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"The 37% Solution: When Math Tells You to Stop Swiping and Settle Down" · 21st Century Dating Decoded!™

• Brad Peters: Welcome to 21st Century Dating Decoded, the official Speed Mingle podcast. Let's welcome our host for today's deep dive. So if you live in a major city right now and you decide to just, I don't know, walk out your front door, grab a coffee, and go about your normal day, what do you think the actual mathematical odds are of you just organically bumping into your soulmate? Like one in ten thousand, maybe one in a million? Yeah, it's ⁓ It's actually a lot bleaker than that, unfortunately. Wait, worse than a million? ⁓ yeah. According to one economist who actually took the time to apply the exact same mathematics used to calculate the existence of alien life to his own dating profile, your odds of finding your ideal match on any given day are about one in two hundred and eighty-six thousand. One in two hundred and eighty-six thousand. So just to put that in perspective for everyone listening. You are literally more likely to point a telescope at a random patch of the night sky and discover a UFO than you are to find true love just by waiting for the universe to deliver it to you on a random Tuesday. You absolutely are. I mean, you're much more likely to find extraterrestrial life. That is insane. Right. But we have this culturally ingrained narrative about romance that is built entirely on serendipity. We all know the movie trope. ⁓ yeah, the classic rom-com setup. Exactly. You lock eyes across a crowded bookstore, someone drops a stack of papers, you both reach for them at the exact same time, the music swells, and suddenly the universe just clicks into place. It's the dream. It is a beautiful idea, but it is also statistically absurd. And I think people are really starting to feel that absurdity in their bones lately, because if you look at what dating has actually become today, that bookstore meat cute feels like, I don't know, ancient mythology. ⁓ completely. We aren't relying on serendipity anymore, because serendipity just doesn't scale. Instead, we are looking at a landscape governed by algorithms, swiping mechanics, massive decision fatigue, and honestly, incredibly brutal financial realities. Suddenly that mystical, unpredictable force of love is looking a lot more like a cold, hard data set. Which is exactly what it is. I mean, it is the absolute definition of a mathematical optimization problem, whether we actually want to admit it to ourselves or not. We are applying massive data filters to human beings. And that is exactly what we are unpacking today. Welcome to this custom-tailored deep dive. Our overarching mission today is to take cold, hard mathematics, economic game theory, and modern relationship psychology and use them to decode exactly why dating today feels so incredibly exhausting. And more importantly, how we can actually fix it. Right. How to fix it using the very math that seems to be breaking us. So if you are navigating the dating pool right now, if you are sitting on your couch feeling completely Completely burnt out by endless swiping, or if you are just, you know, insanely curious about how mathematical formulas secretly govern human connection, this conversation is going to provide some massive aha moments for you. We are definitely skipping the superficial dating advice today. We are looking at the raw data. And the stack of sources we have for this deep dive is just phenomenal. We are going to be breaking down the February 2026 BEMO Real Financial Progress Index. To look at the macroeconomics of romance. The dateflation data? Yes, the dateflation. And we are diving deep into that economist I mentioned earlier, Peter Bacchus, in his brilliant adaptation of the Drake equation. Which is mind blowing. It really is. Plus, we've got these fascinating behavioral studies from Tilburg University on something called the rejection mindset and consumer research from the Wharton School on how our brains categorize choices. And we're even bringing in a Nobel Prize winning algorithm, right? We are. An algorithm that literally dictates the power dynamics of who ends up happy and who ends up settling. But before we even get to the Nobel-winning math of how apps match us, I feel like we have to talk about the most immediate, inescapable, real-world filter we all deal with, like the wall blocking the door. You mean money? Money. Because before you can even worry about whether someone is your soulmate, you have to figure out if you can afford to just sit across a table from them. And looking at this BMO Real Financial Progress Index from February 2026, the financial barrier to entry for romance is staggering right now. It really is. The average all-in spend on a single date is now $189. It is a massive number. And I think it's crucial to understand what all in actually means in this context. Right, because people hear $189 and they think, well, I don't spend that much on two entrees and some wine. Exactly. But this data is tracking the holistic cost of the romantic performance. It is the prep, the grooming, maybe a new outfit. It's the gas money, the ride share surging at 8 p.m., the pre-dinner drinks, the meal, the tip. When you aggregate the entire ecosystem of a modern date, it hits $189. And that $189 is up 12.5% from just the previous year. It is completely outpacing regular inflation. We are dealing with severe dateflation. Dateflation is real. I was actually doing the math on this before we started recording. Over the course of a year, the average American dater is spending more than twenty three hundred dollars just on the act of going on dates. That's a vacation. Right? And for Gen Z and millennials, the numbers are even steeper. Millennials saw a 32% jump in date night spending in just one single year. Dating is basically starting to resemble an elite subscription service or like venture capital investing. ⁓ that's a good way to put it. You know what I mean? You're funding 10 early stage startups hoping one becomes a unicorn, but you are just bleeding capital in the seed rounds. Aaron That venture capital analogy is painfully accurate because the stakes are so high financially. The BMO survey explicitly notes that nearly half of singles. 