then you move to the city because you need to make more money and help support your family, and you’d see hundreds of people every day.” When there are bigger numbers of potential partners in play, she said, it’s much more likely that people will begin to think about dating in terms of probabilities and odds.

Eva Illouz, directrice d’etudes (director of studies) at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, who has written about the the application of economic principles to romance, agrees that dating started to be understood as a marketplace as courtship rituals left private spheres, but she thinks the analogy fully crystallized when the sexual revolution of the mid-20th century helped dissolve many lingering traditions and taboos around who could or should date whom. People began assessing for themselves what the costs or benefits of certain partnerships might be—a decision that used to be a family’s rather than an individual’s. “What you have is people meeting each other directly, which is exactly the situation of a market,” she said. “Everybody’s looking at everybody, in a way.”

In the modern era, it seems probable that the way people now shop online for goods—in virtual marketplaces, where they can easily filter out features they do and don’t want—has influenced the way people “shop” for partners, especially on dating apps, which often allow that same kind of filtering. The behavioral economics researcher and dating coach Logan Ury said in an interview that many single people she works with engage in what she calls “relationshopping.”

Read: The rise of dating-app fatigue

“People, especially as they get older, really know their preferences. So they think that they know what they want,” Ury said—and retroactively added quotation marks around the words “know what they want.” “Those are things like ‘I want a redhead who’s over 5’7”,’ or ‘I want a Jewish man who at least has a graduate degree.’” So they log in to a digital marketplace and start narrowing down their options. “They shop for a partner the way that they would shop for a camera or Bluetooth headphones,” she said.

But, Ury went on, there’s a fatal flaw in this logic: No one knows what they want so much as they believe they know what they want. Actual romantic chemistry is volatile and hard to predict; it can crackle between two people with nothing in common and fail to materialize in what looks on paper like a perfect match. Ury often finds herself coaching her clients to broaden their searches and detach themselves from their meticulously crafted “checklists.”

The fact that human-to-human matches are less predictable than consumer-to-good matches is just one problem with the market metaphor; another is that dating is not a one-time transaction. Let’s say you’re on the market for a vacuum cleaner—another endeavor in which you might invest considerable time learning about and weighing your options, in search of the best fit for your needs. You shop around a bit, then you choose one, buy it, and, unless it breaks, that’s your vacuum cleaner for the foreseeable future. You likely will not continue trying out new vacuums, or acquire a second and third as your “non-primary” vacuums. In dating, especially in recent years, the point isn’t always exclusivity, permanence, or even the sort of long-term relationship one might have with a vacuum. With the rise of “hookup culture” and the normalization of polyamory and open relationships, it’s perfectly common for people to seek partnerships that won’t necessarily preclude them from seeking other partnerships, later on or in addition. This makes supply and demand a bit harder to parse. Given that marriage is much more commonly understood to mean a relationship involving one-to-one exclusivity and permanence, the idea of a marketplace or economy maps much more cleanly onto matrimony than dating.

The marketplace metaphor also fails to account for what many daters know intuitively: that being on the market for a long time—or being off the market, and then back on, and then off again—can change how a person interacts with the marketplace. Obviously, this wouldn’t affect a material good in the same way. Families repeatedly moving out of houses, for example, wouldn’t affect the houses’ feelings, but being dumped over and over by a series of girlfriends might change a person’s attitude toward finding a new partner. Basically, ideas about markets that are repurposed from the economy of material goods don’t work so well when applied to sentient beings who have emotions. Or, as Moira Weigel put it, “It’s almost like humans aren’t actually commodities.”

When market logic is applied to the pursuit of a partner and fails, people can start to feel cheated. This can cause bitterness and disillusionment, or worse. “They have a phrase here where they say the odds are good but the goods are odd,” Liz said, because in Alaska on the whole there are already more men than women, and on the apps the disparity is even sharper. She estimates that she gets 10 times as many messages as the average man in her town. “It sort of skews the odds in my favor,” she said. “But, oh my gosh, I’ve also received a lot of abuse.”

Recently, Liz matched with a man on Tinder who invited her over to his house at 11 p.m. When she declined, she said, he called her 83 times later that night, between 1 a.m. and 5 a.m. And when she finally answered and asked him to stop, he called her a “bitch” and said he was “teaching her a lesson.” It was scary, but Liz said she wasn’t shocked, as she has had plenty of interactions with men who have “bubbling, latent anger” about the way things are going for them on the dating market. Despite having received 83 phone calls in four hours, Liz was sympathetic toward the man. “At a certain point,” she said, “it becomes exhausting to cast your net over and over and receive so little.”


This violent reaction to failure is also present in conversations about “sexual market value”—a term so popular on Reddit that it is sometimes abbreviated as “SMV”—which usually involve complaints that women are objectively overvaluing themselves in the marketplace and belittling the men they should be trying to date.

