I reckon everyone who’s used a dating app has had the following thought: “If I’m swiping through hundreds of people and choosing them based on a single picture, how easy must it be for others to skip me?”
After all, the algorithm suggests, there are thousands of (real or imagined) matches out there.
It’s very hard to square the idea of one true love with a jammed inbox filled with hundreds of messages and an endless carousel of supposed potential loves.
So I’m not shocked that a study published this year in Behavioural Science called Mate Choice Plurality, Choice Overload, and Singlehood: Are More Options Always Better? found that, well, they aren’t.
I was, however, surprised as to the reason why ― and the gender divides.
What did the study find?
Researchers gave 804 participants (456 women, 335 men, 8 participants who counted as “other,” and 5 participants who didn’t share their gender) questionnaires which assessed how many options they thought they had in the dating pool.
They also asked about participants’ relationship satisfaction, self-esteem, and desire to stay in their current relationship.
They found that across all genders, people who perceived themselves as having more romantic options were less likely to be single.
But people who thought they had too many options were less likely to be single. partly because they felt overwhelmed by choice and couldn’t decide who to date.
People who were in relationships but thought they had a lot of dating options tended to report lower levels of relationship satisfaction because they weren’t confident about their choice of partner.
Men in particular were more likely to experience feelings of regret and low satisfaction in their relationship if they imagined they’d be a hot commodity on the dating market, and may even have been less inclined to stay in a relationship.
The same was not seen in women.
So... was it all bad news?
In short, no.
Some choice is helpful and can increase your chances of finding a partner, the study suggested ― “the fewer options individuals have, the more likely they are to be single.”
“High selectivity implies that individuals do not settle for the first potential mate they encounter, but rather screen prospective mates for desirable traits,” they add.
But an overwhelming level of real or perceived options was “linked to higher choice overload, which, in turn, increased the likelihood of being single rather than in an intimate relationship.”
“More research is necessary to examine the effect of choice overload on years spent single,” the researchers said.