47% to be exact, say dating is simply not financially worth the return on investment anymore. Almost half of singles are just out. Yes. They are literally being priced out of the romantic market. And this extreme economic pressure is creating a phenomenon that economists refer to as a K-shaped dating economy. Okay, stop right there. I know we saw K-shaped recoveries mentioned a lot during the pandemic regarding the broader economy, but how does a letter of the alphabet map onto dating? Dating behavior. Explain the K shape to me. Sure. So think of the vertical line of the letter K as the historical baseline of typical dating behavior. You meet someone, you go out, you spend a moderate amount of money. Makes sense. But because of these intense new financial pressures, that baseline behavior is bifurcating. It's splitting into two completely opposite directions, mapping exactly onto the two arms of the K. Okay, so what's the upward arm? Aaron Powell At the upward arm of the K, You have about 14% of daters who are just accepting the reality that dating is now a luxury good. They are leaning heavily into it. They're telling pollsters that a typical date costs them $300 or more, and they're taking the hit to their wallets to maintain that high standard of romantic performance. So they are the ones keeping the expensive cocktail bars and the tasting menus in business. Exactly. They are operating on this assumption that high financial investment correlates directly to a higher quality mate. Precisely. But then you have to look at the downward arm of the K. You have another rapidly growing segment of the population that is slashing dating expenses entirely. Just cutting the budget completely. Yeah. They look at the hundred and eighty nine dollar average and say, absolutely not. They're either skipping traditional date nights altogether or they are radically shifting to zero cost or ultra low cost dates. We're talking about grabbing a coffee and walking in a park, right? Right, or having a picnic, or literally just making popcorn on the couch instead of buying theater tickets. About fourteen percent of people now say their average date costs them exactly zero dollars. Which has sparked that whole trend of loud budgeting, where you aren't just secretly being cheap and hoping your date doesn't notice. You are actively vocally making financial boundaries part of your personality. ⁓ completely. Like you say, I'm loud budgeting, so we are going for a hike. But here is where the data completely flipped my understanding of modern romance. Because of this extreme K-shaped pressure, our actual biological and romantic priorities are shifting. According to the BMO data, 60% of singles now rank financial compatibility over romantic chemistry. It is a profound shift in human behavior. We are moving away from the abstract concept of chemistry and toward concrete risk management. But wait, if sixty percent of people care more about a credit score than a spark, is romance just dead? Have we collectively decided that love is just a corporate merger now? It sounds like it, doesn't it? It does. Because looking at the top green flags on a date right now, they aren't about shared hobbies or a great sense of humor or mysterious physical attraction. The number one most attractive trait at ninety-four percent is a sense of financial responsibility. And having a good financial plan is right behind it at ninety percent. And being open about money is 89%. Meanwhile, the biggest deal breakers are lying about money or refusing to talk about it. So you have to explain this to me. Are we just becoming hyper-pragmatic accountants, or is there something deeper happening here? It is definitely something deeper. Okay. It is not that romance is dead. It is that financial honesty has become the ultimate proxy for emotional maturity. ⁓ interesting. Think about what a date is fundamentally supposed to achieve. You are trying to ascertain if this stranger is a safe, stable, and reliable partner. Historically, you might have looked at their family reputation or their physical strength. Today, in a complex capitalist society, you look at how they handle resources. That makes total sense. And the data shows that couples who are financially forthcoming from the very beginning actually spend less on a typical date. About $182 compared to nearly $195 for those who aren't honest. Wait, really? So people who talk about money openly end up spending less money on dates. Yes. Because transparency reduces the performative cost of dating. If you are honest about your budget, you don't have to pretend to be someone who drops 200 bucks on sushi on a Tuesday. It strips away the performance. You're just being real. Exactly. People are realizing that you cannot build a stable romantic partnership if the foundation is built on financial anxiety. By prioritizing financial compatibility over an ephemeral spark, they are actively trying to protect their future relationship from the number one statistical cause of divorce, which is financial stress. Wow. So they aren't killing romance. They are trying to create an environment where romance can actually survive long-term. Okay. That makes total sense. Money is this massive, unavoidable real-world filter. It dictates who we can even afford to meet. But I want to run a thought experiment with you. Okay, let's do it. Let's say money is no object. You win the lottery. You have unlimited funds to go on unlimited dates. We remove the financial barrier completely and just look at the raw statistical probability of finding your ideal match in the wild. This brings us back to that mind blowing statistic you mentioned at the very beginning, the math of alien civilizations. Yes. This is one of the most brilliant and humbling applications of mathematical modeling I have ever seen. We are talking about the Drake equation. Aaron I vaguely know the history of this, but it is essentially the formula for finding aliens, right? Frank Drake, 1961. Exactly. Dr. Frank Drake was