Takeaway
- Dating is getting harder due to Tinder.
- Tinder merged several small local dating markets into national (sometimes international) dating markets.
- This has exacerbated the differences between high-value men and women, and low-value men and women.
- Low-value men and women were pushed down in the hierarchy, losing access to partners.
- High-value men and women were pushed up in the hierarchy, gaining access to more partners.
- The only way to hack the Tinder game is to become a valuable person.
How Tinder Is Destroying the Dating Market – and How You Can Profit From It
Dating for millennials is getting harder for one reason: abundance.
Social apps transformed the nature of dating from a social activity to a market of goods and consumers that buy them.
This has led to three different changes in the dating world.
1. Economics teaches us that when the volume of a product increases, the value of this product declines (1).
-> abundance decreased the value of “people” in the eyes of people.
2. Since the cost of acquiring the good is lower, consumers are less willing to make efforts to acquire it and to maintain it.
-> abundance decreased the motivation to find a partner.
3. Furthermore, as they are offered more choices, consumers’ standards and expectations regarding the product rise.
-> people have higher dating standards than before.
We discuss these three consequences and what it implies for millennials and GenZ in the 21st century.
Abundance in Dating
Back when the Earth population did not go over one billion (1804), the dating pool was scarce for both men and women (even though less for the latter).
Dating rules were established by culture and religion and relationships were “contracted” through marriage.
The purpose of weddings wasn’t love, but politics. Royal couples unified nations, and royal divorces split countries and institutions (Henry VIII and the Catholic Church).
Marriages were transactional and love had low value (or at least, was low on the priority list). As a result, love was almost always extra-marital.
Then society evolved.
Cities expanded, choice in partners broadened, women acquired ownership of their bodies, and sexual relationships lost their “importance” and seriousness.
Sex became “normal” and “more abundant”, with a peak in the 60s and 80s.
While sex became easier to find (compared to the past when you’d have to get married to get it), it didn’t mean you could get it “for free”.
You still had to “invest” to get it.
Clothing, make-up, gym memberships, drinks, club entrance tickets, discussions, and overall, time were necessary investments for “customers” to acquire the goods they wanted.
Sex was easy to find, but it wasn’t “cheap to buy.”
Until…
Tinder
Tinder revolutionized dating and transformed its codes.
While in the past, the dating pool was equal to the number of people one met in bars and cafes, Tinder exploded the availability of potential partners by offering everyone and anyone…to everyone and anyone.
While one guy had maybe four or five options to choose from his social circle or nights out, Tinder upped the choice by a factor of, according to my own estimates, 2000%.
The multiplier is even more extreme for girls, with options being in the likes of 20-30 through social circles and nights out, subsequently multiplied by a factor of 10 000% or so on the app.
This explosion of abundance had three consequences on the so-called “dating market”.
Firstly, since the availability of goods (understand: potential partners) increased, their value declined.
1. The Devaluation of Dating Goods
When the availability of goods increases in volume, their value, whether real or artificial, declines as ease of access increases.
Think about the difference between acquiring a Logan Dacia and a Lamborghini.
First of all, there aren’t that many Lamborghini shops.
Second of all, it is much more expensive (understand: the investment to make to acquire Lamborghini is much higher) to buy.
If the abundance of a good increases, the cost and the investment of the good decline. Scarcity decreases and consumers are not as motivated to acquire the good as they used to be – because it does not appear as valuable anymore.
This leads to the second consequence.
2. Everyone Is Making Fewer Efforts to Date
Before we go any further, we need to define the dating market.
The dating market is weird. The consumer…is also the product. As such, the effort consumers invest in acquiring a product is equal to their own value as a product.
Your investment to acquire the product = your own value as a product
When you go on a date, you want to check if the person you’re having a date with suits you. You have a consumer mentality – love is the product you’re trying to buy.
However, you’re also the product of the person sitting in front of you. They are also going to judge your value in their eyes.
As a result, a consumer’s product is also the consumer of the product that consumes it (you are the consumer of a product who is consuming you as a product).
Logically, whatever has consequences on the overall consumer behavior will have consequences on product quality (since the consumer is also the product.)
-> When a consumer becomes less invested in acquiring a product, its own product quality decreases as a result.
Let’s take an example.
Let’s imagine you get one date per year. Since this date is rare, you will invest a lot in it – you will look good, you will be pleasant, and try to appear as attractive as possible in the eye of your date.
Since your investment is high to maximize the chances to date that person (because one date a year is rare), your own value as a potential partner is higher.
Now let’s say you get to have two dates per week.
Will you be as motivated to please your date knowing that you’ll get another one that may even be better in a couple of days?
No.
Consequently, your own value as a product will decrease because you’ll be less invested in acquiring the product in front of you because there is plenty of others like them.
We Desire Less What We Can Easily Get
Now, imagine that you start dating full-time.
In a world of one date per year, you’d hold onto your partner for longer as you won’t be as likely to find another.
But in the world where you get two dates per week…who cares if you break up?
When whatever you have is easy to get, you’ll tend to make fewer efforts to maintain it.
Translation: since the number of people to have relationships with is higher thanks to Tinder, people make fewer efforts to maintain the relationships they currently have.
This issue may be the biggest problem millennials will ever have to face in their lives.
Millennials were born in a world of abundance and easiness. Nothing is really expensive, nothing is really hard.
As a result, millennials are not used to invest nor make efforts to obtain what they desire. They have been criticized to be early quitters and have empty relationships.
The problem of acquiring a relationship is that it is not like acquiring a vacuum cleaner.
Relationships are hectic and demand investment both at the beginning and throughout the ownership period.
