You Learned to Shop for Partners. Never to Build With One.

For all the time and money you spend on the dating apps, you should be doing better than this.

You have a hard time finding exactly what you want. But then, finally…you find someone good. It was actually going somewhere. Then a few weeks in, it falls apart. When you lose someone you wanted, someone who had promise, it’s especially tough. What went wrong?

Either everyone out there is broken, or you are.

It’s neither.

Every dating app you’ve ever used has a similar business model. They make money when you sign up, when you swipe, when you match, when you upgrade to see who liked you, or buy a boost to jump the line.

The moment you find someone and delete the app, you become worthless to them. So every feature, every algorithm tweak, every notification, every dollar of product development points at one number: Keeping you swiping.

What happens next, they aren’t as worried about. In fact, if it doesn’t work out, and you go back to swiping, it’s almost better.

In marketing, there’s a basic distinction between customer acquisition cost and lifetime value, or what it costs to get a customer, versus what that customer is actually worth once they stick around. For the apps, you’re worth the most single and searching, and worth virtually nothing matched and gone. What works best for them and what works best for you is misaligned.

That’s dating apps. Extraordinary at helping you find, view, and evaluate dating prospects. But they do virtually nothing to help you keep what you found. They’re setting you up to excel in only one area.

Sure, you may generate five matches this weekend, but if any work out, you’ll have no idea what to do in five weeks or five months from now (if it lasts that long).

Of course, nobody selling dating advice talks about it this way.

Anyone who’s done online dating gets good at the acquisition part.

You know how to build a profile, start a conversation, generate matches. That’s the skill the apps trained you on, because that’s the only skill they profit from you mastering. The apps don’t care nearly as much about what comes after the match (slogans aside), so they don’t focus on what keeps a relationship thriving.

Worse than skipping that lesson, the apps reinforce an instinct that makes keeping good relationships going strong more difficult later. (For what it’s worth, I don’t think apps are evil or doing this intentionally, I just don’t think the incentives for keeping people together make business sense…yet).

Every screen you swiped asked the same thing. Is this one better than the next. Swipe left or right. Keep or discard. Pay to see who’s waiting and check if there’s someone better waiting for you to find them.

Don’t feel bad. Everyone’s in on it. Look at how daters describe themselves. When researchers put their assistants through hundreds of profiles on Match and Coffee Meets Bagel, a lopsided pattern turned up (Schroeder & Fishbach, 2023). More than half the writers were angling to be known, hunting for someone who would listen to them, support them, get them. Only about one in five signaled the reverse, that they wanted to know and support the other person (which for the record is much better marketing).

When you read a bunch of profiles, what you’ll see is people broadcasting what they want. When you pay for a service, that feels reasonable, but if everyone’s doing that, it all starts to sound a bit selfish. After all, relationships are about compromise, support, and mutual sacrifice. It’s about being part of something bigger than yourself. That seems to be missing online.

The same data holds a second pattern. Almost everyone wants a partner who listens, supports, and gets them. Yet, very few think to offer that back to a partner. The profiles that show interest in the other person, are more attractive (Schroeder & Fishbach, 2023). It’s a simple fix that not only signals that you’re thinking in relationship terms, but makes you more appealing.

If choosing a person has started to feel impossible, that isn’t a flaw in you. You got trained on one skill, relentlessly, and so did everyone in your queue. The pool isn’t full of broken people with bad judgment. It’s full of practiced shoppers, each one running the same evaluation on the other, everyone is auditioning, nobody building, everyone bolting at the first sign of friction. You can feel it on the dates. That weird sense of being assessed while you assess back.

You don’t get out of it by sharpening the skill the app gave you.

Perhaps a tangent (and I’ll have a future post the dives deeper into this), but it doesn’t feel like a coincidence that red flag culture and awareness sprang up just as apps were getting popular. Maybe it’s because red flags are just easier to see now. But there’s a part of me that wonders if conditioning everyone to seek out red flags simultaneously encourages more of the shopping for the perfect purchase mentality.