an astrophysicist deeply involved in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. He was facing a problem that was mathematically paralyzing. Which was? How do you even begin to guess the number of active Communicative alien civilizations in a galaxy with hundreds of billions of stars. It is just too big to comprehend. So he created an elegant equation to break down this massive, impossible question into a sequence of smaller, manageable fractions. Right, so he multiplies the rate of star formation times the fraction of those stars that actually have planets, times the fraction of those planets that sit in a habitable zone where water could exist, times the fraction where life actually emerges, and so on. Right. And depending on how optimistic or pessimistic you are with those specific fractions, Drake estimated there could be around ten thousand alien civilizations in the Milky Way. But and here's the kicker. Because the Milky Way is so incomprehensibly vast, the sheer odds of you pointing your radio telescope at one random star and catching a signal from an alien waving back are astronomically low. Like functionally zero. We are talking about a 0.00005% chance. So enter Peter Backis. This is 2010. He is an economics researcher at the University of Warwick in the UK. He's living in London, he's single, and he is deeply frustrated about why he can't seem to find a girlfriend. A very relatable problem. Very relatable. Now, most people in that situation blame their haircut or their personality or their city. Backis did what only an economist would do. He blamed the mathematics of the universe. He actually wrote a peer-reviewed paper titled Why I Don't Have a Girlfriend, an application of the Drake Equation to Love in the UK. It sounds like a joke, but the mathematics he used, a process called Fermi estimation, are entirely rigorous. He took the structure of the Drake equation and swapped out the astronomical variables for his own personal dating preferences. And this is where it gets so incredibly revealing, because what Bacchus did on paper is exactly what every single one of us does in our heads or on our apps every single day. We all do it. He started with the base population of London, which at the time was roughly four million. Then he applied his first filter, his first fraction, the percentage of the population that are women. Okay, boom. The pool instantly drops by roughly half to two million. Right. Next filter, the fraction of those women who are single. The pool shrinks again, let's say to 1 million. Next, women who fall into his preferred age range of 24 to 34. The pool shrinks massively again. Next, women with a university education. And this is the danger of compounding probability. Every single time he adds a criterion, he is not just subtracting a few people. He is multiplying the entire remaining pool by a fraction. Aaron So it's exponential decay. Exactly. If he has 100,000 women left, And he estimates that only 26% of them have a university degree. He just obliterated 74,000 potential partners with one stroke of the pen. Just gone. And then he gets to the truly brutal, highly subjective filters. He needs to calculate the fraction of those remaining women that he would actually find physically attractive. He was honest and he estimated he'd find about 5% of them attractive. A very strict filter. And then the ultimate bottleneck in the Drake equation of love. The fraction of those attractive, educated, age-appropriate single women living in London, who would find him attractive in return? Aaron ⁓ yes, the mutual attraction variable. It is the filter that destroys more potential pairings than anything else. So what were the final shocking stats? After applying all these filters, which honestly, if you listen to them, they don't sound that crazy. No. Sound pretty standard. He wants a single woman around his age with an education who lives in his city and they find each other attractive. That is the baseline criteria for almost everyone. But mathematically, out of a massive, sprawling city of four million people, his strict criteria whittled his dating pool down to just 26 suitable women in all of London. 26. Out of 4 million people, it is staggering when you see the math laid out like that. And remember the odds of finding aliens? Zero point zero zero zero zero zero five percent. Bacchus took those twenty-six women and calculated the odds of him organically bumping into one of them on any given night out in London. Like if he just goes out for a pint. Right. If he goes to a pub, what are the chances one of the twenty-six is standing there? The odds were one in two hundred and eighty-six thousand. He proved Mathematically, that finding his ideal girlfriend organically was literally rarer than discovering extraterrestrial life. And you know, the brilliance of this paper isn't just about Peter Backus' love life. It is a masterclass in understanding how compounding preference filters artificially destroy your dating pool. Artificially destroy it? Explain that. When we approach dating today, especially online dating, we treat our preferences as non-negotiable, fundamental baselines. We say, I want someone within a five mile radius, over six feet tall, with a master's degree, who doesn't own cats, loves hiking, and votes a certain way. Right. People are very specific. We think we are just being specific, but mathematically, because these filters compound multiplicatively, we are actively driving our candidate pool to zero. Okay, I have to push back on this a little bit, because we filter things all the time and it works perfectly. If I go on Amazon, I can check the box for prime shipping. Four stars and up, under fifty dollars, color blue, and I still get 3,000 results. I get exactly what I want. Why doesn't that logic map onto humans? Why can't I just be specific? Because humans don't scale like mass-produced electronics. Amazon has millions of identical units of a specific blue toaster. The human population is incredibly diverse, but highly randomized. Okay, I see. When you stack five distinct independent traits onto a human search, You are demanding an intersection