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.
