Pursuit of romantic or sexual fulfillment is now no more than a swipe away. Touch your phone in the right places, and you could wind up with a very special someone of your own (whose consent you should first seek before attempting to touch in any places, much less the right ones).
Researchers have quantified the precise degree to which that change has taken place during the last several decades in America. Research out of Stanford University and the University of New Mexico in 2019 (Click here to read the article) showed downright tectonic shifts in the way opposite-sex couples met their partners during the last 70 years or so.
From time immemorial (or at least World War II), the chief way people paired off was through friends. Other possibilities, like church, work, school, or bars, aren't necessarily mutually exclusive, but the fact remains that people meeting people through other people has almost always been the way things happen around here.
All that changed in 2009.
The Internet
The graph below shows some pretty wild trends. The gently curved blue line at the top represents the percentage of couples who met through friends. As you can tell, it has been the dominant factor driving coupling since the mid-1940s.
The second thing you might notice, the big scary-looking red line, that's so vertical it almost looks like it's on the wrong plot, shows online dating.
The curve starts really flat (before Al Gore could get his invention, the internet, to take off), and then explodes upward at the end of the 20th century.
There's a plateau in the mid-2000s (probably because MySpace showed the very worst of all of us online), and then another, still-continuing meteoric rise in the 2010s.
The two lines cross between 2012 and 2013, at which point online dating overtook friendship and never looked back.
Note: this is for heterosexual couples only.
The authors contextualize this with the best line in the whole paper: "Heterosexuals, because they constitute the large majority of adults, are usually in thick dating markets, where several potential partners are identifiable." Thick dating markets, you say? Don't mind if I do.
The shift in how most partnerships form has deeper implications than simple sociological curiosity. The ease with which people can use readily accessible technology to find partners has commodified dating, at least to some degree. That doesn't have to be a bad thing, of course.
After all, why go through the rigamarole of introducing yourself through witty remarks and small talk over drinks when you could submit a nice, simple, one-time application and review applications of your own?
The process sure cuts down on a lot of time, but there are problems with making everything smooth and easy at the beginning.
People on the dating scene simultaneously provide supply and demand when they go on the market, and when those forces start to act in concert, a plain old exchange of value is bound to follow. That in itself isn't the bad part.
The Right Way to Swipe
The bummer comes with realizing that competing in a no-kidding market, with its invisible hands and regulations and all the trimmings, can be really difficult, and it only gets worse as the market grows.
As Nick and I discussed on the show, one of the ways game-theory-minded individuals (okay, okay, and probably just horny dudes) approach the dating game is to put away the normal tools, like sincere representation and self-reflection when getting to know potential partners, and instead just starting going for pure volume.
So-called "power swipers" found creative (and occasionally funny) ways to just start collecting as many potential matches as possible, which effectively means swiping right on everyone and doing it as quickly as possible.
From a game theory perspective, this kind of makes sense: why limit supply even more by selecting even further in an already limited supply? All power swiping does is turn a normally-cooperative game, dating, into a competitive one, and the power swiper is just setting himself up for "success," as he maximizes his chances of finding romance (or a one-night stand).
Of course, that game can only go on covertly for so long before it becomes common knowledge. Suddenly, potential matches (read: women) realize they are on the other side of a numbers game with some or most of the matches they receive.
The foot is in the door, so to speak, but now it's incumbent on the power swiper to prove why this strategy is worth the potential partner's time.
The trouble is, with a sleazy numbers-based approach, the power swiper puts himself down in a pit when he would have had to climb a mountain anyway.
Eventually, once this practice becomes pervasive, we end up at square 1: people have to actually get to know each other through a painful, logistically inconvenient process. So much for efficiency.
So we recommend something pretty simple: leave the gaming to the games, put your heart on your sleeve, and go out and try to actually get to know someone.
Be discerning about how you use the tools available to you to get to know someone. After all, if you have a happy relationship, the way you met is pretty much irrelevant.
Take it from Nick, who met his incredible wife on one of the apps. True love is true love, whether it starts with electrons or not.
For more discussion on the topic of game theory in dating, check out the podcast linked below. Thanks for swiping right.
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