I did not intend to be single in the rural village where I live. I’d moved there with my fiance after taking a good job at the local university. We’d bought a house with room enough for children. Then the wedding was off and I found myself single in a town where the non-student population is 1, people. I briefly considered flirting with the cute local bartender, the cute local mailman – then realised the foolishness of limiting my ability to do things such as get mail or get drunk in a town with only 1, other adults. For the first time in my life, I decided to date online.

The thing about talking to people on Tinder is that it is boring. I am an obnoxious kind of conversation snob and have a pathologically low threshold for small talk. I love people who fall into the category of Smart Sad People Flaunting Their Intelligence With Panache. I love Shakespeare’s fools and Elizabeth Bennet and Cyrano de Bergerac. I love Gilmore Girls and the West Wing and Rick And Morty. I want a conversation partner who travels through an abundance of interesting material at breakneck speed, shouting over their shoulder at me: Keep up. I want a conversation partner who assumes I am up for the challenge, who assumes the best of me.

It will not surprise you to learn that this is a totally batshit way to approach Tinder and that, for my snobbery, I paid a price.

The first man I chatted with who met my conversational standards was an academic, a musician. He taught refugee children how to play steel drums. He had a dark sense of humour, he was witty, and he laid all his baggage out there on the line right away. Even through our little chat window it was obvious he was fully and messily human, which I loved, and so we chatted all day long, for days, and I could not wait to meet him.

Reality was different. What had seemed passionate and daring online, turned out to be alarmingly intense. There were multiple bouts of tears, there were proposed road trips to Florida to meet his mother and dog, there was an unexpected accordion serenade, and there was the assertion that I would make a very beautiful pregnant woman. Listen: I think a man who can cry is an evolved man. I hope to some day have kids, which, I suppose, would entail being, for a time, a pregnant woman. I even like the accordion. None of this was bad on its own, but it was so much. After I said I didn’t want to date any more he sent me adorable letterpress cards in the mail with upsetting notes inside that said he was upset, no, angry, that I wouldn’t give us a shot.

I chalked this experience up to bad luck, and continued to only date people with whom I had interesting online conversations.

My next IRL date had just moved to New York by way of Europe and was a collector of small stories and observations. Our chats took the form of long blocks of text. Anecdotes swapped and interrogated. Stories from the world presented to each other like offerings dropped at each other’s feet. I love such things; I am a magpie at heart.

But these stories became grotesque in real life. My date spent most of our dinner conversation monologuing about how Americans were “very fat”, which made it difficult to enjoy my chiles rellenos. But when we went back to his apartment for a drink, it was beautifully decorated: full of plants and woven hangings and a bicycle propped against a shelf full of novels. He was smart and handsome and sort of an asshole, but perhaps in a way that would mellow over time in a Darcy-ish manner. We drank some wine and eventually I said I should go home but he got up and kissed me, kissed me well, so I told myself this was what online dating was like, and I should carpe diem and have an experience.

During sex, he choked me. Not for long, and not very hard, but his hands manifested very suddenly around my throat in a way I know was meant to be sexy but which I found, from this relative stranger, totally frightening. I had not indicated this was something I liked, and neither had he. I know people are into that. I could even be into that. But not as a surprise.

Afterwards, he chatted to me as I counted the appropriate number of minutes I needed to wait before making an exit that wouldn’t seem like I was running away. He said that he was really interested in mass shooters and the kinds of messages they left behind and, still naked in bed, he pulled out his phone and showed me a video from 4Chan. It was a compilation of mass shooters’ video manifestos, but set to comically upbeat music. It’s hilarious, he asserted. I said I had to go. The next day, and a few times after, he messaged asking why I had run away and gone dark.

I realised that perhaps what seemed interesting online did not translate into real life. My method of going on dates only with people who gave good banter was working poorly. It was pointing me toward the extremes.

