What Dating Apps Are Really Optimizing. Hint: It Isn’t Love
14th February 2026
These digital tools aren’t simply interfaces that facilitate connection. The ease and expansiveness of online dating have commodified social bonds, eroded meaningful interactions, and created a type of dating throw-away culture, encouraging a sense of disposability and distorting decision-making.
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Dating apps don’t sell love. They sell the feeling that it is one premium upgrade away. The platforms aren’t primarily designed for users to find love and promptly delete the apps from their phones. They’re designed to keep users swiping.
Dating apps don’t ‘help you to find that special someone’. They try to keep you looking for that special someone. This is particularly true for women, and is the root cause of the ‘loneliness epidemic’ among men.
People once dated locally, and your ‘catchment area’ was limited to the people you would (or could) meet in person. Social media generally, and dating apps specifically, have globalized the amount of exposure, to the detriment of all.
hoe_math points out that all women now see the best men as attainable, and so have developed unrealistic expectations.
Michael Sartain likes to cite a study where one hundred men were asked “If you met a woman that met 80% of your desired qualities, would you find that acceptable?” to which almost all of them said something like “Eighty percent? Hell, yes—that’s a win!” One hundred women, asked the corresponding question, answered “No, that would be ‘settling’.”
Sartain likes to say that there are actually three sexes: The top 20% of men, in whom women will admit an interest; all women; and the bottom 80% of men, who to women are effectively invisible, and might as well not exist.