The logic is upsetting but clear: The (shaky) foundational idea of capitalism is that the market is unfailingly impartial and correct, and that its mechanisms of supply and demand and value exchange guarantee that everything is fair. It’s a dangerous metaphor to apply to human relationships, because introducing the idea that dating should be “fair” subsequently introduces the idea that there is someone who is responsible when it is unfair. When the market’s logic breaks down, it must mean someone is overriding the laws. And in online spaces populated by heterosexual men, heterosexual women have been charged with the bulk of these crimes.

“The typical clean-cut, well-spoken, hard-working, respectful, male” who makes six figures should be a “magnet for women,” someone asserted recently in a thread posted in the tech-centric forum Hacker News. But instead, the poster claimed, this hypothetical man is actually cursed because the Bay Area has one of the worst “male-female ratios among the single.” The responses are similarly disaffected and analytical, some arguing that the gender ratio doesn’t matter, because women only date tall men who are “high earners,” and they are “much more selective” than men. “This can be verified on practically any dating app with a few hours of data,” one commenter wrote.

Economic metaphors provide the language for conversations on Reddit with titles like “thoughts on what could be done to regulate the dating market,” and for a subreddit named sarcastically “Where Are All The Good Men?” with the stated purpose of “exposing” all the women who have “unreasonable standards” and offer “little to no value themselves.” (On the really extremist end, some suggest that the government should assign girlfriends to any man who wants one.) Which is not at all to say that heterosexual men are the only ones thinking this way: In the 54,000-member subreddit r/FemaleDatingStrategy, the first “principle” listed in its official ideology is “be a high value woman.” The group’s handbook is thousands of words long, and also emphasizes that “as women, we have the responsibility to be ruthless in our evaluation of men.”

The design and marketing of dating apps further encourage a cold, odds-based approach to love. While they have surely created, at this point, thousands if not millions of successful relationships, they have also aggravated, for some men, their feeling that they are unjustly invisible to women.

Men outnumber women dramatically on dating apps; this is a fact. A 2016 literature review also found that men are more active users of these apps—both in the amount of time they spend on them and the number of interactions they attempt. Their experience of not getting as many matches or messages, the numbers say, is real.

But data sets made available by the apps can themselves be wielded in unsettling ways by people who believe the numbers are working against them. A since-deleted 2017 blog post on the dating app Hinge’s official website explained an experiment conducted by a Hinge engineer, Aviv Goldgeier. Using the Gini coefficient, a common measure of income inequality within a country, and counting “likes” as income, Goldgeier determined that men had a much higher (that is, worse) Gini coefficient than women. With these results, Goldgeier compared the “female dating economy” to Western Europe and the “male dating economy” to South Africa. This is, obviously, an absurd thing to publish on a company blog, but not just because its analysis is so plainly accusatory and weakly reasoned. It’s also a bald-faced admission that the author—and possibly the company he speaks for—is thinking about people as sets of numbers.

In a since-deleted 2009 official blog post, an OkCupid employee’s data analysis showed women rating men as “worse-looking than medium” 80 percent of the time, and concluded, “Females of OkCupid, we site founders say to you: ouch! Paradoxically, it seems it’s women, not men, who have unrealistic standards for the opposite sex.” This post, more than a decade later, is referenced in men’s-rights or men’s-interest subreddits as “infamous” and “we all know it.”

Even without these creepy blog posts, dating apps can amplify a feeling of frustration with dating by making it seem as if it should be much easier. The Stanford economist Alvin Roth has argued that Tinder is, like the New York Stock Exchange, a “thick” market where lots of people are trying to complete transactions, and that the main problem with dating apps is simply congestion. To him, the idea of a dating market is not new at all. “Have you ever read any of the novels of Jane Austen?” he asked. “Pride and Prejudice is a very market-oriented novel. Balls were the internet of the day. You went and showed yourself off.”



Daters have—or appear to have—a lot more choices on a dating app in 2020 than they would have at a provincial dance party in rural England in the 1790s, which is good, until it’s bad. The human brain is not equipped to process and respond individually to thousands of profiles, but it takes only a few hours on a dating app to develop a mental heuristic for sorting people into broad categories. In this way, people can easily become seen as commodities—interchangeable products available for acquisition or trade. “What the internet apps do is that they enable you to see, for the first time ever in history, the market of possible partners,” Illouz, the Hebrew University sociology professor, said. Or, it makes a dater think they can see the market, when really all they can see is what an algorithm shows them.

The idea of the dating market is appealing because a market is something a person can understand and try to manipulate. But fiddling with the inputs—by sending more messages, going on more dates, toggling and re-toggling search parameters, or even moving to a city with a better ratio—isn’t necessarily going to help anybody succeed on that market in a way that’s meaningful to them.

Last year, researchers at Ohio State University examined the link between loneliness and compulsive use of dating apps—interviewing college students who spent above-average time swiping—and found a terrible feedback loop: The lonelier you are, the more doggedly you will seek out a partner, and the more negative outcomes you’re likely to be faced with, and the more alienated from other people you will feel. This happens to men and women in the same way.