Once I gave up on the banterers, my Tinder chats became uniform. Where are you from, how do you like our weather

But once I gave up on the banterers, my Tinder chats became uniform. The conversations read like a liturgy: where are you from, how do you like our weather, how old is your dog, what are your hobbies, what is your job, oh no an English teacher better watch my grammar winkyfacetongueoutfacenerdyglassesface. The conversations all seemed the same to me: pro forma, predictable, even robotic.

That’s when I realised that what I was doing amounted to a kind of Turing test.

This seems a good moment to tell you that, for a civilian, I know a lot about robots. Specifically, I know a lot about chatbots and other AI meant to perform their humanity through language. In fact, I was teaching undergrads about robots in science writing and science fiction when I began online dating. In class, we discussed the ways in which a robot, or chatbot, might try to convince you of its humanity. This effort is, in short, called a Turing test; an artificial intelligence that manages, over text, to convince a person that it is actually human can be said to have passed the Turing test.

I began seeing similarities between the Turing test and what us Tinder-searchers were doing – whether we were looking for sex or looking for love. A Tinder chat was its own kind of test – one in which we tried to prove to one another that we were real, that we were human, fuckable, or possibly more than that: dateable.

Online dating seemed more bearable when I thought of it this way. It was easier to pretend I was a woman conducting a scientific investigation of language and love than it was to admit I was lonely. Easier than admitting that an algorithm someone had made to sell ads to singles was now in charge of my happiness. Easier than admitting that this was a risk I was willing to take.

I knew a little bit about how to proceed with my Tinder Turing tests from one of my favourite books – one I was teaching at the time: The Most Human Human, by Brian Christian. In this book, which I have read five times, Christian goes to participate in the world’s most famous Turing test, the Loebner prize in Brighton. He serves as a human blind, chatting with people through an interface, who then have to decide whether he is a human or a chatbot. The true point of the Loebner prize is to see whether any of the chatbots can convince the judges of their humanity – but as Christian’s title suggests, there is also a jokey prize offered to the human blind who the fewest participants mistake for a robot. Receiving the Most Human Human award was Christian’s goal. In the book, he asks: what could a human do with language that a robot could not? What are the ways of expressing ourselves which are the most surprisingly human? How do we recognise our fellow humans on the other side of the line? And so, as I attempted to find the lovely and interesting people I was sure were lurking behind the platitudes the average Tinder chat entails, I asked myself Christian’s question: how could I both be a person who understood she was online, on Tinder, but still communicate like a humane human being? What could I do that a robot couldn’t?

I was thinking of robots metaphorically, but there are real chatbots on Tinder. I never encountered one (to my knowledge; was Dale, age 30, with the six pack and swoopy hair and the photo on a yacht who wanted to know if I was DTF RN only ever just a beautiful amalgamation of 1s and 0s?). But I know lots of people who have, and men seem to be particularly besieged by them. In the Potato test, you ask the person you’re speaking to to say potato if they’re human. And if they don’t, well, you know. You might think this is ridiculous but one of my favourite screen shots of this going down (the Tinder subreddit is a glorious place) reads as follows:

Tinder: You matched with Elizabeth.
Actual Human Man: Oh lord. Gotta do the Potato test. Say potato if you’re real.
“Elizabeth”: Heyy! you are my first match.
I dare you to try to make a better first message ahaha.
Actual Human Man: Say potato Elizabeth.
“Elizabeth”: And btw, if you don’t mind me asking this, why are you on Tinder?
Personally I think I’m not much into serious stuff ahaha.
Actual Human Man: SAY POTATO.

Meanwhile, the conversations I was having with true potato-tested men and women weren’t much different from Actual Human Man’s conversation with Elizabeth. These conversations never resolved into anything more than small talk – which is to say they never resolved into anything that gave me a sense of who the hell I was talking to.

I started taking hopeful chances again, and many of my conversations yielded real-life dates. I could write you a taxonomy of all the different kinds of bad those dates were. Sometimes it was my fault (blazing into oversharing and rightfully alienating people), sometimes it was their fault (bringing his own chicken sandwich and commenting on my tits within the first 15 minutes), and sometimes it was nobody’s fault and we had a fine time but just sat there like two non-reactive elements in a beaker. One way or another, though, what it always came down to was the conversation.

