The last paragraph: “How many [men] over six feet tall with graduate degrees who don’t smoke and drink only socially or not at all and either already have kids or don’t want kids and live within fifty miles of you who aren’t polyamorous and designate themselves as active, with liberal politics and no bathroom selfies or rote clichéd philosophizing? I thought I might stop at ninety-nine, or one hundred.” gives you a good feeling of a constant theme throughout the entire article. Every few paragraphs the author discusses another disqualifying feature she uses to winnow the field of potential mates - no car selfies, no bathroom selfies, no mentioning sarcasm, no “partners in crime”, etc.

The simple analysis is she’s being too picky, but the simple analysis is too easy; this is a intelligent woman who tries very hard to introspect and self-reflect and pours an enormous amount of effort into trying to find love, and in my opinion that effort earns her a right to a correspondingly more effortful analysis.

She feels distrust towards dating apps, seeing them as “casinos“; she feels a sense that this breakdown of the dating market is being blamed on women somehow; she feels this is unfair. All valid feelings, and when we put them together we get the start of a much more interesting analysis.

She says she has been on a hundred dates. (I would absolutely love for her to give a ballpark figure of how many profiles she has viewed - I suspect high five figures with a fat, fat tail out to high six, but for the purposes of this analysis I will use a conservative estimate of 10,000.)

She specifies in about two thirds of her dates, her filters were telling her no but she went anyway out of a fear that her filters were somehow wrong, and then her filters were confirmed later on. The Starbucks example quoted by other commenters is illustrative: she rejects on the basis that she can’t like a man who likes Starbucks, but then rejects her own rejection and tries anyway, but then discovers he also likes Marvel movies and her initial rejection is re-confirmed: “But then he mentioned he got his daily coffee from Starbucks… but then he mentioned mostly watching Marvel movies…”.

“But then he mentioned”. 10,000 profiles viewed, 100 dates, ~0 long term relationships. No car selfies. Dating apps are casinos. Let’s put it all together:

Dating apps present a stunning over-abundance of choice, which forces women to construct a veritable armory of cheap and hard filters just to even begin to start considering individuals. But dating is an incomplete information game where there’s an initial dump of information on a profile, and then more is revealed over time in conversation and on dates. Any set of filters that can practically reduce the initial superabundance to a manageable amount based on the initial info dump will likewise reduce the manageable amount to ~0 when more information is revealed. And so after the first date, she must return to the dating app.

Is this what’s going on? We might think to examine womens’ psyches for evidence to support our conclusion, but that would be very rude and also we suck at doing that. Instead, we might examine dating apps to see if they use superabundance and low initial information. Well, Tinder exemplifies this pattern - it absolutely inundates you with superficial profiles and demands an immediate, often split-second “no / maybe” decision (your filters have to be incredibly cheap to compute under those constraints). Is Tinder more successful than other dating apps? Yes - in fact it’s more successful than all other dating apps put together. We might be on to something here.

tl;dr Dating apps are designed to hack womens’ psychology and make them super-picky, because pickiness sets them up to fail the rest of the relationship and this makes them a returning customer.