“We found no statistically significant differences for gender at all,” the lead author, Katy Coduto, said in an email. “Like, not even marginally significant.”

There may always have been a dating market, but today people’s belief that they can see it and describe it and control their place in it is much stronger. And the way we speak becomes the way we think, as well as a glaze to disguise the way we feel. Someone who refers to looking for a partner as a numbers game will sound coolly aware and pragmatic, and guide themselves to a more odds-based approach to dating. But they may also suppress any honest expression of the unbearably human loneliness or desire that makes them keep doing the math.

ARTICLE:The two biggest reasons dating is dead by Suzanne Venker

I'm 51. In my day, romantic relationships weren't complicated. You met someone, you were attracted to him or her, you got along great, and you started dating. As in, actual dating: the guy asked the girl to dinner and a movie, and out they went. At the end of the date, he dropped her off at home, kissed her, and if the date went well, he would call her the next day.

If one of the two parties wasn't "feeling it," the relationship pretty much ended there. If they both liked each other, it continued. At some point down the line, the relationship would either fizzle out, or it wouldn't. If it didn't, the couple got married. The end.

This pattern bears no resemblance to today's dating scene. Young people today generally don't date; they "hang out," which basically means spending time together in the same room. They don't even have to be communicating in that room — they're likely on their respective smartphones and watching TV. Or they might "hook up," which can mean anything from kissing to having sex. Whatever goes on between men and women today, particularly in college but even afterward, is often very vague and senseless.

Smartphones and social media are in part to blame, but the rules had already changed. As products of divorce, the modern generation has no clue how to make a relationship work.
The sex part they have down — that part's easy. But how to communicate, how to date, and how to love, well, it's all Greek to them.

There are two main reasons for this sad state of affairs. The first is that so many women lowered their standards. They no longer, as women have always done since the beginning of time, embolden men to bond with them before agreeing to have sex. If a woman wants love and commitment, even before marriage, she's probably not going to get it by making herself so sexually available. That's not how it works. Unfortunately, young women have been taught that "having sex like a man" somehow makes them a man's "equal."
But, of course, it does just the opposite. Women don't gain power by being promiscuous — they lose it.

When it comes to love and sex, women are the gatekeepers: Men have always followed their lead. A man can't have sex with a woman without her permission (if he does, it's a crime); therefore, the average romantic relationship travels along whatever path a woman walks. If she lets a guy know he needn't put in the effort, well then, he won't put it in the effort. But if her standards are high, if she commands respect and makes him work to earn her love, he will rise to the occasion. 

Unfortunately, too many young women do the former rather than the latter; which makes it hard for the women whose standards are high. It also makes dating superfluous. With so many women putting the cart before the horse, relationships go nowhere. They don't even get off the ground.

The second reason dating is dead is that young people think of marriage as the grand finale rather than the main event. This is a huge departure from the way almost every other generation viewed marriage: as the beginning of life. The purpose. The whole enchilada. This earlier mindset guarantees successful dating because people don't waste time with people they know they'd never marry. Rather, they date with purpose: to find out if the person is a potential life match. Without that element, you're just shooting blanks.
But here's the real problem, a largely unspoken problem, with this new mindset: There's a huge psychological toll for moving in and out of countless relationships that go nowhere. The idea behind postponing marriage inevitably is that you learn about people and about yourself and about what you ultimately want in a partner, and there's some truth to this. But it is equally, if not more, likely you'll end up cynical and scarred — and more wary, not less, of how to build a relationship that lasts. This is especially true if all of those relationships were sexual in nature, which they typically are. 

Each time you invest in a relationship that doesn't last, each time you pour out your heart and your soul and your body to him or her, you leave just a little bit damaged. You'll then take these wounds with you into each new relationship. By the time you do get married, if you do, your faith in love has been shattered. 

If we changed just these two things — if women start owning their power in the realm of love and sex, and if young people view marriage as something to aspire to rather than something to put off or to avoid, dating will once again start carrying a lot of weight. 

I don't see any evidence that young people, women in particular, enjoy putting themselves through an endless stream of broken relationships. None of us learns who we are until we get married, so the idea of postponing marriage until we "know ourselves" is just something people tell themselves. It's in the commitment that we learn what we're capable of. It's in the commitment that we finally, ultimately, learn how to love.
Until then, we're just killing time.

THOUGHT: FIONA

The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson. It’s the book that all of Kindle’s hardware code names came from. The book is about a character named Fiona and her “illustrated primer,” a machine designed to look like a book but with links to all libraries, all TV shows, and all human knowledge. (Jeff originally wanted the Kindle code names to come from Star Trek, since he’s such a Trekkie, but more literate minds prevailed.) The book is a treasure trove of other code names for Kindle hardware: Nell, Miranda, and Turing.

THOUGHTS: THE STAR TREK TIME LINE

The Days Before Space

4.6 Billion BCE (or maybe even more):

The birth/arrival/creation of the Guardian of Forever on its ancient planet (ST:TOS S1E28, “The Guardian on the Edge of Forever”).