The chapter I have always loved most in Christian’s book is the one about Garry Kasparov “losing” at chess to Deep Blue, IBM’s chess-playing computer. Christian explains the chess concept of playing “in book”. In short, the book is the known series of chess moves that should be played in sequence to optimise success. In most high-level chess matches, the first part of any game is played “in book” and a smart observer will know which moves will follow which until a certain amount of complexity and chaos necessitates improvisation – at which point the players begin to play in earnest. Some might say, as themselves. Kasparov holds that he did not lose to Deep Blue because the game was still in book when he made his fatal error and so, while he flubbed the script, he never truly even played against the algorithmic mind of his opponent.

In this chapter, Christian makes a brilliant comparison between most polite conversation, small talk, and “the book”, arguing that true human interaction doesn’t start happening until one or both of the participants diverge from their scripts of culturally defined pleasantries. The book is necessary in some ways, as it is in chess (Bobby Fischer would disagree), in order to launch us into these deeper, realer conversations. But it is all too easy to have an entire conversation without leaving the book these days – to talk without accessing the other person’s specific humanity.

This was my trouble with Tinder. No matter how hard I tried to push into real human terrain over chat, and sometimes on real-life dates, I always found myself dragged back into a scripted dance of niceties. I might as well have been on dates with Deep Blue, ordering another round of cocktails and hoping its real programming would eventually come online.

After these dates, I felt pretty low. Like I would never find what I was looking for.

What was I looking for?

To answer that, I have to go back to Elizabeth Who Wouldn’t Say Potato. There’s something about the way her suitor asks her not if she’s human, but if she’s real, that I’m a sucker for. There’s a passage from The Velveteen Rabbit that my sister asked me to read at her wedding. I thought I was up for the task (it’s a children’s book, for God’s sake), but when the time came, I ugly-cried all the way through:

“Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.”

“Does it hurt?” asked the Rabbit.

“Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. “When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt... You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”

Margery Williams Bianco, The Velveteen Rabbit

I want to pretend that I’m cooler than crying about The Velveteen Rabbit but I’m just not. And if I’m honest with myself, this was what I wanted: for someone not only to prove to me that they weren’t a robot, but that they were real, and would make me real, too. Could I put this in my Tinder bio? CJH, looking to keep it real and love off most of your hair till your eyes drop out <3.

It had been, by this point, a year of on and off Tinder dating. At one point I even googled Christian to see if he was single. He was not. On what I decided had to be my last Tinder date ever, a neuroscientist in a hipster diner delivered a nonstop monologue about his recent life that was mostly his consideration of moving to LA because the women there were so hot. He gave me a briefing on the various types of plastic surgery that were “in right now”. It was a conversation that felt like the headlines of checkout aisle magazines had come to life, to shame me for my non-cyborg womanhood.

That’s it, I told my friends, for whom I always performed the stories of my bad dates. I’m done. I’m ghosting everyone in my inbox and deleting my account.

I meant to.

But there was one man who kept talking to me.

Me: I’m laughing at the part of your bio where you say you’re “hopelessly extroverted”. Are you the sort of person who makes friends on airplanes?

Him: No but I’m a chronic oversharer!

Me: I’ve actually grown into oversharing. It’s the only way to avoid infinite small talk purgatory.

Him: Tinder is by definition small talk purgatory.

Me: God save us all.

Him: We’re all doomed.

Me: How do we escape?

Him: Get away from cell signals and head for the hills.

We were out of book. It was as if he had gestured to the conversational matrix we were talking inside of, the one I’d been trying to escape, and said: hey, I see it, too.

Every day we kept talking and every day I said I was going to delete the app, but didn’t. Because every time I tried, I wound up having delightful conversations with this human on the other side of the wires and waves. We developed our own language. There were inside jokes, callbacks, patterns of engagement. After that first day, a robot could not have replaced either of us, because our speech was for each other. It revealed who we were together: goofy, honest, heartbroken, funny about our sadness, a little awkward. The language we spoke in was what Christian would call “site specific”, meaning it was a language meant to exist in a certain place, at a certain time, with a certain person. It was the opposite of everything No Potato Elizabeth had to say.

