The Promise That Curdled
There is an intuition so obvious it feels beyond argument: more choice is better. If one bakery is good, a street of bakeries is a feast. If a handful of suitors was the lot of our grandparents, then a city's worth of them, sorted and filtered and delivered to the palm of a hand, must be liberation. The logic is clean. The experience, for most people who have actually tried to date this way, is not.
Barry Schwartz gave this dissonance a name — the paradox of choice — and though he was writing about jam and pension plans, nothing illustrates it more cruelly than romance. Somewhere past a certain threshold, additional options stop feeling like freedom and start feeling like a tax. The abundance that was meant to guarantee a better outcome instead makes every outcome feel provisional. We were promised a wider door to intimacy. What we got was a turnstile, and it keeps spinning.
The strange part is how little the promise delivers on its own terms. More candidates should mean a better match. Yet people wading through the largest pools often report the thinnest satisfaction — not because the pool is bad, but because its size changes what they are doing inside it.
The Cost of the Endless Menu
Every choice extracts a hidden fee before you ever decide anything: the labour of comparison. With three options, comparison is trivial. With three hundred, it becomes a second job — one performed after work, in bed, thumb aching, attention fraying. Psychologists call the result decision fatigue, the steady erosion of judgement that comes from making choice after choice. The tenth profile gets a fairer reading than the two-hundredth. By then you are not evaluating a person; you are triaging a queue.
This is where the mechanics of the medium quietly work against you. The infinite feed is engineered on the same principle as a slot machine — variable-ratio reinforcement, the unpredictable reward that keeps a hand moving long after pleasure has drained from it. The next card might be the one. It rarely is, but the maybe is enough. Attention, the one genuinely scarce resource in all of this, gets spent not on people but on the act of scrolling past them.
And attention, once fragmented, is hard to reassemble. A person who might have been fascinating across a dinner table becomes a thumbnail competing with forty other thumbnails for a glance. The format does not merely present options; it flattens them, until the difference between a soulmate and a near-miss is reduced to the speed of a swipe.
Abundance does not widen the door to intimacy; it installs a turnstile, and keeps it spinning.
The Someone-Better Illusion
Abundance also plays a subtler trick on the imagination. When you believe a nearly limitless supply of alternatives sits one tap away, every actual human being in front of you is silently measured against a phantom — the person who might be funnier, kinder, more aligned, and who is surely, statistically, still out there. This is the someone-better illusion, and it is corrosive precisely because it can never be disproven. You cannot check. The catalogue is too large to exhaust, so the doubt is impossible to close.
The consequence is a peculiar modern condition: perpetual partial presence. To fully invest in one connection feels like a foreclosure, a premature shutting of doors. So we keep the doors ajar, dating with one eye on the exit that is also, confusingly, the entrance to everyone else. The commitment that intimacy requires — the decision to stop looking — becomes almost impossible to make, because the machine is built to reassure you that stopping is a mistake.
There is grief buried in this, though we rarely name it. Real attachment is partly the willingness to let the alternatives go unexamined — to decide that this person is enough not because you have proven no one better exists, but because you have chosen to stop asking the question.
Maximisers and Satisficers
Schwartz drew a distinction that maps onto dating with uncomfortable precision. The maximiser needs to know they have found the best; the satisficer looks for what is good enough and, having found it, is content. The words sound like a hierarchy — surely the best beats the merely sufficient — but the research points the other way. Maximisers make objectively fine choices and feel worse about them, haunted by the roads untravelled. Satisficers choose well and, crucially, enjoy what they chose.
An infinite catalogue turns everyone into a maximiser whether they wish to be one or not. When the supply appears boundless, 'good enough' starts to feel like surrender, a failure of ambition. Why settle when the next screen is free? But the maximiser's promised reward — certainty that no better option was missed — is not merely elusive in dating. It is structurally unavailable. You are chasing a proof that the format guarantees you can never obtain.
To satisfice, then, is not to lower one's standards. It is to hold a standard and then honour a decision — to treat a good choice as a beginning rather than a hypothesis awaiting refutation.
The Case for the Narrow Door
Constraint has a bad reputation. It sounds like scarcity, compromise, the poorer cousin of freedom. Yet a well-drawn limit is often what makes choice bearable at all. A sommelier's short list produces more pleasure than a warehouse of bottles; a considered menu of a few dishes serves you better than a laminated encyclopedia. The constraint does the exhausting work of comparison in advance, and hands back the one thing abundance steals — the capacity to attend.
Applied to dating, the principle is almost heretical: fewer, more considered introductions can yield better decisions and deeper satisfaction than an unlimited stream. Two people met with real attention will always outweigh two hundred met with none. When the pool is deliberately small and thoughtfully assembled, the phantom of someone-better loses its grip, decision fatigue never sets in, and the mind is free to do what it was always meant to do with a stranger who might matter: notice them.
None of this is an argument for less love or a smaller life. It is an argument about where attention goes, and what it builds when it is allowed to settle. The paradox resolves the moment you stop mistaking the size of the field for the quality of the harvest. You do not need more people to choose from. You need the quiet room, and the two good options, in which choosing finally becomes possible.