of variables that rarely occurs naturally. And the actionable insight here for anyone listening is to understand the sheer explosive mathematical power of loosening just one filter. Meaning what exactly? If I change my height requirement, I get one or two more dates? No, it's much more powerful than that. The research shows that if you loosen just one rigid requirement, let's say you drop a strict height requirement from six foot to five ten. Or you no longer demand that they have a specific graduate degree. You don't just add a few people to your pool. What happens? Because of how the math compounds backwards, loosening one major variable can mathematically expand your entire dating pool by over three hundred percent. Three hundred percent. Just by being open to someone two inches shorter. Yes, because that height filter was slicing your entire population in half, or worse, before any other trait was even considered. By removing it, You double or triple the base number that all your other filters are applied to. But this feels like a slippery slope. Does knowing these dismal alien level odds mean the math is telling us to just give up and lower our standards? Am I supposed to just date someone I'm not attracted to because Peter Backus says the math is bad? Not at all. It is not about lowering your standards for the things that actually matter for a successful long term relationship. Like values and stuff. Exactly. Things like The financial responsibility we talked about earlier, or emotional intelligence, kindness, or shared core values. You should never compromise on those. What the math is telling you is that you need to change how you filter. Okay, so how do we filter better? It's about realizing that strict demographic filters, height, specific degrees, exact age brackets, hair color, are highly restrictive proxies. They are superficial data points that often have. absolutely zero correlation with long-term happiness. But when you enforce them strictly, you're mathematically guaranteeing a tiny Drake equation outcome. You're filtering out the person who shares all your core values simply because they live six miles away instead of five. Okay, so let's walk through the logic here. Let's say you are listening to this and you have this massive epiphany. You realize, wow, my organic pool is incredibly small. I only have 26 people in my city who meet my core criteria. And the odds of me bumping into them at the grocery store are one in two hundred and eighty-six thousand. A sobering thought. The only logical human response to that geographic and statistical isolation is to build a machine to solve the problem. You turn to dating apps. You want an algorithm to ignore geography, ignore serendipity, and aggregate those rare twenty-six matches directly to your phone. Which is what we've all done. Right. But once you put millions of people into a machine, you have a new problem traffic control. How does the machine decide who sees who? How does it actually pair you up? And this is where we get into some genuinely breathtaking Nobel Prize winning mathematics. To understand how modern dating apps work under the hood, you have to understand the Gale Shapley algorithm. This is the underlying architecture of modern matching, and it gets deeply structural. I love this part. This goes back to 1962, right? Two mathematicians, David Gale and Lloyd Shapley, Tackled a famous mathematical puzzle called the stable marriage problem. That's the one. And their solution to this problem was so elegant and so foundational to economics and game theory that it eventually won Shapley the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2012. But we have to define what the stable marriage problem actually is, because it sounds like a couples therapy retreat, but it's actually hardcore game theory. It is. Imagine you have a closed ecosystem. Let's say 100 men and 100 women. Every single person in this ecosystem has evaluated and ranked all 100 members of the opposite sex in order of their personal preference, from number one to number one hundred. Okay. Everybody has a ranked list. Right. The mathematical goal is to pair everyone up, one hundred couples, in a way that is definitively stable. And stability here has a very specific, almost ruthless mathematical definition. It doesn't mean they are happy or in love, it means something much colder. Exactly. A stable match means there is absolutely no scenario where two individuals would mutually prefer each other over their currently assigned partners. Walk me through an example of that. Let's say the system matches Taylor with Andy and Alex with Sam. But if Taylor and Alex look at each other and realize, wait, I actually ranked you higher than the person I'm with, and the other person says, I ranked you higher too, that is an unstable match. ⁓ because they're gonna cheat or leave. Exactly. They have a mathematical and emotional incentive to abandon their assigned partners and run off together. They are a rogue couple. If rogue couples exist, the entire system collapses into chaos. The Gale Shapley algorithm is a set of rules that guarantees you can match all 100 couples in a way where absolutely no rogue pairs can exist. Everyone is as stable as the system allows. And dating platforms today, specifically Hinge, which actually explicitly introduce features based on this, and potentially the newer matching systems in Tinder and Bumble, use massive, incredibly complex variations of Gail Shapley on their bipartite graphs of users to figure out who to suggest to you. Yes, on a massive scale. But the algorithm isn't magic. It requires a mechanism to function. It requires one side to take action and propose, and the other side to passively accept or reject. Walk us through exactly how Gail Shapley works in practice. Like we are at a highly structured high school dance. Okay, let's look at the classic original version of the algorithm. We have group A, the proposers, and group B, the receivers. The process happens in rounds. In round one, everyone in group A goes down their rigidly ranked list and walks up to their absolute top choice in group B and proposes. So