4 Billion BCE:

An unknown humanoid species, to quote Geordi LaForge, “scattered this genetic material into the primordial soup of at least 19 different planets across the galaxy,” explaining why most sentient species look the same (ST:TNG S6E20, “The Chase”).

3.5 Billion BCE:

The beginnings of life in the Alpha Quadrant are threatened by Q’s anomaly (ST:TNG S7E25-26, “All Good Things”).

400 CE (approximately):

Approximate time when the Changelings founded what would become the Dominion, with the Jem’Hadar

900 CE (approximately):

Kahless the Unforgettable slays the Qo’noS tyrant Molor and becomes the first Emperor of the Klingon Empire.

1505 CE:

First known sign of the Borg in the Delta Quadrant.

1600 CE (approximately):

The beginnings of Bajoran space exploration leads to first contact between the Cardassians and Bajorans. (It does not go well for them.)

1800 CE (approximately):

Establishment of the Cardassian Union.

1893:

Picard, La Forge, Troi, Riker, and Crusher arrive in San Francisco after the discovery of Data’s severed head in their century. Samuel Clemens (AKA Mark Twain) gets caught up in their efforts to save him (ST:TNG S5E26-S6E1, “Time’s Arrow”).

1930:

Kirk and Spock chase a drugged and disoriented McCoy through the time portal known as the Guardian of Forever to New York City. While there, Kirk falls in love with Edith Keeler, a social worker whose life McCoy saved, but Kirk must ultimately let die, in order to preserve the timeline and prevent Germany from winning World War II (ST:TOS S1E28, “The City on the Edge of Forever”).

1937:

The Briori abduct several hundred humans from Earth and bring them to the Delta Quadrant, including Amelia Earhart (ST:VOY S2E1, “The 37’s”).

1944 (alternate universe):

Jonathan Archer and the Enterprise NX-01 crew find themselves in an altered version of World War II, where the Nazis have invaded America (ST:ENT S4E1-E2, “Storm Front”).

July 1947:

Quark, Rom and Nog crash their ship in Roswell, New Mexico and have to escape from the U.S. Military (ST:DS9 S4E8, “Little Green Men”).

1968:

The Enterprise travels back to this year to prevent an agent from interfering with events, because Starfleet had a record of them doing so. Time travel is fun that way (ST:TOS S2E26, “Assignment: Earth”).The Enterprise also went on a similar mission in 1969 (ST:TOS S1E19, “Tomorrow Is Yesterday”).

1986:

Kirk and friends, in search of humpback whales to save the future, arrive in San Francisco, where they meet marine biologist Gillian Taylor, invent transparent aluminum, and teach Spock how to swear (Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home).

1992-1996:

The Eugenics Wars rage on (at least, according to almost all sources). When the Enterprise first discovers genetically enhanced Khan Noonien Singh (ST:TOS S1E24, “Space Seed”), Spock says that during these years, Khan had conquered most of the Earth, before fleeing the Earth with 84 of his followers to drift through space in the S.S. Botany Bay.

1996:

In this version of 1996 (perhaps because they’ve just ended?), there’s no sign of the Eugenics Wars in action when the Voyager is pulled to sunny Southern California by a 29th century time ship. Despite being featured on local news broadcasts, the Voyager and its crew manage not to damage the timeline before returning to the 24th century (ST:VOY S3E8-9, “Future’s End”).

December 27, 1999:

One of Captain Janeway’s ancestors gets caught up in the controversy surrounding the construction of the Millennium Gate tower, a self-sufficient structure built in Indiana that would become the model for the colonization of Mars (ST:VOY S5E23, “11:59”).

2004:

Archer and T’Pol arrive in Detroit to stop the Xindi from annihilating the human race with a bioweapon — they succeed (ST:ENT S3E11, “Carpenter Street).

Aug. 30-Sept. 2, 2024:

Thanks to a transporter accident, Sisko, Dax and Bashir arrive in a very different San Francisco from the modern world, and get caught up in the Bell Riots, a historical event which eventually led to massive reform of America’s social issues (ST:DS9 S3E11-E12, “Past Tense”).

2026 – 2053:

World War III ravages Earth, killing six hundred million humans.


The Dawn of the Warp Era

April 4, 2063:

The Enterprise-D arrives at Earth after chasing a Borg sphere from the 24th century, just as the Borg plan to disrupt the launch of Zefram Cochrane’s extremely important prototype warp drive flight (Star Trek: First Contact).

April 5, 2063:

Thanks to the Enterprise-D, Cochrane successfully completes his flight and, later that day, a Vulcan ship arrives on Earth, initiating first contact and beginning humanity’s journey to its future as an architect of the Federation (Star Trek: First Contact).

2103:

Colonies on Mars are established.

2119:

An elderly Zefram Cochrane vanishes, after heading out on one last space voyage (ST:TOS S2E9, “Metamorphosis”).