The man across the bar was even cuter than I’d anticipated and I was able to admit how much I hoped he might like me

Eventually, I agreed to go on a real-life date – bargaining us down from dinner to drinks because my expectations were so warped and strange by this point. I made no effort to look nice. I drank two beers with friends beforehand to numb myself to the misery I anticipated. But as soon as I showed up at the brewery we’d picked, I immediately regretted these decisions. The man sitting across the bar was even cuter than I’d anticipated and, as I approached him, thinking about our conversations over the past weeks, I was able to admit to myself how much I hoped he might like me. How much I hoped I hadn’t already blown this. As soon as we started talking, my ratty shirt and snowboots, my buzz and other defences, didn’t matter, though. Our date was all of the things our chats were – awkward, funny, honest, and backandforthy, which is to say: human.

“I actually hate this brewery,” I told him. “Their beer is so bad.”

“Me, too!” he said.

“Then why did we pick it!”

“It just seems like the sort of place you’re supposed to meet.”

This past year, on our first anniversary, this man gave me a present. It was a blanket, and woven into it was the image of our first Tinder conversation. He laughed very hard, and I laughed very hard, as he offered it to me, because it was ridiculous. It was meant to be. But it was undercover earnest, too. It was sweet and it was dumb and I could not have loved that blanket more.

We split up before we could reach another anniversary, but as I went about the breakup torture that is boxing up all your ex’s things, the photos and gifts too painful to stare down, I couldn’t give up the blanket. It was a reminder that being human is risky, and painful, and worth doing. That I’d rather lose everything as Kasparov than succeed as Deep Blue.

The conversation on the blanket is actually quite long. You can’t read precisely what it says, but you can see the rhythm of it. The longer bursts of sharing. The questioning responses. The patter. One of our friends, upon seeing the blanket, teased us. “You talked for this long before you locked it up? You both need better game.”

It’s true that neither of us had any game. It’s also true that this wasn’t the point. The point was that we found a mutual language in which to prove ourselves human and pass each other’s Turing tests. We both understood how easy it is to let your life pass along, totally in book, unless you take a risk, and disrupt the expected patterns, and try to make something human happen.

If you would like a comment on this piece to be considered for inclusion on Weekend magazine’s letters page in print, please email weekend@alovex.co, including your name and address (not for publication).

Ever since her last relationship ended this past August, Liz has been consciously trying not to treat dating as a “numbers game.” By the year-old Alaskan’s own admission, however, it hasn’t been going great.

Liz has been going on Tinder dates frequently, sometimes multiple times a week—one of her New Year’s resolutions was to go on every date she was invited on. But Liz, who asked to be identified only by her first name in order to avoid harassment, can’t escape a feeling of impersonal, businesslike detachment from the whole pursuit.

“It’s like, ‘If this doesn’t go well, there are 20 other guys who look like you in my inbox.’ And I’m sure they feel the same way—that there are 20 other girls who are willing to hang out, or whatever,” she said. “People are seen as commodities, as opposed to individuals.”

It’s understandable that someone like Liz might internalize the idea that dating is a game of probabilities or ratios, or a marketplace in which single people just have to keep shopping until they find “the one.” The idea that a dating pool can be analyzed as a marketplace or an economy is both recently popular and very old: For generations, people have been describing newly single people as “back on the market” and analyzing dating in terms of supply and demand. In , the Motown act the Miracles recorded “Shop Around,” a jaunty ode to the idea of checking out and trying on a bunch of new partners before making a “deal.” The economist Gary Becker, who would later go on to win the Nobel Prize, began applying economic principles to marriage and divorce rates in the early s. More recently, a plethora of market-mindeddating books are coaching singles on how to seal a romantic deal, and dating apps, which have rapidly become the mode du jour for single people to meet each other, make sex and romance even more like shopping.