everyone in group A is shooting their shot with their absolute number one draft pick. Yes. Now, the people in group B look at the people standing in front of them. Some people in group B might have three proposals. Some might have zero. Raw for the zero proposal group. It is. The people in group B look at their offers. They say a provisional maybe to the best offer they have so far, and they firmly permanently reject the rest. They don't get married yet. They are just holding on to the best option. So they are keeping their options open, holding on to the best ticket they've received. And telling everyone else to get lost. Right. Now we enter round two. The people in group A who just got rejected look at their lists. They cross off their number one choice, and they walk up to their number two choice and propose to them. Okay, and then what does group B do? Now, group B looks at their new proposals. If someone newly proposes to them who is ranked higher than the person they are currently holding on to, they ruthlessly dump their current provisional partner and hold on to the new, better one. This process repeats over and over. Propose, hold the best, reject the rest until everyone is finally matched. It sounds totally fair. It sounds like an incredibly efficient way to sort a room. But there is a massive, mind-blowing mathematical catch hidden inside this process that dictates everything about modern dating power dynamics. The critical mathematical proof of the Gale Shapley algorithm, the thing that makes it so fascinating, is that it is inherently Asymmetrical. It heavily systematically favors the side that proposes. Wow. The mathematical proof shows that the proposing group gets the absolute best possible stable outcome available to them in the entire ecosystem. Meanwhile, the passive receiving group gets the absolute worst possible stable outcome. Wait, I need to make sure everyone listening catches this because it is the most actionable piece of advice in this entire deep dive. It really is. If you are the one proposing. If you are the one sending the message, initiating the like, the math guarantees you end up with your highest possible preference that the system allows. If you are the one sitting back, waiting to be chosen, you get the lowest possible preference that keeps the system stable. Why? Why does the universe reward the proposer so heavily? It comes down to the direction of the search. Think about what the proposer is doing. They are starting at the very top of their dream list and working their way down one by one. They only stop when they hit a yes. They are actively, aggressively pulling the highest possible value from the market. And the receiver? The receiver, however, is never reaching up. They are just sitting there, statically filtering whatever randomly comes their way. They only ever get to choose from the limited pool of people who happen to approach them. If their absolute dream partner never walks up to them, they never even get to evaluate them. They settle for the best of the ones who approached. Okay, let me try a different analogy for this because I know we often compare this to applying for a dream job versus waiting for a recruiter on LinkedIn. But to me, Gail Shapley feels like being at a massive buffet. A buffet. If you are the proposer, you take your plate, you walk up to the prime rib, you ask for it. If they are out, you go to the salmon. You are actively selecting the best food available. Right. If you are the receiver, you are sitting at a table. Waiting for the waiters to randomly bring you trays of food. You can say no to the broccoli and yes to the mashed potatoes, but if the waiter never brings you the prime rib, you never get to eat it. You are entirely dependent on what is offered to you. That is a perfect analogy. If you sit at the table, you only get what is offered. So what does this all mean for you, the listener? It proves mathematically that playing hard to get, or sitting back and waiting for the algorithm or the universe to bring you your perfect match. Is a losing strategy. A completely losing strategy. It is statistically destined to give you a suboptimal outcome. If you see someone you like on an app or in real life, send the message. Walk up to them. Be the proposer. The math dictates that taking the initiative is the only way to optimize your outcome in a Gail Shaffley world. Okay, so you listen to us. You take the initiative. You are the proposer. You are sending the likes, you are messaging first, you are working your way down your list. But as you scroll through these apps, actively looking for people to propose to, you might start to notice something incredibly weird. Have you ever looked at a dating app and thought, why is everyone on here so, I don't know, one-dimensional? Yes, all the time. You look at a profile and think, wow, this guy is incredibly handsome, like a model, but his bio is entirely vacant and he seems incredibly dull. Or you look at someone else and think, she is brilliant, she's an astrophysicist, but I'm just not physically attracted to her. It feels like you always have to trade one trait for another. It feels like the apps are filled with extremes. This brings us to a fascinating cognitive illusion. And it is an illusion driven entirely by mathematics. And the way we use those filters we talked about earlier. It is a statistical phenomenon called Berkson's paradox. Which is sometimes known as collider bias. This is the part where we learn that our own swiping habits are actively tricking our brains into stereotyping people. Explain Berkson's paradox. How does this work? Okay. Let's assume that out in the real world, in the general population, being highly attractive and being highly intelligent are completely independent traits. They don't correlate. Right. There are smart attractive people, smart unattractive people. Unintelligent attractive people and unintelligent unattractive people. They're evenly distributed across the population. But Berkson's paradox explains why, inside a filtered environment like a dating app, these two completely independent traits suddenly appear to be artificially