Navigating congested (dating) markets: Judd Kessler's advice for the frustrated

 Pessimistic about dating? Harvard-trained economist says do 2 simple things to improve your luck
by Judd B. Kessler

 1. Ditch the disinterested
Aggressively screen out people based on their interest in you.  

...

"2. Lean into idiosyncratic preferences
Identify what you — and specifically you — desire in a partner. What do you particularly value that may not be commonly desired by others? Economists call these your idiosyncratic preferences, distinguishing them from general preferences that are more commonly held. 

...

"And since people are looking for idiosyncrasies, you should advertise yours, too. Let potential daters know about your quirks (the kind that attract some people while repelling others) on your profile and on first dates. Sure it might send some people packing, but the ones who are drawn to you are better matches anyway.  

"A focus on idiosyncratic preferences can turn the “too many options” problem of dating apps back into a plus. A larger dating pool means there are probably more people out there who are quirky in the particular ways you like. To be successful in the dating market — during cuffing season or otherwise — you just have to make sure your energy is focused on finding them. " 

^^^^^

Earlier:

 Monday, August 11, 2025  Lucky by Design: The Hidden Economics You Need to Get More of What You Want, by Judd Kessler

Online dating in the US--is it past peak?

 Here's a 2022 survey I just came across from Pew Research. It caught my eye because it reports a much lower percentage of life partners arising from dating sites than were found in surveys by sociologists in 2009 and 2017.

From Looking for Love to Swiping the Field: Online Dating in the U.S.
Tinder is the most widely used dating platform in the U.S. About half of those who have used dating sites or apps have had positive experiences, and some have met their partners on one. But safety and harassment remain issues
By Colleen McClain and  Risa Gelles-Watnick 

 

 

 

"One-in-ten adults who are partnered – that is, they are married, living with a partner or in a committed romantic relationship – say they met this person on a dating site or app. The share rises to 20% of partnered adults under 30 who say online dating brought them together; about a quarter of LGB partnered adults say the same."

####### 

Those numbers of partnerships seem a lot lower than earlier numbers I recounted in this post:

Friday, August 9, 2019  Coupling up with the help of the internet

 

 

Who pays for (first) dates?

 There's matching, and then there's matching with sidepayments.  

For dating, some decisions were easier in the dinosaur age: in theory at least, only the man could propose a date, and he paid. But times have changed.

Here's an opinion piece in the WSJ:

How to Find Love When Dating Has Gotten So Expensive
Young adults, faced with economic anxiety, are re-evaluating the way they search for romantic partners
By  Cordilia James

"To some extent, traditional thinking about date etiquette hasn’t changed: According to the LendingTree survey, 32% of Gen Z believe that the man should pay for the first date in a heterosexual relationship, while 18% think the person who asks should pay. (Nearly 31% think the cost should be split.)

...

" Tiffany Aliche, founder of Budgetnista, a financial-education firm, ... says that since the asker sets the terms of the date, that person is responsible for picking an activity they can afford.
...
"Some of my friends disagree with that strategy. One female friend, for instance, told me that she expects the guy to pay to show that he’s comfortable being a provider, regardless of who proposes the date. One male friend told me he prefers to split the check or take turns paying to show mutual interest. Another female friend says she has noticed that more of her dates have asked her to split the bill lately—a sign, she says, of the new dating math."

Congestion in the job market, AI version

 The Atlantic has this story on the job market, that contains a nice line...

The Job Market Is Hell.  Young people are using ChatGPT to write their applications; HR is using AI to read them; no one is getting hired.   By Annie Lowrey

“ What Bumble and Hinge did to the dating market, contemporary human-resources practices have done to the job market. People are swiping like crazy and getting nothing back.”

Tea and Hacking: Privacy and dating

 Here's a modern short story about privacy, and dating.  A dating app allowed women to widely share information about men.  The app asked women to reliably identify themselves.  It was hacked...

The NYT has the story

What to Know About the Hack at Tea, an App Where Women Share Red Flags About Men. A data breach exposed photos and ID cards of women who signed up for a fast-growing app for women to share details of men they might date.  By Isabella Kwai

 "A fast-growing app for women was hacked after it shot to the top of app download charts and kicked off heated debates about women’s safety and dating.

"The app, Tea Dating Advice, allowed women worried about their safety to share information about men they might date. Its premise was immediately polarizing: Some praised it as a useful way to warn women about dangerous men, while others called it divisive and a violation of men’s privacy.

"On Friday, Tea said that hackers had breached a data storage system, exposing about 72,000 images, including selfies and photo identifications of its users."

************ 

https://www.teaforwomen.com/

 "Share experiences and seek advice within a secure, anonymous platform. Tea is built on trust; screenshots are blocked and all members are verified as women"

Romantic matching while kinky, short, Saudi, or Chinese

 Here are some dating and matrimony stories that have recently caught my eye

 The Guardian has the story of tourists wandering into the ethical monogamy site Feeld:

Unconventional dating app Feeld reports surge in ‘vanilla tourists’. User base has grown by 30% year on year since 2022, raising questions of how to integrate new and longstanding members   by Rachel Hall

 

Here's the short story:

The shorter man’s search for love  by Leah Harper

 

Here's a Saudi app (HT: Michele Petochi), to be used by parents or the daring, from Arab News:

Saudi matchmaking app, Awaser, is helping individuals find partners by bridging tradition and modernity by Afshan Aziz

 "One of the app’s most distinctive features is the ability for families to create and manage accounts on behalf of their children, a model that preserves the essence of traditional matchmaking while increasing the chances of finding a suitable match."