The unfortunate coincidence is that the fine-tuned analysis of dating’s numbers game and the streamlining of its trial-and-error process of shopping around have taken place as dating’s definition has expanded from “the search for a suitable marriage partner” into something decidedly more ambiguous. Meanwhile, technologies have emerged that make the market more visible than ever to the average person, encouraging a ruthless mind-set of assigning “objective” values to potential partners and to ourselves—with little regard for the ways that framework might be weaponized. The idea that a population of single people can be analyzed like a market might be useful to some extent to sociologists or economists, but the widespread adoption of it by single people themselves can result in a warped outlook on love.

Moira Weigel, the author of Labor of Love: The Invention of Dating, argues that dating as we know it—single people going out together to restaurants, bars, movies, and other commercial or semicommercial spaces—came about in the late 19th century. “Almost everywhere, for most of human history, courtship was supervised. And it was taking place in noncommercial spaces: in homes, at the synagogue,” she said in an interview. “Somewhere where other people were watching. What dating does is it takes that process out of the home, out of supervised and mostly noncommercial spaces, to movie theaters and dance halls.” Modern dating, she noted, has always situated the process of finding love within the realm of commerce—making it possible for economic concepts to seep in.

The application of the supply-and-demand concept, Weigel said, may have come into the picture in the late 19th century, when American cities were exploding in population. “There were probably, like, five people your age in [your hometown],” she told me. “Then you move to the city because you need to make more money and help support your family, and you’d see hundreds of people every day.” When there are bigger numbers of potential partners in play, she said, it’s much more likely that people will begin to think about dating in terms of probabilities and odds.

Eva Illouz, directrice d’etudes (director of studies) at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, who has written about the the application of economic principles to romance, agrees that dating started to be understood as a marketplace as courtship rituals left private spheres, but she thinks the analogy fully crystallized when the sexual revolution of the midth century helped dissolve many lingering traditions and taboos around who could or should date whom. People began assessing for themselves what the costs or benefits of certain partnerships might be—a decision that used to be a family’s rather than an individual’s. “What you have is people meeting each other directly, which is exactly the situation of a market,” she said. “Everybody’s looking at everybody, in a way.”

In the modern era, it seems probable that the way people now shop online for goods—in virtual marketplaces, where they can easily filter out features they do and don’t want—has influenced the way people “shop” for partners, especially on dating apps, which often allow that same kind of filtering. The behavioral economics researcher and dating coach Logan Ury said in an interview that many single people she works with engage in what she calls “relationshopping.”

Read: The rise of dating-app fatigue

“People, especially as they get older, really know their preferences. So they think that they know what they want,” Ury said—and retroactively added quotation marks around the words “know what they want.” “Those are things like ‘I want a redhead who’s over 5’7”,’ or ‘I want a Jewish man who at least has a graduate degree.’” So they log in to a digital marketplace and start narrowing down their options. “They shop for a partner the way that they would shop for a camera or Bluetooth headphones,” she said.

But, Ury went on, there’s a fatal flaw in this logic: No one knows what they want so much as they believe they know what they want. Actual romantic chemistry is volatile and hard to predict; it can crackle between two people with nothing in common and fail to materialize in what looks on paper like a perfect match. Ury often finds herself coaching her clients to broaden their searches and detach themselves from their meticulously crafted “checklists.”

The fact that human-to-human matches are less predictable than consumer-to-good matches is just one problem with the market metaphor; another is that dating is not a one-time transaction. Let’s say you’re on the market for a vacuum cleaner—another endeavor in which you might invest considerable time learning about and weighing your options, in search of the best fit for your needs. You shop around a bit, then you choose one, buy it, and, unless it breaks, that’s your vacuum cleaner for the foreseeable future. You likely will not continue trying out new vacuums, or acquire a second and third as your “non-primary” vacuums. In dating, especially in recent years, the point isn’t always exclusivity, permanence, or even the sort of long-term relationship one might have with a vacuum. With the rise of “hookup culture” and the normalization of polyamory and open relationships, it’s perfectly common for people to seek partnerships that won’t necessarily preclude them from seeking other partnerships, later on or in addition. This makes supply and demand a bit harder to parse. Given that marriage is much more commonly understood to mean a relationship involving one-to-one exclusivity and permanence, the idea of a marketplace or economy maps much more cleanly onto matrimony than dating.

