I wish I didn’t think about dating and dating apps as much as I do. It’s hard to escape. I can’t hang out with anyone without them bringing up their dating lives or married lives. I don’t dare talk to anyone about my loneliness problem, because will (and have) suggest I sign up for dating apps.
I really don’t like the idea of these dating apps. I hate both the idea of having to look through profiles and deliberately trying to decide with whom to talk and also the idea that someone will be inspecting my profile to determine whether they wish to speak to me.
It’s the most efficient way of connecting people with potential romantic partners, but it is that very efficiency which turns me off the whole process. If you want something to be efficient, that necessarily means you have a clearly defined objective and you are trying to make the process of achieving that objective efficient.
Dating apps attempt to make the dating market efficient in the same way other technologies try to make the job market or the product market more efficient. But the dating market is not as efficient as it could be because on some level, people do balk at the idea of making it too systematic.
For instance, people can have different objectives ranging all the way from casual hookups to long-term commitment. But stating this objective to potential matches can be awkward. The market responded by creating more and more specialized apps, each exclusive in their own way. So I suppose the system is moving towards more efficiency.
A better example is the lack of the formal review process. Hear me out. I am not advocating for a formal review process. I am merely discussing the implications of the lack of this review process.
In many ways, the dating market is like a job market. You “screen” and “select” candidates, you “interview” them for “fit” and then you have a continuous process of “evaluation” – these are the ways in which the processes are similar. Both processes have expectations built into them and both processes require us to evaluate how well those expectations are met. The job market has come up with a way to increase efficiency in this aspect – the formal review process. The employee is reviewed by the management, and in some cases, the employee does a self-evaluation and/or an evaluation of the management. This helps both parties take stock of how well their match is going.
No such review process exists for romantic relationships. Should there be such a process? I don’t know the answer to that question. But I am asking out of curiosity – if people search for relationships with the same systematic process used to find a job, why don’t they evaluate their relationships with the same systematic process?
We would never think of doing a formal review process with our friends or with our family. But then again, we would never think of doing a screening and interviewing process with our friends and our families. So why do we do it with romantic relationships?
Of course not all romantic relationships start in this way. Many people have met at school, or work, or through a mutual community. When they first met, maybe they ran through a mental checklist before deciding whether or not to see this person more; maybe they didn’t. But even if they ran through the mental checklist, the process is not as deliberate as it is when you screen for candidates on an app or swipe left or right. With an app, you have to make these decisions much more deliberately. When we are limited to having access only to those people we would run into in the course of our daily lives, we can get away with not having well-defined preferences. But when the whole world is your oyster, when you can meet anyone through a dating app, you are forced to come up with screening criteria and to put deliberate thought into what your preferences are.
I am not taking a position on whether this is a good or bad thing. But I am asking this: so if you do develop strong preferences and have clear requirements in what you want from your partner, shouldn’t there be a good to (1) evaluate potential partners on how well they meet those criteria, and (2) evaluate current partners on their ongoing performance in meeting those criteria?
As for me, personally, I do not have strong clearly defined preferences and I am not sure I want to form them. I only want to make friends the old fashioned way. I always thought that “when” I met the right person, I would enter into hopefully a lifelong partnership. Increasingly, I am realizing that this is a question of “if” rather than “when” – which begs the question what happens if I don’t meet the right person. I suppose I would just go on with my life, but I also have to confront other doors that might close on me. Mostly, I speak of the possibility of having children. That door is not necessarily closed, but deciding to have children without a partner is inarguably a much more difficult choice than deciding to do so with a partner. However, that is a topic for another time.
In the meantime, I have faced pressure from various external sources to consider the marriage market or the dating market. And I recognize that this is by far the “easiest” option to consider if I want to have children. But…I don’t like the idea of going into a “market” when all I have are “screening” criteria and no “evaluation” criteria. Maybe other people are able to view the people they meet on dating apps no different than the people they meet in the course of their daily lives. I can’t.
If I have to evaluate a candidate, I instantly the feel the weight of having to make a big decision. Am I judging this candidate fairly? Am I giving them a fair shot? Am I using the right selection criteria? How do I know when enough criteria are met? When do I make a decision? If I don’t make a decision right now, am I wasting my time? Maybe I should talk to someone else? Am I discarding this candidate too fast before moving on to the next?
Most of big decisions in my life have boiled down to choosing between two options: Northwestern or Penn for my undergrad (it ultimately came down to the Ivy League status and the amount of financial aid offered); admin job at Fordham university or a market research job at a small firm (the salary rendered it an obvious choice, but it also put me in an awkward situation of rejecting a job offer after having already accepted it); ASU or UT Austin for grad school (difficult choice involving campus visits, several meetings; ultimately decided based upon advice and a gut feeling and had to have faith that the choice was right). It is unlikely I would have to make such a choice for a life partner because people usually do not interview multiple potential life partners simultaneously. (Is this another potential source of inefficiency in the dating market?)
The choice might be more like my first attempt at grad school: I had only one offer and my decision was whether to take it or not. It wasn’t that difficult a decision because I knew I wanted to go to grad school. But there was the fear of failure (which ultimately happened, lol) and the opportunity cost of leaving behind a steady job with good benefits and growth potential. While I knew I wanted to go to grad school, I still went into it with a trepidation that perhaps I am making a mistake. (Wait, was it a mistake? The answer to that is actually not clear!)
I do not like the idea of entering into a relationship with the same kind of trepidation of whether I am making a mistake. What if this doesn’t work out? Should I interview more candidates before going with this one? What if there is a better option?
I never want to confront questions like this when deciding on a relationship. I would only enter a relationship if I knew I wanted this 100%. And it is not as if I have never experienced that feeling, it is rather the case that circumstances have not worked out in my favor.
At this point people might point out I am talking about a relationship as if it were marriage. To be honest, for me there isn’t a huge difference. Sure, I wouldn’t jump into marriage. But I also wouldn’t enter a relationship unless I knew I wanted it to lead to marriage. The time in between isn’t to figure out whether or not to get married, but rather as a way to work out the kinks before signing the legal documents. Of course, there is a chance that the kinks might not get worked out, in which case, it doesn’t lead to marriage. But that risk is the same risk as not anticipating which kinks might not work out in the distant future (i.e. divorce).
What about comparing the dating market to the product market? Big purchases, like a car or a house can involve equally nerve-wracking decisions. You could discover flaws you had missed before, you might end up regretting your purchase, and getting a new one is not that easy. If you’ve thought very carefully about your exact preferences, it might be easier to know what to look for, but it can also be limiting because the perfect match may not exist. This sounds creepy right? When I could be talking about buying a car or finding a partner with the exact same language? But that’s the thing about the marketplace – it operates in fundamentally the same way. Yet, when humans date, they like to enter the marketplace and pretend like it’s not a marketplace.
I am not sure what my larger point is. Perhaps it is this. I don’t understand why on one hand we want dating apps to make the dating process more efficient, but on the other we feel hesitant for the process to be even more efficient. I don’t care for any part of that efficiency and I’d rather stick to the old fashioned way. If that means nothing happens for me, maybe that’s not such a bad thing. Maybe someday I will adopt a child, but I’m not sure about that either. I don’t like the idea of having to choose a child to adopt. If God gave me a child, I would have no choice in the matter, and that’s the way I like it. I certainly will not have any preferences whatsoever for my hypothetical child because I would want them to be their own person. I wish I could be that way about my hypothetical child’s father, but there is no escaping some element of human choice when it comes to finding a partner.
Tushmit's Stream of Consciousness 