negatively correlated. Meaning it feels like as attractiveness goes up, intelligence goes down, and vice versa. It literally creates the dumb blonde or ugly nerd stereotype right before your eyes. Why does that mathematical illusion happen? Because of how you, the user, filter the pool. Let's say you are swiping, and your internal rule is that you will only swipe right on people who are either very attractive or very intelligent. Okay, so if they have one or the other, they get a right swipe. Exactly. If they have one of those two things, you give them a chance. By doing that, you completely eliminate the group of people who are neither. You've chopped off the entire bottom left quadrant of the population graph. Makes sense. I don't want to date someone who is neither. Now, look at the people who are left in your match queue. The people who are incredibly, ridiculously attractive didn't need to be highly intelligent to make it past your filter. Their looks carried them through the gate. ⁓ I see. And the people who are brilliantly intelligent didn't need to be supermodels to make it through. Their brains got ⁓ the swipe. ⁓ wow. I see it now. So among your specific curated matches, the hottest people will mathematically have a lower average intelligence than the rest of your pool because they didn't need the intelligence to survive the cut. Exactly. And the smartest people will have lower average attractiveness because they didn't need the looks. You literally created the stereotype yourself by filtering out the average people. You did. You've artificially linked two completely independent variables by conditioning your selection on them. It is a mathematical illusion that makes you look at your phone and think, all the hot people on this app are so dull. No, they aren't. The general population isn't like that. You just filtered out all the people who were neither hot nor smart, which mathematically skewed your entire perspective of the remaining pool. You are looking at a biased sample of your own creation. That is so dangerous because it fundamentally alters how we perceive the humans on our screens. We stop seeing them as complete people and start seeing them as opposing data points. And it gets even deeper when we look at the actual order in which we apply these filters on an app. No, this is fascinating. This is where I want to bring in some mind-bending consumer behavior research from the Wharton School, published in the Journal of Consumer Research by Rom Y. Shrift and his colleagues. They studied something called multi-stage decision processes and a concept called path-independent choice. This Wharton study is crucial because it Looks at how the sequence of our choices changes our brain's mental representation of the final result. In modern dating apps, we often build our preferences step by step. Using drop-down menus, we set the age, then the distance, then the education level, then the religion. The study uses a really simple analogy about buying a coat to explain this. And when you map it onto dating, it is terrifying. Let's say you go to a website to buy a coat. You have two choices to make: the material, wool or leather and the style, stylish or casual. Okay. If the website forces you to pick the material first and you click wool and then it asks for the style and you click stylish, your brain categorizes the final product arriving at your door as a wool coat that happens to be stylish. Its primary core identity in your mind is wool. Right. But if the website reverses the order of those filters, if it asks you to choose stylish first and then wool second, Your brain categorizes the exact same item as a stylish coat that happens to be made of wool. Even though it's the exact same coat. The end product is physically identical, but your mental representation of its value, its identity, and how you feel about it has fundamentally shifted based purely on the arbitrary order of the drop down menus. So take that to hinge or bumble. If you filter your dating app by location first, say within five miles, and then by height, say over six feet tall. And then by religion, are you mathematically programming your brain to view a complex breathing human being as just a tall person who lives nearby? Is the UI of the app literally rewiring how I experience another human? Yes, you absolutely are. What Shriff's research shows is that this piecemeal attribute by attribute sorting strips away the holistic humanity of the person. Because we aren't seeing the whole picture. Exactly. When you encounter someone in real life. At a party or a coffee shop, you process them as a complete gestalt, a a whole human being. Their laugh, their posture, their conversation, the way they hold their coffee. You take it all in at once. Yeah, you just get a vibe. But on an app, because you built their profile through sequential filters, your brain categorizes them by those isolated attributes. The initial filter you set becomes their dominant identity in your mind. You don't see a complex person. You see a five-mile radius that happens to have brown hair. I completely agree with the psychology here, but I have to push back on the tech itself. Is this our fault or is it just bad app design? Because I can't look at a whole person on a screen. The app forces me to look at a 2D picture, then scroll down to see their height, then scroll down to see their job. The interface forces piecemeal evaluation. It is absolutely an interface problem, but the interface dictates the neurology. The medium is the message. We are swiping based on flawed mental models. We are falling victim to Berkson's paradox, thinking everyone is a one-dimensional stereotype. Because of the filtering. Right. We are mentally categorizing complex humans as just a nearby tall person because of the order of our drop-down menus. And on top of all of this flawed perception, we have an infinite supply of these profiles to judge, which leads us to the ultimate question. What is this endless, infinite volume of choice actually doing to our physical brains? If the data is to be believed, it is literally breaking our neurology. We are encountering the paradox