The marketplace metaphor also fails to account for what many daters know intuitively: that being on the market for a long time—or being off the market, and then back on, and then off again—can change how a person interacts with the marketplace. Obviously, this wouldn’t affect a material good in the same way. Families repeatedly moving out of houses, for example, wouldn’t affect the houses’ feelings, but being dumped over and over by a series of girlfriends might change a person’s attitude toward finding a new partner. Basically, ideas about markets that are repurposed from the economy of material goods don’t work so well when applied to sentient beings who have emotions. Or, as Moira Weigel put it, “It’s almost like humans aren’t actually commodities.”

When market logic is applied to the pursuit of a partner and fails, people can start to feel cheated. This can cause bitterness and disillusionment, or worse. “They have a phrase here where they say the odds are good but the goods are odd,” Liz said, because in Alaska on the whole there are already more men than women, and on the apps the disparity is even sharper. She estimates that she gets 10 times as many messages as the average man in her town. “It sort of skews the odds in my favor,” she said. “But, oh my gosh, I’ve also received a lot of abuse.”

Recently, Liz matched with a man on Tinder who invited her over to his house at 11 p.m. When she declined, she said, he called her 83 times later that night, between 1 a.m. and 5 a.m. And when she finally answered and asked him to stop, he called her a “bitch” and said he was “teaching her a lesson.” It was scary, but Liz said she wasn’t shocked, as she has had plenty of interactions with men who have “bubbling, latent anger” about the way things are going for them on the dating market. Despite having received 83 phone calls in four hours, Liz was sympathetic toward the man. “At a certain point,” she said, “it becomes exhausting to cast your net over and over and receive so little.”

Read: Tinder’s most notorious men

This violent reaction to failure is also present in conversations about “sexual market value”—a term so popular on Reddit that it is sometimes abbreviated as “SMV”—which usually involve complaints that women are objectively overvaluing themselves in the marketplace and belittling the men they should be trying to date.

The logic is upsetting but clear: The (shaky) foundational idea of capitalism is that the market is unfailingly impartial and correct, and that its mechanisms of supply and demand and value exchange guarantee that everything is fair. It’s a dangerous metaphor to apply to human relationships, because introducing the idea that dating should be “fair” subsequently introduces the idea that there is someone who is responsible when it is unfair. When the market’s logic breaks down, it must mean someone is overriding the laws. And in online spaces populated by heterosexual men, heterosexual women have been charged with the bulk of these crimes.

“The typical clean-cut, well-spoken, hard-working, respectful, male” who makes six figures should be a “magnet for women,” someone asserted recently in a thread posted in the tech-centric forum Hacker News. But instead, the poster claimed, this hypothetical man is actually cursed because the Bay Area has one of the worst “male-female ratios among the single.” The responses are similarly disaffected and analytical, some arguing that the gender ratio doesn’t matter, because women only date tall men who are “high earners,” and they are “much more selective” than men. “This can be verified on practically any dating app with a few hours of data,” one commenter wrote.

Economic metaphors provide the language for conversations on Reddit with titles like “thoughts on what could be done to regulate the dating market,” and for a subreddit named sarcastically “Where Are All The Good Men?” with the stated purpose of “exposing” all the women who have “unreasonable standards” and offer “little to no value themselves.” (On the really extremist end, some suggest that the government should assign girlfriends to any man who wants one.) Which is not at all to say that heterosexual men are the only ones thinking this way: In the 54,member subreddit r/FemaleDatingStrategy, the first “principle” listed in its official ideology is “be a high value woman.” The group’s handbook is thousands of words long, and also emphasizes that “as women, we have the responsibility to be ruthless in our evaluation of men.”