 

Here's the Economist on bride price inflation in China:

Bride prices are surging in China  Why is the government struggling to curb them?

Good luck to all, and be careful out there.

Tinder has plans to become less focused on hookups

 The WSJ has the story:

Tinder’s New Chief Is Out to Change Its Hookup-App Reputation. Spencer Rascoff is rethinking Match Group’s biggest app as younger online daters grow tired of swiping  By  Chip Cutter 

"Tinder’s new chief, Match Group CEO Spencer Rascoff, aims to revamp the app’s image away from hookups to attract Gen Z.

"Rascoff plans to introduce new features, leverage AI, and enhance user safety to improve user experience.

"Tinder is testing a “double dating” feature and will roll it out globally this summer to create low-pressure ways for people to meet.

...

“This generation of Gen Z, 18 to 28—it’s not a hookup generation. They don’t drink as much alcohol, they don’t have as much sex,” he told investors this month. “We need to adapt our products to accept that reality.”

Dating sites as matching markets: Bumble reimagined

The NYT interviews Whitney Wolfe Herd, who co-founded Twitter in 2012, started Bumble in 2014, stepped down as Bumble CEO and is now resuming that position, amidst some general malaise among dating apps, reflected in stock prices and drop-off in younger participants.  The interview is wide ranging and interesting. I'll excerpt two market design observations, both concerned with congestion--i.e. with the difficulty of curating and finding matches in a large market.

Here's the NYT interview:
Can Whitney Wolfe Herd Make Us Love Dating Apps Again?  By Lulu Garcia-Navarro

"The next era of Bumble, you had a lot of growth during the pandemic when everyone was stuck on their apps. It was a huge moment. You go public in 2021, ring the bell, baby on your hip, and the very next year user growth starts to slow down. What do you think was happening? My opinion is that I ran this company for the first several years as a quality over quantity approach. A telephone provider came to us early on. They said, “We love your brand, we want to put your app preprogrammed on all of our phones and when people buy our phones, your app will be on the home screen, and you’re going to get millions of free downloads.” I said, “Thank you so much but no thank you.” Nobody could understand what in the world I was doing, and I said it’s the wrong way to grow. This is not a social network, this is a double-sided marketplace. One person gets on and they have to see someone that is relevant to them. If you flood the system just endlessly — you’re not going to walk down the streets of New York City and want to meet every single person you pass. Why would you assume that someone would want to do that on an app? This is not a content platform where you can just scroll and scroll and scroll and scale drives results. What happened was, in the pandemic and throughout other chapters, growth was king. It was hailed as the end all be all.

...

"You’re quite bullish on A.I. I’ve heard you talk about it. How are you imagining A.I. functioning in this next iteration of the app? Let’s say we could train A.I. on thousands of what we perceive as great profiles, and the A.I. can get so sophisticated at understanding: “Wow, this person has a thoughtful bio. This person has photos that are not blurry. They’re not all group photos. They’re not wearing sunglasses. We can see who they are clearly and we understand that they took time.” The A.I. can now select the best people and start showing the best people the best people and start getting you to a match quicker, more efficiently, more thoughtfully. The goal for Bumble over the next few years is to become the world’s smartest matchmaker. This is beyond love. We have a friend product with a very broad member base, and it’s really beautiful."

Matchmaking on campus with Marriage Pact

 Happy Valentine's Day:)

Here's a story from the Amherst Student (the student newspaper), about an annual event on many campuses that started at Stanford.

True Love or True Disappointment? Students Reflect on the 2024 Marriage Pact by Savita Jani and Erin Sullivan

"With Valentine’s Day just around the corner, love is on the brain for many Amherst students. But Cupid isn’t just around on Feb. 14 — back in September, over 1,200 Mammoths sought romance through the Marriage Pact, an online questionnaire that matches students with their most statistically compatible partner on campus.

"At Amherst, the Association of Amherst Students (AAS) contracts with the Marriage Pact company, a sizable operation available at 100 schools across the country. Marriage Pact has served over 570,000 participants and made over 285,000 matches since its founding. It uses its own algorithm that takes psychology, “market design,” and linear algebra into account in order to find students their ideal match: a perfectly compatible other half whom they can one day marry (if they don’t find someone else).

"Marriage Pact also claims to address the nuances of romance by recognizing when similar values are necessary for a good match and when they aren’t. According to their website, 3-4% of Marriage Pact matches date for a year or longer. But how well has the Marriage Pact worked for Amherst students?

"To answer this question, we interviewed several Mammoths and collected responses from 54 respondents through an anonymous Google Form survey.

 

Here are my previous posts on the Marriage Pact.