Dating as a market failure

I discuss a commonly used dating model and show that it is highly prone to failure. The only sensible alternative seems to be the age-old belief in an unexpected “romantic” encounter.

The idea of “romance” is ubiquitous in modern culture. Books, movies, and everyday conversations routinely tell us that there is one person that we are destined to be with, yet this person may turn out to be the complete opposite of what we imagine as our soul mate, and little can be done to increase the likelihood of meeting this person – it may happen anytime and anywhere…

… or not happen. Indeed, the “romantic” assumption looks quite unrealistic and we are frequently following a very different model of choosing a partner, which is described below.

Let us consider a person approaching middle age, who we shall call Alice. (For the sake of clarity, we chose this person to be female and heterosexual, yet other situations can be considered mutatis mutandis.) By saying that Alice approaches middle age, we mean that she already has some experience in dating and a definite goal. In particular:

i) she has a way of meeting men, for example in clubs, by being introduced by friends, or using a dating service;

ii) she knows how to behave on a date, so the outcome of the date is not accidental, but rather the result of her conscious decision to take the relationship to the next level or not;

iii) finally, Alice is at the point in her life where the goal of dating is to form a stable relationship with one man, rather than just having fun.

No doubt, many readers identify with this situation – demographic developments in the last few decades have made it a common one. Others are probably familiar with the situation from popular culture. For example, the TV series “Sex and the City” describes precisely this situation – several single women in their 30s-40s constantly changing partners in their search of “true love,” till they finally settle with the perfect one.

Alice now adopts the “realistic” dating model of the dating scene being a huge market, where among all the available candidates she has to choose the most suitable one. In doing so, she makes many of the assumptions, typically used in economics, to describe firm operating in a perfectly competitive market. Without attempting to apply the market analogy too literally, we consider two of them that are actually false. They are the assumptions about:

i)        An infinite number of choices and the existence of the optimal one

ii)       Availability of the perfect information necessary for making the choice

Infinite number of choices and existence of the optimal one

Attractive people are probably the ones who are often particularly misled on this account. Indeed, despite the great number of candidates seeking Alice’s attention, most likely very few of them fit her criteria for being possible “dating material.” In addition, even among suitable candidates there may be no one who perfectly fits Alice’s criteria, i.e. her search may have no realistic chances to succeed within her lifetime.    

Availability of the perfect information necessary for making the choice

Under most realistic scenarios, when Alice encounters a new candidate, she will date him for some time, before making her decision whether to upgrade their relationship to a higher level or whether to dismiss him and move on to the next candidate. Thus, Alice never really makes a choice between the candidates - when making a decision to stop dating one of them, she does so on the basis of her previous experience and her idea of an ideal candidate. (Even if she simultaneously dates two or three, this situation is far removed from the perfect choice among a large number of candidates.)

On the other hand, if making a decision to upgrade the relationship, she does so not out of knowledge that her choice is optimal, but again by comparing him to the previous ones and out of expectation that no better choice will come up.

In either case Alice has no information of whether she will (or whether she could) meet a better candidate in the future. Dismissal makes it difficult to return to dating one of the earlier candidates, even if the later search showed that he was the optimal one.

This constitutes the main theme in the depictions of this situation in popular culture. For example, in “Sex and the City,” after having dated several very impressive men, the main heroine spends most of the film dreaming about one of them- the relationship with whom is irreparably ruined. Of course she reunites with the man of her dreams in the very last chapter of the sequel.

In actual life, endings are less likely to be that happy. Once a candidate has been dismissed, the later reunification with him becomes unlikely due to mutual grudges, or because the candidate (or Alice herself) has relocated to a different country, or because one of them is not technically free anymore. The lucky exception occurs, if Alice meets somebody about whom she immediately feels, “This is the one! This is Mr. Right!” Of course, this implies that i) the man that she is destined to be with exists, about whom she will have such feelings, and ii) he may be just the opposite of what she imagined, since her decision is based not on comparing him with other candidates, but rather on knowing that he is “the right one.” In short, nothing of what Alice does in order to find the partner is relevant to her success – it happens unexpectedly and at unexpected circumstances. But this is just the unrealistic “romantic” approach that we described in the very beginning of this article. It seems that this is the approach that is more likely to succeed.