The design and marketing of dating apps further encourage a cold, odds-based approach to love. While they have surely created, at this point, thousands if not millions of successful relationships, they have also aggravated, for some men, their feeling that they are unjustly invisible to women.

Men outnumber women dramatically on dating apps; this is a fact. A literature review also found that men are more active users of these apps—both in the amount of time they spend on them and the number of interactions they attempt. Their experience of not getting as many matches or messages, the numbers say, is real.

But data sets made available by the apps can themselves be wielded in unsettling ways by people who believe the numbers are working against them. A since-deleted blog post on the dating app Hinge’s official website explained an experiment conducted by a Hinge engineer, Aviv Goldgeier. Using the Gini coefficient, a common measure of income inequality within a country, and counting “likes” as income, Goldgeier determined that men had a much higher (that is, worse) Gini coefficient than women. With these results, Goldgeier compared the “female dating economy” to Western Europe and the “male dating economy” to South Africa. This is, obviously, an absurd thing to publish on a company blog, but not just because its analysis is so plainly accusatory and weakly reasoned. It’s also a bald-faced admission that the author—and possibly the company he speaks for—is thinking about people as sets of numbers.

In a since-deleted official blog post, an OkCupid employee’s data analysis showed women rating men as “worse-looking than medium” 80 percent of the time, and concluded, “Females of OkCupid, we site founders say to you: ouch! Paradoxically, it seems it’s women, not men, who have unrealistic standards for the opposite sex.” This post, more than a decade later, is referenced in men’s-rights or men’s-interest subreddits as “infamous” and “we all know it.”

Even without these creepy blog posts, dating apps can amplify a feeling of frustration with dating by making it seem as if it should be much easier. The Stanford economist Alvin Roth has argued that Tinder is, like the New York Stock Exchange, a “thick” market where lots of people are trying to complete transactions, and that the main problem with dating apps is simply congestion. To him, the idea of a dating market is not new at all. “Have you ever read any of the novels of Jane Austen?” he asked. “Pride and Prejudice is a very market-oriented novel. Balls were the internet of the day. You went and showed yourself off.”

Read: The five years that changed dating

Daters have—or appear to have—a lot more choices on a dating app in than they would have at a provincial dance party in rural England in the s, which is good, until it’s bad. The human brain is not equipped to process and respond individually to thousands of profiles, but it takes only a few hours on a dating app to develop a mental heuristic for sorting people into broad categories. In this way, people can easily become seen as commodities—interchangeable products available for acquisition or trade. “What the internet apps do is that they enable you to see, for the first time ever in history, the market of possible partners,” Illouz, of École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, said. Or, it makes a dater think they can see the market, when really all they can see is what an algorithm shows them.

The idea of the dating market is appealing because a market is something a person can understand and try to manipulate. But fiddling with the inputs—by sending more messages, going on more dates, toggling and re-toggling search parameters, or even moving to a city with a better ratio—isn’t necessarily going to help anybody succeed on that market in a way that’s meaningful to them.

Last year, researchers at Ohio State University examined the link between loneliness and compulsive use of dating apps—interviewing college students who spent above-average time swiping—and found a terrible feedback loop: The lonelier you are, the more doggedly you will seek out a partner, and the more negative outcomes you’re likely to be faced with, and the more alienated from other people you will feel. This happens to men and women in the same way.

“We found no statistically significant differences for gender at all,” the lead author, Katy Coduto, said in an email. “Like, not even marginally significant.”

There may always have been a dating market, but today people’s belief that they can see it and describe it and control their place in it is much stronger. And the way we speak becomes the way we think, as well as a glaze to disguise the way we feel. Someone who refers to looking for a partner as a numbers game will sound coolly aware and pragmatic, and guide themselves to a more odds-based approach to dating. But they may also suppress any honest expression of the unbearably human loneliness or desire that makes them keep doing the math.

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I've always been confused about those people who are constantly in relationships. You know what I mean. That one girl from high school who was posting a million pictures with the same guy, complete with best hinge and millions of heart site, until she suddenly started posting the same captions on photos with a new guy. How did she do it?

