Dating and Serendipity

I have been thinking about dating for 25 years. As in, how does someone find the right partner for their life?

Incidentally, I found mine on a dating app AFTER meeting her in real life, which made for an awkward first message on the app. The rest is history.

But I have been thinking about the concept of dating within my favorite, albeit simplistic, framework: Search and Evaluation. Reading Clara Gold's hilarious and energizing posts about building her dating app (thank you Guilherme Nazareth for liking her posts into my feed) re-ignited my interest. Why is there so much dissatisfaction with dating apps? Swipe fatigue, IRL disappointment, too many choices, highly nonlinear (and stochastic) mapping from profile to phenotype, there are many reasons. I don't subscribe fully to the Gigerenzer theory of dating (to paraphrase horribly, arranged marriage without choice is preferable to infinite sampling), but I agree that looking for the "perfect" mate gets in the way of a happy life. Or, in more theoretical terms, satisficing is preferable to optimizing. And dating apps do have a way of triggering compulsive sampling in an endless FOMO loop. And there is the small issue that humans are (mostly) confined to sequential sampling, which makes it hard to go back to a former date after you realize they were the one.

There is one thing, however, that dating technology has enabled: the ability to expand your search beyond your immediate surroundings, or, as Clara Gold would say, Jean-Mi from the next village. The one thing they can't do is the evaluation part, or at least the "final" evaluation: chemistry is best experienced in person and over a little bit of time. What a perfect dating app should do is expand the search space, not to become a random walk but a curated exploration, filtering out the obvious mismatches and creating room for serendipitous encounters, happy accidents. Preventing dating overload. In other words, set the human up for success.