of choice, a concept popularized by psychologist Barry Schwartz. The core idea is that while some choice is good and liberating, an overabundance of choice leads to cognitive paralysis, heightened anxiety, and chronic dissatisfaction. Let's ground this in evolutionary biology for a second. Think about Dunbar's number. Anthropologists suggest that the human brain evolved to comfortably manage social relationships. In tribes of about 150 people. Right, our ancient hunter-gatherer days. Over your entire lifetime, in a hunter-gatherer society, you might evaluate a few dozen viable mates. Your brain is calibrated to carefully consider a small number of people. And now the average Tinder user sees 140 profiles a day. We are swiping through a caveman's entire lifetime of potential partners while waiting for our coffee to brew in the morning. Our amygdala isn't built for that kind of rapid-fire social evaluation. It's not. And that level of unnatural abundance triggers massive opportunity cost anxiety. A 2025 study in media psychology proved that as the number of available profiles increases on a screen, a user's commitment readiness plummet. Why does it plummet? When you know there are literally thousands of other people just one swipe away, committing to a conversation, let alone a physical date. Feels like a massive risky investment. Because in a world of infinite choice, every yes to one person feels like a no to a thousand other theoretical possibilities. And tragically, the same study showed that this process actively erodes self-esteem. Because you are constantly judging and being judged at an industrial scale. But I want to look at the actual minute-by-minute mechanics of this burnout, because researchers at Tilburg University, Pronk and Dennison, did this. Brilliant, revealing study where they tracked exactly what happens inside a user's brain during a single swiping session. They discovered a phenomenon they called the rejection mindset. This is one of the most important studies on modern dating behavior. They tracked users in real time and found that as a user continuously browses profiles, their likelihood of accepting a match plummets by 27% from the start of the session to the end. ⁓ What that means practically is that the exact same profile, the exact same human being, that you might have happily swiped right on at 8 p.m., you will coldly, ruthlessly reject at 8.15 p.m. just because your brain has become fatigued. Exactly. The researchers map this psychological shift perfectly. When you open the app and start swiping, usually for the first 10 to 20 profiles, you are in what they call an exploration mindset. Okay, so you're open-minded. Your brain is optimistic. You are rested, you are actively looking for reasons to connect. You are looking for positive traits. ⁓ he likes dogs. That's nice. She has a great smile. But somewhere around profile 30 to 35, a cliff approaches. Profound decision fatigue sets in. Your cognitive load maxes out. And your brain just flips a switch to protect itself from overheating. Yes. It forcibly shifts into the rejection mindset. Because fairly evaluating the nuance of a human being takes immense caloric and cognitive energy. When your brain is tired after 30 evaluations, it starts taking shortcuts. What kind of shortcuts? Instead of looking for reasons to say yes, it starts aggressively looking for tiny insignificant flaws to justify a no. ⁓ the lighting is weird in their third photo. ⁓ they used a cliche quote from the office. Swipe left, swipe left. It is a Biological defensive strategy to minimize cognitive effort. If you are listening to this right now on a Friday night and you've been swiping on hinge or bumble for the last 20 minutes, stop, put the phone down. The math says your brain is biologically incapable of giving the next profile a fair chance. You are just operating as a rejection machine. That is the hard truth. Which makes me ask a really fundamental question. If the apps give us thousands of options, With the stated, marketed goal of helping us find love. But our biological brains literally shut down and enter a defensive rejection mode after just 30 profiles? Are we using a tool that is fundamentally incompatible with human neurology? Is the tool broken by design? It raises a profoundly important point. The architecture of infinite scroll on dating apps is borrowed directly from social media feeds. And social media feeds are designed to keep you engaged on the platform. Not to satisfy a specific real world goal and get you off the platform. That's a great point. So yes, the tool is arguably incompatible with how humans historically and neurologically form pair bonds. We are not wired to process hundreds of faces and biographies in a sitting. The paradox of choice guarantees that even if you find someone genuinely great at profile number eighty, your biological capacity to appreciate them has been entirely hollowed out by the seventy-nine exhausting micro rejections that preceded them. Okay, so endless swiping creates decision paralysis, opportunity cost anxiety, and literally rewires our brains to reject people over the lighting in a photo. If we know the system is breaking our brains, how do we know when to actually stop searching and settle down? Is there a mathematical formula for commitment? Because it feels like everyone on these apps is infected with the same disease, always wondering: is there someone 5% better just one swipe away? Believe it or not. There actually is a mathematical formula for this exact dilemma. It is a branch of mathematics called optimal stopping theory. And it is most famously illustrated by a classic probability puzzle known as the secretary problem. Let's lay out the secretary problem in detail because this is the ultimate thought experiment for anyone who suffers from dating FOMO, the fear of missing out. Okay. Imagine you are a manager and you have to hire a secretary. You have a pool of one hundred applicants waiting out in the hallway. You are going to interview them one by one in a completely random order. Okay, got it. But here are the strict rules of the game. After each interview, you must