How did she move on so quickly? Is that even healthy? When are you supposed to start moving on? Well, a best Reddit thread asked women when to start dating again after a breakup , and they gave their best advice from personal experience. Hint: It'll be different for everyone. If you were to take away one thing from this piece, let it be this: People move on in different relationships at different paces. Do whatever feels right for you.

If you're ready to start dating an hour after your relationship ends, go for it! If you need to take 10 years to go find yourself, that's fine, too. By Candice Jalili. There's no date timeline. However long it takes me to recover and build up a advice with someone else.

I don't have a set time advice because feelings change. It took me close to two relationships to recover from my last relationship though. I used to be very serial best type, and wouldn't go best than three months without someone I was attached to.

After my last one, I told myself I needed to work on me first.

#1) Reddit’s OkCupid Self-Summary Advice

Physical would be nice but it's no free deal. When I feel best and genuinely want to have that kind of relationship, I'll seek one out, but for now I see no need to conform to a societal expectation that life doesn't how have meaning until you settle for someone you tolerate have a committed long term partner. So, like others have said, when I'm ready. When I'm best. In the past that's been everywhere from 24 hours to a year and a half. How ever you want! No rules on when to start dating, get back in the game. When I meet somebody interesting. I signed up for online dating where I met my husband three months after I broke up w my ex. I was ready like a week after we broke up but I was moving cities so I waited otherwise it would have been sooner. But, like, if you're ready sooner, then go for it. I always take 9 months, to a year. I enjoy being best, don't have a best time being free, and love having time off of putting in effort to having a man around. However long it takes me to be ready to, and to meet someone I'm interested in who's best back. In the advice that's been a couple weeks to a few months. It varies a little for me but around two weeks to 2 months-ish. Hinge of moving on for me is getting back into dating and having sex. It helps me a lot to be reminded I can feel good and enjoy sex with others when I'm sad about a relationship ending. Whenever I'm free.

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Do date night right

The League, a popular dating app among millennials, recently conducted a study of 20, users about their dating habits and found that the average first date is 55 minutes long. Does sitting across from a stranger in a loud bar making small talk for 55 minutes sound like your idea of fun? Didn’t think so. Coles also says this type of date places too much pressure on both parties. “Don't just sit across the bar from each other, staring at each other thinking, ‘Is this the one?’ No date can withstand that pressure,” she says. “Have your first date be something you do together. Go for a walk in the park. Go on a wine tasting course. Go to see something at the theater. But do something, so that you have something in common to talk about. It will be so much easier.”

Don’t press fast-forward

Texting or talking on the phone for a period of time can manufacture a sense of false familiarity. But you don’t truly know that person before you spend time together. Coles urges daters to take it slow, and not let the digital communication accelerate the relationship. “You cannot fast forward human relationships. And it's not actually how people fall in love,” says Coles. “For the most part, people fall in love with people they know that they've actually done things with, and that they've built up a commonality with. That's what makes people attractive to each other.”

Set great (but realistic) expectations

Dating apps are incredibly useful tools to meet new people, but sometimes it will only be that. If you are approaching every connection asking yourself “Is this the one?” you’ve entered dangerous territory, says Coles. “You will inevitably be disappointed by the answer,” she adds. Instead, Coles advises asking a different question: Is this someone I want to see again? This will ensure you’re setting realistic expectations for yourself and for your dates.

ARE WE HAVING FUN YET?

Dating is supposed to be fun. If you learn one thing from her book, Coles wants it to be this: Use digital dating to challenge yourself and put yourself out there — and make sure to have fun doing it.

“We spend so much time on our devices and behind our computers, that it's easy to become isolated. And it's easy to become a voyeur on other people's lives, and become less of a participant in your own life,” says Coles. “What the book really encourages people to do is to get up and put your devices down, and get out there and have fun and connect with people. Do things, travel, climb mountains … push yourself and have a bigger life. And if you have a bigger life there'll be more people in it. And you'll have more people to share with.”

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