2151:

The Enterprise NX-01, the first starship capable of traveling at Warp 5, begins its mission to explore the galaxy. A major part of its adventures have to do with the Temporal Cold War, in which the crew found itself caught up in time travel conflicts.

March 2153:

The Xindi attack Earth, firing a blast that causes destruction from Florida to Venezuela, killing seven million people. The NX-01 refocuses its mission on trying to stop the Xindi from causing further destruction.

2155:

For the first time, Starfleet officers travel to the Mirror Universe, encountering a far darker version of their world (ST:ENT S4E18-E19, “In a Mirror, Darkly”).
Discussion of uniting various planets for some sort of… federation, perhaps, begins (ST:ENT S4E22, “These Are the Voyages…”).

2156–2160:

A four-year war with the Romulans leads to the creation of the Romulan Neutral Zone.

2161:

Captain Archer speaks to the Coalition of Planets about the need to create…
The United Federation of Planets, which is officially born that year (ST:ENT S4E22, “These Are the Voyages…”).
Starfleet Academy is also founded.

2173:

In an alternate timeline, the crew of the Defiant was sent back in time to this year, crashing on a planet called Gaia. While Kira died, the survivors eventually built a society of eight thousand people. This society, however, was wiped out of existence when the Odo living on Gaia prevented the Defiant from replicating that journey into the past, to save Kira’s life (ST:DS9 S5E22, “Children of Time”).

March 22nd, 2233:

James Tiberius Kirk is born.

In the Kelvin Timeline, Kirk is born aboard a USS Kelvin shuttlecraft as time-traveling Romulan Nero attacks the ship now being captained by James’ soon-to-be-deceased father George (Star Trek 2009).
In the Prime Timeline, Kirk is born (exact location unknown, but could have still been aboard the USS Kelvin, albeit under more peaceful circumstances), and eventually raised in Iowa by George and Winona Kirk.

2236

Michael Burnham’s family was killed at Doctari Alpha, following which Sarek brought her into his home and made her Spock’s adoptive sister (ST:DIS S2E1, “Brothers”).

2250:

The USS Enterprise, captained by Christopher Pike, launches its second five-year mission to explore the universe.

2254:

Captain Pike, Lieutenant Spock and the Enterprise visit the planet of Talos IV (ST:TOS S1E15-E16, “The Menagerie”).

May 2256:

The USS Shenzhou is called to investigate damage done to an interstellar array on the edge of Federation space, which leads to the ship being overwhelmed by an onslaught of Klingon ships. In the conflict, Captain Georgiou is killed, and Lieutenant Michael Burnham not just committing mutiny, but triggering a war between the Federation and the Klingons (ST:DIS S1E1-E2, “The Vulcan Hello”-“Battle at the Binary Stars”).

November 2256:

Michael Burnham is, via a roundabout set of circumstances, transferred from prison to the USS Discovery under the command of Captain Gabriel Lorca (ST:DIS S1E3, “Context Is For Kings”).

2257:

The Discovery arrives in the Mirror Universe thanks to Lorca, who had secretly snuck into the Prime Universe. The ship eventually returns home, but with the devious Mirror Universe version of Georgiou on board (ST:DIS S1E13, “What’s Past Is Prologue”).
By making a pact with L’Rell and stopping an attack on the Klingon homeworld, Burnham is able to end the Federation-Klingon War (ST:DIS S1E13, “What’s Past Is Prologue”).
As the Enterprise needs repairs and the Discovery needs a (temporary?) captain, Captain Pike fills in the gap, introducing the mission to discover what’s going on with the “Red Angel” who keeps appearing in multiple spots across the Alpha Quadrant (ST:DIS S2E1, “Brothers”).

2258

Burnham learns that the Red Angel is herself, from the future, and ultimately chases that predestination paradox (ST:DIS Season 2).
The Discovery, with a limited crew, travels to the year 3186. Those who stay behind, including Pike, Spock and Number One, adhere to the pact that speaking of the Discovery or its crew ever again is a treasonable offense (ST:DIS S2E14, “Such Sweet Sorrow, Part 2”).

2258 (Kelvin-verse):

The Prime Universe version of Spock arrives from the future — which is just what Nero has been waiting for, for 25 years (Star Trek 2009).
James Kirk is just about to finish his time at Starfleet Academy when the planet of Vulcan is destroyed by Nero. Kirk and his new crew ultimately take down Nero, and end up taking over the Enterprise for a mission of exploration (Star Trek 2009).

2259 (Kelvin-verse):

Khan Noonien Singh arises to try to tear down the Federation. Kirk dies, but does not stay dead (Star Trek Into Darkness).

2260 (Kelvin-verse):

The Enterprise sets out on its five-year mission (Star Trek Beyond).

2263 (Kelvin-verse):

Three years into said mission, the Enterprise crew saves the space station Yorktown from destruction — destroying their ship in the process, but the Enterprise-A immediately gets commissioned (Star Trek Beyond).
The Prime Universe Spock, having lived in the Kelvin timeline for seven years, passes away at the age of 162 (Star Trek Beyond).

