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Relationships

a straight answer, then a way to find out

Is there always someone better on the apps?

There is always someone with a better profile, which is a different claim. Compatibility is mostly built after the third month and cannot be read off a grid of photographs, so an endless list of alternatives optimises a variable that predicts almost nothing. What keeps you scrolling is the existence of the option, not any actual person in it.

Someone perfectly nice is sitting opposite you and part of your attention is on the phone in your pocket, where there are four hundred other people. Nothing is wrong with the person. That is, in fact, the problem: nothing is wrong and nothing is decisive, and in a world with an unlimited next page, nothing is wrong has stopped being enough to act on.

What is usually going on

More options make choosing harder, not easier, and satisfaction lower afterwards. This is one of the better-replicated findings about choice, and dating apps are the largest choice set most people will ever face. A bigger field increases the chance that any particular decision could have been better, and that awareness does not stay outside the relationship once it starts.

You are selecting on the things a profile can show. Height, job, six photographs, a joke. None of these predict much about whether two people can handle a difficult year together, and all of them are what the format offers. Optimising hard on weak predictors produces confident decisions and poor outcomes.

Comparison is running against a composite that does not exist. Not this person against that one — this person against an assembled best-of: his humour, her job, someone else's certainty. Nobody has ever met that composite, and no real person survives contact with it.

Keeping the option open is doing something for you. This is the part that gets skipped. An open field means never having to be fully in something, which means never being fully exposed to losing it. If that sounds familiar, it belongs next to commitment issues rather than to any theory about supply.

You are expecting to know early, and that is not when it is knowable. The thing that eventually distinguishes a good relationship shows up around the point where the initial chemistry settles and two people have to negotiate something real. Deciding at week three, on the basis of whether it feels certain, means deciding before any of the relevant evidence arrives. The relationship escalator entry is about the assumed sequence here; what matters for this page is that the interesting part comes after the stage most people abandon at.

There is a real mismatch and you are calling it indecision. Sometimes the answer is simply no. Worth keeping available, because the diagnosis of choice paralysis can also be used to talk yourself into the wrong person.

What to do

  • Set a number and a deadline. Meet a few people, then choose from what you have rather than from what might exist. A rule that seems arbitrary outperforms an open search that never closes, because the open search has no stopping condition at all.
  • Decide what would actually be disqualifying, in writing, before the next date. Most people's real list is short — three or four things — and most of what they browse against is not on it.
  • Give one person four dates. The stretch between the second and the fifth is where nearly everything informative happens, and it is exactly the stretch that gets abandoned in favour of a fresh conversation with someone new.
  • Stop running parallel threads while you are seeing someone you like. It is not a moral point. Divided attention makes everyone seem less compelling, including the person who would have been fine.
  • Ask yourself what you are hoping to feel. If the answer is certainty, the search will not end, because certainty at week three is not information — it is usually just intensity, and intensity is a poor guide to who is good to live with.
  • Notice whether every option starts looking worse the moment it becomes available. If so, this is not a search problem, and no amount of additional profiles will fix it.

What it depends on

There are two quite different people asking this question. One is genuinely between options and needs a stopping rule. The other is running a loop — gathering more, deferring the decision, feeling the deferral as diligence — and would be running it with four options or with four hundred. The apps did not create the second person; they simply removed the natural end of the queue.

The overthinking test reads where the mind circles and what breaks the circuit, which is the actual skill this needs: the ability to close a decision with imperfect information rather than to keep improving the information. If the result comes back high, the useful move is not a better filter. It is a deadline. The entry on rumination explains why more thinking reliably fails to end this particular kind of thinking.

Which one are you? Find out in two minutes

Keeping several people in play while deciding about none of them is a decision loop, not a strategy, and it has the same signature as any other loop: more information consumed, no closer to a conclusion, and a growing sense that committing would be premature. The test reads where your mind circles and what actually interrupts it, which is the relevant skill here.

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Overthinking TestWhere your mind loops — and what actually breaks the circuit.25 questions · 5 min · Free
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People also ask

Do dating apps make it harder to commit?

For many people, yes — mostly because the option of an alternative never closes, and a decision with no closing date is harder to make and easier to second-guess afterwards.

How many people should I date before choosing one?

Fewer than the apps encourage. Meeting a handful and then choosing from that group works better than an open-ended search, because the value of additional candidates falls off quickly and the cost of never deciding does not.

Is it bad to date several people at once?

Early on it is ordinary and often sensible. Once you actively like someone, running parallel conversations tends to blunt the thing you were trying to evaluate, since divided attention makes everybody seem slightly less interesting.

How do I know if someone is right for me?

Not at week three, and not by feeling certain. The useful evidence appears when the initial chemistry settles and the two of you have to handle something real, which is later than most app dating gets to.

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Written by MoodyWonder from the attachment, conflict, trust, occupational and sleep literature. Describes patterns; does not diagnose. If you are unsafe or everything has gone grey, talk to someone you trust or a clinician today.