When you find yourself in a rigged game, the best move is to leave it. Play a different game instead.

There’s a difference between understanding something and being able to do something with it. The tools, frameworks, and step-by-step strategies that close that gap are what paid subscribers get, plus the full archive (everything unlocked) of science-backed scripts, exercises, and coaching frameworks from 4+ years working with real people in real relationships.

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Everyone asks, “How can we fix the dating apps?” It’s the wrong question.

Yes, the apps are a business and their business interests aren’t always aligned with your love interests. Yes, that can make dating harder.

Also, so what?

This doesn’t mean you can’t find your person on an app. You can. Many people have found the love of their life on a dating app. You can too, you just have to try a little harder and smarter.

Apps get you to ask one thing, over and over: Is this person better than the last. That’s a superficial evaluation, based on information that can’t ever give you a good answer.

You’ll get better results with better questions. Instead of, “Is this person good enough for me?” Ask, “Would my life get bigger with them in it?” Would they help you grow and become bigger, or shrink and become less.

There’s real science under that word, bigger. Psychologists call it self-expansion, the finding that relationships are strongest with partners who grow us, who help us build new skills, learn new perspectives, and expand parts of ourselves we didn’t walk in with (Aron, Lewandowski, Branand, Mashek, & Aron, 2022). I spent years building the questionnaire researchers use to measure it, so I’ll say this plainly.

The right partner makes you a better person. You leave the date having learned something, wanting to be more than you were when you showed up.

The best part about all of this? You can’t really answer this question based on someone’s dating profile. For real insight, you’re going to have to meet them in person. It’s something I remind clients about all the time: Online dating, isn’t dating. It’s an online intro. The real dating and getting to know each other should all happen in person. Just like it did in the 1900’s.

So you get in person. Now what do you actually watch for.

Start here. Watch what someone does when you tell them something good. Not something hard. Something good. A small win, a bit of luck, the thing you’re lit up about. Decades of research find that how a partner responds to your good news predicts the health of a relationship better than how they respond to your bad news (Gable et al., 2004; Gable et al., 2006).

That feels backward. We’re all braced for the crisis, wanting to know who’ll show up when we’re falling apart. Thankfully, you falling apart is rare. But, you constantly have good days and moments in those days. A partner who helps you bring out and accentuate the good broadens and amplifies your world. Contrast that with a partner who reacts to happiness with flat apathy, changes the subject, or turns your good news into a story about themselves. Those partners erode your joy.

So when your date lights up about something they love, go with it. Get curious and let them stay in it, ask the second question and the third. Make sure they’re doing the same for you. Partners who lean into each other’s positive moments keep expanding in their relationship.

The moment you find someone and delete the app, you become worthless to it.

That also means that the exact thing that makes you worthless to the machine is what makes you irreplaceable to a person. That’s the whole point.

The app measures you in swipes and session times, in how many times it can pull you back for one more look.

The person who’s right for you measures something else entirely: whether life is bigger with you in it. That’s the skill worth having. There was just never any money in helping you build it.

Hope this helps,

Dr. L

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References

Aron, A., Lewandowski, G. W., Jr., Branand, B., Mashek, D., & Aron, E. N. (2022). Self-expansion motivation and inclusion of others in self: An updated review. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 39(12), 3821–3852. https://doi.org/10.1177/02654075221110630

Gable, S. L., Gonzaga, G. C., & Strachman, A. (2006). Will you be there for me when things go right? Supportive responses to positive event disclosures. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 91(5), 904–917. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.91.5.904

Gable, S. L., Reis, H. T., Impett, E. A., & Asher, E. R. (2004). What do you do when things go right? The intrapersonal and interpersonal benefits of sharing positive events. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 87(2), 228–245. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.87.2.228

Schroeder, J., & Fishbach, A. (2023). Feeling known predicts relationship satisfaction. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 105, 104559. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2023.104559

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Note: Please forgive any typos or errors. Non-AI writing has its imperfections. Consider it the patina of a personal touch.