2265:

James T. Kirk takes command of the USS Enterprise for another five-year mission, encountering Klingons, con men and more.

2267:

McCoy, after an unfortunate injection, rushes to the surface of an alien planet and escapes to the year 1930 thanks to the Guardian of Forever (ST:TOS S1E28, “The Guardian on the Edge of Forever”).

2268:

The Enterprise experiences plenty of wacky experiences, but few as memorable as a trip to Deep Space Station K-7 to handle an agricultural situation aggravated by a tribble infestation (ST:TOS S2E13, “The Trouble With Tribbles”).
After a time traveler tries to interfere with the events of DSS K-7, Captain Sisko and his crew arrive to make sure Kirk keeps the Klingons from sabotaging things (ST:DS9 S5E6, “Trials and Tribble-ations”).

2269:

The Enterprise discovers Zefram Cochrane marooned on a remote planetoid, but ultimately leaves him behind with an alien consciousness with which he is in love (ST:TOS S2E9, “Metamorphosis”).

2270:

At the end of the five-year mission, Kirk is promoted to the rank of Admiral, while Will Decker becomes captain of the USS Enterprise.

2273:

When an alien-retrofitted version of Voyager returns to Earth, Kirk resumes control over the Enterprise to save Earth (Star Trek: The Motion Picture).

2285:

The Prime Universe Khan gets his chance at conquering the galaxy. Spock dies in the successful effort to thwart him (Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan).
Kirk steals the Enterprise, but Spock is successfully resurrected thanks to the planet Genesis’s extraordinary properties. They return Spock to Vulcan so he can recuperate (Star Trek III: The Search For Spock).

2286:

An alien probe broadcasting humpback whale song doesn’t get any response, and starts trying to destroy the planet Earth as a result. To prevent this, Kirk and his friends travel back in time (Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home).
Kirk is demoted to the rank of Captain, and thus he can return to being the Captain of the Enterprise (Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home).

2287:

The Enterprise crew goes on another adventure, which might be boiled down to this memorable incident: Captain Kirk asks the question “What does God need with a starship?” (Star Trek V: The Final Frontier).

2290:

Hikaru Sulu becomes captain of the USS Excelsior.

2293:

Kirk is framed for the assassination of Klingon Chancellor Gorkon, and he and McCoy even go to prison for that presumed crime, but their friends rescue them in time to prevent another assassination. Kirk saves the peace talks and is told to bring the Enterprise back to Earth. He might end up taking his time getting there (Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country).
Tuvok serves under Captain Sulu aboard the Excelsior (ST:VOY S3E2, “Flashback”).
Later that year, Kirk and other crew members are visiting the newly commissioned Enterprise-B. After an encounter with the Nexus that destroys a good part of the ship, Kirk is considered dead (Star Trek Generations).

2344:

Captain Rachel Garrett and the Enterprise-C are lost while defending a Klingon settlement, an event which proved pivotal to creating peace between the Klingons and the Federation — so pivotal that when it didn’t happen in an alternate universe, it led to a far worse future (ST:TNG S3E15, “Yesterday’s Enterprise”).

2347:

War between the Federation and Cardassian Union begins, with conflicts tapering off in the 2350s.

2358:

The USS Pegasus is considered missing after experimenting with phasing technology (ST:TNG S7E12, “The Pegasus”).




The Rise of Picard, Sisko, and Janeway

2364:

Captain Jean-Luc Picard takes command of the Enterprise, confronting a malevolent entity known as Q who is set upon judging the human race (ST:TNG S1E1-E2, “Encounter at Farpoint”).

Seven years later, Picard re-experiences this first mission, because it is revealed that the trial which Q began during the trip to Farpoint had never actually ended (ST:TNG S7E25-26, “All Good Things”).

Lieutenant Natasha Yar is killed in action (ST:TNG S1E23, “Skin of Evil”).

2365:

The Enterprise encounters the Borg for the first time, after being flung into the Delta Quadrant by Q (ST:TNG S2E16, “Q Who”).

2366:

The Enterprise-C arrives in a very changed version of the universe, 22 years after it disappeared into a temporal rift. Captain Garrett and her crew eventually return to the point of their disappearance to preserve the original timeline, with Tasha Yar (who did not die in this new timeline) returning with them (ST:TNG S3E15, “Yesterday’s Enterprise”).

2367:

Jean-Luc Picard gets abducted by the Borg, and a battle he spearheads as Locutus of Borg, known as Wolf 359, is a brutal moment for the Federation. Benjamin Sisko’s wife Jennifer is one of the many, many casualties (ST:TNG S3E26-S4E1, “The Best of Both Worlds”; ST:DS9 S1E1, “Emissary”).
With the ascension of Gowron as Emperor, the Klingon Civil War begins.

2368:

The Klingon Civil War ends, with Gowron maintaining his control over the Empire (ST:TNG S5E1, “Redemption II”).
Ambassador Spock travels to Romulus to try to reunite the Vulcans and Romulan people — unsuccessfully. (ST:TNG S5E7-8, “Redemption I-II”).