Millennials, untrained and unable to both think long term and invest heavily into something that, despite its appearing abundance, is scarce, quit making efforts and go back shopping for potential mates, hoping to find a more suitable product to their taste.
Let’s summarize what we have seen so far.
Tinder increased the number of potential partners which has led to a loss of value for these potential partners. Faced with a lower acquisition cost and more options, millennials lowered their own investments into acquiring love partners, which has lowered their own value as dating products.
As a result, everyone’s value/investment into and regarding dating has lowered.
We will now speak of the third consequence of abundance in the dating pool: the rise of standards and expectations.
3. Abundance Leads to a Rise in Standards and Expectations
When I go shopping with my cousin and the parking lot is full of cars, we park in the first parking slot we pass by.
When the parking lot is empty, my cousin takes twice as much time to find the perfect parking slot.
Why?
This is because choice raises our standards and expectations.
When you don’t have a choice, you’re happy to accept whatever you are handed. When you do have a choice, you must make a list of criteria to choose that which suits you best, since you can’t have everything.
As the dating pool became more abundant, people (consumers) became more demanding in what they were looking for.
They started looking for higher-quality people.
This is a huge problem since as we have seen, the quality of the dating pool didn’t improve.
It worsened.
While Dating Conditions Worsened for Everyone, It Improved for a Small Minority
Let’s summarize:
Tinder offers abundance → the value of potential partners decreases in your eyes → millennials invest fewer efforts to date and keep their partners because it’s easy to find a new person to date→ millennials’ value as dating products decreases in return → as choice increases, standards and expectations increase as well.
The result?
In theory, no one would be dating anyone, since everyone would be looking for higher quality than they would be able to provide.
In practice though, it is not entirely true.
While theoretically, everyone’s value lowered, some people were smart and actually raised theirs simultaneously.
As such, the dating market didn’t collapse onto itself…it polarized.
Have you ever heard the saying “the rich are getting richer and the poor, poorer?”
That’s exactly what’s happening in the dating market as we speak.
A lot of people in the “middle class” not only lost value, but simultaneously raised its standards.
It’s the economic equivalent of earning less money while spending more – aka borrowing.
As people look for more attractive than them, the beneficiaries of the polarization of the dating market became…the very attractive people.
In the past, people of similar quality used to date each other.
Today, however, Tinder users are aiming for higher quality than themselves. They’re borrowing.
The only ones benefiting from this are the ones consumers are spending their loans on: the very attractive people (understand: the products with the highest value).
Tinder Is Not a Market
Like all topics explained economically, it’s great as long as you remain within the boundaries of theory.
In practice, Tinder is not a market because people are not products, and partners are not looking to maximize “their purchase”.
You may get married to someone and everything looks perfect, without knowing that there is someone else with who your marriage would be even better.
This is because people don’t fall in love with other people like they buy cars and vacuum cleaners.
While I do believe that value plays a role in attraction (Justin Bieber and Ryan Gosling wouldn’t exist otherwise), dating is not only a numbers game.
It’s also a game of luck and chemistry, matches made in heaven.
That being said…while the dating pool is not a market, Tinder does transform it into one. Tinder users increasingly behave like consumers and go on dates with the same mindset they go shopping.
As a result, the decisions they make regarding buying or not resemble that of shopping.
It is yeah. Or ney.
Forget about feelings. Forget about risks. Forget about the will to impress. Forget about the thrill to pursue.
The person you go on a date with is a product you want to get.
That’s the biggest mistake consumers are making.
Your Tinder date is not a product.
It’s an investment.
What’s the Solution?
First off, people need to realize that if they want to date quality, they must themselves be quality.
Yes, it’s not really nice to say, but it is the truth. When you have been on Tinder long enough, you understand that the girls that send the first message are *not* the prettiest ones.
-> if you want to raise the quality of your potential partners, you must first raise your own quality as an individual.
Second, partners should be encouraged to invest more in the acquisition and maintenance of a relationship instead of giving up.
Marriage appears as the favorite contender to solve that issue.
Marriage only makes sense when two people commit to making their relationship work whatever the cost.
Should you ask for my personal opinion, I’d say the cost of marriage is simply too high for me to ever sign the contract, but I can’t deny it helps and protects a lot of people in and with their relationships.
It ensures both spouses invest whatever they have in their mutual link and prevents giving up, or not investing enough.
Relationships are chaotic, and while quitting may seem like a reasonable idea amid a fight, staying together, growing and persevering may in the long term, yield better results for both partners.
Emotions and economics form a weird mix.
How You Can Hack the Market
Markets are rarely efficient. In this case, all you need to do to hack the dating market is raise your own value.
For guys:
- Make more money.
- Look better (clothes + gym + diet)
- Become more social
- Go after what and who you want
For girls:
- Look better (gym + diet, girls often wear pretty clothes)
- Be more confident
- Get rid of your fixations on micro physical details like “that one scar on your left thigh”. Guys don’t care.
When you raise your value, the number of potential partners increases almost exponentially.
The Bottom Line
Dating has never been so hard…and easy at the same time.
It is hard because people are less willing to seriously invest in it, but it is easy for anyone that manages to raise their value above average, as they’ll have plenty of potential partners to date.
This polarization of dating is not good though. It creates social tension and destabilizes the equilibrium within society.
The truth, as we have seen, is that both men and women are guilty of not providing for what they would like to acquire. As a result, everyone is frustrated.
Make no mistakes, dating is hard.
The perks are nice.
But it is hard.
This is the fundamental lesson millennials should think about when they meet their fifth different match of the month.
They are not on Tinder to make a buying decision.
They’re there to decide whether they want to invest.
For more articles, head to auresnotes.com.
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