2369:

Commander Benjamin Sisko arrives at the station Deep Space Nine, where he encounters the “wormhole aliens,” AKA “the Prophets,” and devotes himself to bringing local planet Bajor into the Federation as Bajor rebuilds after Cardassian occupation (ST:DS9 S1E1, “Emissary”).
The Enterprise-D recovers long-lost Montgomery Scott from a transporter buffer, and Scotty sets out to go exploring the galaxy (ST:TNG S6E4, “Relics”).

2370:

Commander Riker, struggling to decide what to do when his old commanding officer Admiral Pressman asks for his help, uses the holodeck to look back at Captain Archer’s big speech to the Coalition of Planets (ST:ENT S4E22, “These Are the Voyages…”; ST:TNG S7E12, “The Pegasus”).
The Federation-Cardassian Treaty is signed, officially ending hostilities and creating a demilitarized zone that left several planets previously colonized by Federation citizens under Cardassian control. This leads to the creation of the Maquis, former Federation members who rebel against the Cardassians (ST:DS9 S2E20-21, “The Maquis”).
Picard begins to shift in time, from his past to his future, which lead to him discovering that Q has spent the last seven years evaluating the human race, based on the adventures of Picard and his crew. Ultimately, Picard convinces Q of humanity’s value (ST:TNG S7E25-26, “All Good Things”).

2371:

Picard learns that his brother and nephew have ben killed in a fire at his family vineyard (Star Trek Generations).
The Enterprise-D gets caught up in Dr. Soran’s attempt to reach the Nexus, a realm outside of space and time that can feel like paradise. Picard, inside the Nexus, meets Kirk, who he convinces to leave the Nexus with him to stop Soran. They succeed, but Kirk is killed and the Enterprise is destroyed (Star Trek Generations).
The USS Voyager departs Deep Space Nine to track down a missing Maquis ship, but both ships end up getting dragged 75,000 light years away from Earth. The Starfleet and Maquis crews end up working together to try to get back to the Alpha Quadrant (ST:VOY S1E1-2, “Caretaker”).
The USS Defiant, a new ship to be captained by Benjamin Sisko, arrives at Deep Space Nine (ST:DS9 S3E1, “The Search, Part I”).
Odo learns that his people, the Changelings, are the Founders of the Dominion, which controls the Gamma Quadrant, and now aims to take over the Alpha Quadrant (ST:DS9 S3E1-2, “The Search, Parts I/II”).

2372:

The Enterprise-E is launched.
Thanks to Changeling infiltration at the highest levels of government, war erupts between the Federation and the Klingon Empire. Worf joins the crew of Deep Space Nine (ST:DS9 S4E1-2, “The Way of the Warrior”).

2373:

After the Battle of Sector 001, in which the Borg gets close to attacking the Earth, the Enterprise-E launches into action, following a Borg Sphere back into the past (Star Trek: First Contact).
When the Changeling impersonating General Martok is revealed, war between the Federation and the Klingons ends (ST:DS9 S5E1, “Apocalypse Rising”).
The Federation first learns about the existence of the non-corporeal Pah-wraiths, enemies of the Bajoran Prophets, when one of them takes over the body of Keiko O’Brien (ST:DS9 S5E5, “The Assignment”).
Bashir, without anyone’s knowledge, is replaced by a Changeling, which is not uncovered for a month (ST:DS9 S5E14-15, “In Purgatory’s Shadow”/”By Inferno’s Light”).
The Cardassian Union officially joins the Dominion, which invades the Alpha Quadrant (ST:DS9 S5E14-15, “In Purgatory’s Shadow”/”By Inferno’s Light”).

The Dominion, as part of the deal, helps Cardassia completely eliminate the Maquis.

To avoid war with the Dominion, the Bajorans sign a non-aggression treaty (ST:DS9 S5E26, “Call to Arms”).
The Dominion takes over the Bajor sector as the Federation departs, beginning the Dominion War (ST:DS9 S5E26, “Call to Arms”).

2374:

Voyager assists the Borg in fighting off Species 8472, and a drone known as Seven of Nine gets marooned on their ship (ST:VOY S4E1, “Scorpion, Part II”).
Meanwhile, crew member Kes leaves the ship to explore her psychic abilities (ST:VOY S4E2, “The Gift”).
The Dominion War is fought on multiple fronts, with Kira leading a resistance effort on Deep Space Nine while Sisko and the Defiant battle to eventually retake the station (ST:DS9 S6E6, “Sacrifice of Angels”).
Gul Dukat’s daughter Ziyal is killed by Damar during the battle over DS9 (ST:DS9 S6E6, “Sacrifice of Angels”).
Worf and Jadzia Dax get married (ST:DS9 S6E7, “You Are Cordially Invited…”).
First major appearance of Section 31 (in the Prime timeline), as an agent attempts to recruit Bashir (ST:DS9 S6E18, “Inquisition”).
Thanks to Sisko working with the ruthless Garak, the Romulans join the war against the Dominion (ST:DS9 S6E19, “In the Pale Moonlight”).
Dukat, having snuck onto DS9, kills Jadzia Dax and releases a Pah-wraith which closes the Bajoran wormhole permanently (ST:DS9 S6E26, “Tears of the Prophets”).

2375:

The Dax symbiont is joined with a Trill named Ezri (ST:DS9 S7E1, “Image in the Sand”).
After having left DS9 for a short time, Sisko recovers the Orb of the Emissary, and returns to reopen the wormhole (ST:DS9 S7E2, “Shadows and Symbols”).
Dukat now leads a cult devoted to the worship of the Pah-wraiths (ST:DS9 S7E9, “Covenant”).
The Enterprise-E crew, including Worf, work together to reconcile the Son’a and Ba’ku people after a century of distrust (Star Trek: Insurrection).
Sisko makes plans for life after the Dominion War, and also marries long-time girlfriend Kasidy Yates (ST:DS9 S7E18, “‘Til Death Do Us Part”).
Kira, Odo and Garak go to Cardassia to help Damar, now in open rebellion against the Dominion, lead a resistance movement. Odo learns that he has been infected by the virus killing the Changelings, which was created by Section 31(ST:DS9 S7E21, “When It Rains…”).
The Defiant is destroyed by the Breen, and a new ship is renamed in its honor (ST:DS9 S7E24, “The Dogs of War”).
Odo, having been cured of Section 31’s disease, returns to his people to spread the cure to them (ST:DS9 S7E26, “What You Leave Behind”).
Dukat, having surgically altered himself to resemble a Bajoran, becomes a confidante of Kai Winn and manipulates her into helping him unlock the power of the Pah-wraiths in the Fire Caves on Bajor. Sisko arrives in time to stop him, but all three of them are considered dead (ST:DS9 S7E26, “What You Leave Behind”).
The Dominion War ends (ST:DS9 S7E26, “What You Leave Behind”).

2376:

The USS Voyager continues its journey home.

2377:

Tom Paris and B’Elanna Torres get married (ST:VOY S7E3, “Drive”).

2378:

Neelix leaves Voyager to join a Talaxian community (ST:VOY S7E23, “Homestead”).
With the help of a time-travelling Admiral Janeway, Voyager successfully uses the Borg transwarp network to get back to Earth (ST:VOY S7E25, “Endgame”).
Miral Paris is born (ST:VOY S7E25, “Endgame”).

2379:

William Riker and Deanna Troi get married (Star Trek: Nemesis).
The Enterprise-E discovers that Data’s creator, Dr. Soong, had created an early prototype of Data known as B-4, which is more primitive than Data. Data tries to help by transferring his memories into B-4.
Picard comes to Romulus after a military coup puts Shinzon, a clone of Picard created by Romulans who ended up becoming the leader of the Remans. In the ensuing fight, Picard kills Shinzon, but Data is killed saving his crew (Star Trek: Nemesis).



The Future Is a Dark Place


2386:

Jean-Luc Picard puts Data’s Daughter painting into storage at the Starfleet Archive Museum (ST:PIC S1E1, “Remembrance”).

2387:

When a star near Romulus goes supernova, the entire planet is destroyed, despite Spock’s attempt to stop the explosion by injecting the star with Red Matter and creating a black hole. The black hole instead brings both his ship and the nearby Romulan mining vessel containing Nero into the past (Star Trek 2009).

2388-89 (approximate):

In the wake of the destruction of Romulus, the Utopia Planitia Fleet Yards of Mars are destroyed by rebellious synthetic workers on First Contact Day (April 5), killing thousands and leaving Mars ablaze for years to follow (ST:ST “Children of Mars,”ST:PIC S1E1, “Remembrance”).

2394:

The original year that the Voyager returned to the Alpha Quadrant, prior to Janeway’s temporal interference (ST:VOY S7E25, “Endgame”).

2395:

While the future that Picard saw during his final confrontation with Q was eventually rewritten, this would have been the year in which Picard reunited his old crew to work together to stop the anomaly (ST:TNG S7E25-26, “All Good Things”).

2399:

Jean-Luc Picard, having left Starfleet years ago after the destruction of Romulus, meets a frightened young woman with a mysterious connection to Data. She inspires to pull himself out of retirement and investigate further (ST:PIC S1E1, “Remembrance”).

2404:

Admiral Janeway, having spent years figuring out a plan, leaves her original timeline to travel to the year 2378 and change the past (ST:VOY S7E25, “Endgame”).

3186:

The USS Discovery arrives in an uncharted future. What happens next is totally unknown (ST:DIS S2E14, “Such Sweet Sorrow, Part 2,” ST:DIS Season 3).

3200s (or potentially more):

1000 years into the future of the Discovery, the abandoned ship (run by a now-sentient computer) rescues an escape pod and forms a bond with its occupant (ST:ST “Calypso”).