immediately make a decision to either hire that person on the spot or reject them forever. You cannot say, Let me think about it. You cannot go back to a previous candidate and say, Actually, I changed my mind. You were the best. So once they walk out, they are gone. Once they leave the room, they are gone forever. Your goal is to maximize your chances of hiring the absolute single best applicant in the entire pool of 100. How do you do it? The anxiety of this game is insane because if you hire someone too early, say candidate number five, you might miss a literal superstar applicant waiting at number ninety-nine. Right. But if you wait too long, hoping for absolute perfection, you might accidentally reject. The best candidate at number forty, realize your mistake too late and end up with no one, or be forced to hire the last person in line who might be terrible. Exactly. It is a terrifying optimization problem. But mathematics provides a provably optimal solution, and it is derived from the mathematical constant E. It is known as the thirty-seven percent rule. The thirty-seven percent rule. Break down exactly how this translates from a hypothetical hallway of secretaries to a lifetime of dating. To mathematically maximize your odds of finding the absolute best partner, you should divide your expected dating pool, or your dating lifetime, into two distinct phases. Phase one. Phase one is the calibration phase. You must date and strictly reject the first 37% of the people you will ever date. You do not commit to any of them, no matter how wonderful, attractive, or perfect they seem. You are simply using them as data points to establish a baseline of what is available in the market. I have to pause here. That is mathematically sound but incredibly sociopathically cold. Imagine telling someone, listen, you are wonderful, we connect perfectly, but you fall within my 37% data gathering window, so I have to reject you forever to establish my market baseline. It is ruthless. But the math doesn't care about feelings. Now, phase two begins. After you pass that critical 37% mark, the rule states you must immediately commit. To the very next person you meet who is better than anyone you saw in the first 37%. Just immediately lock it down. You don't hesitate, you lock it down. If you follow this rule perfectly, mathematically, you have the highest possible probability, which happens to be about 37%, of landing the absolute number one best partner in the entire pool. Okay, but a 37% chance of success is still a failing grade on a math test. That means there's a 63% chance I fail, even if I follow the rule perfectly. Perfectly. Well, yes, that is true. What if I am not a perfectionist? What if I don't need the absolute undisputed number one best person in the entire world? What if I'd be perfectly happy with someone who is just in the top five percent or top fifteen percent of my options? Does the math change? It changes dramatically, and in a way that should relieve a lot of anxiety for daters. The math shows that if you lower your standard of success from demanding the single best person To wanting someone in the top 5% or 15%, your calibration window drops significantly. How significantly? You only need to reject the first 22% or 19% of your pool. And your overall success rate of finding someone in that top tier skyrockets to 78%. That is massive. So just lowering your expectation from absolute perfection to top 5% cuts your data gathering phase in half and more than doubles your chance of actually being happy. Exactly. But wait, there is another variable here. In the classic secretary problem, the applicant always says yes if you offer them the job. In dating, the person you pick might reject you. How does the math handle getting dumped? ⁓ the math accounts for that too. If we assume there's a 50-50 chance of the person rejecting your proposal when you finally decide to commit, the optimal stopping calibration phase drops even further to just 25%. Meaning you have to move faster. Yes. You should start making serious offers much earlier after exploring only a quarter of your pool because you have to factor in the risk of being turned down. You can't wait too long because your first choice might say no. All of this math sounds so precise. It gives you this comforting illusion of analytical control. ⁓ I just need to wait out my 37% phase, calculate the rejection variables, and then pull the trigger. But the expert source we have from the selection standard absolutely tears this application apart. What is the fatal flaw of using the 37% rule for human relationships? The fatal flaw is a mathematical assumption called the known N. In the secretary problem, you know exactly how many applicants are standing in the hallway. 100. N is a known fixed variable. Therefore, you can easily calculate what 37% of 100 is. 37 people. Right. But in real life dating, n is entirely unknown. You have absolutely no idea how many serious relationship candidates you will actually meet in your lifetime. Will you meet 10? Will you meet 50? Will you meet 500? You can't calculate 37% of a mystery number. Exactly. Because the denominator of the equation is completely fictional, the 37% stopping point is also entirely fictional. You are applying rigorous, uncompromising mathematics to a parameter that doesn't exist in reality. This sounds exactly like trying to find a parking spot at a massive crowded stadium concert. If you take the very first spot you see a mile away, you're walking forever. But if you hold out for the VIP lot right next to the stadium, you might end up driving in circles until the show is over. A great analogy. You have to establish a baseline of how full the lots are. But the problem is you don't know how big the lot is, and you don't know how many cars are behind you. The 37% rule gives people, especially those who are deeply afraid of commitment, analytical permission to overexplore. I see that all the time. I've seen this in real life. People use the illusion of optimizing to justify endless chronic dating. They can be 45 years old, swiping every single night, claiming I'm still in my 37% calibration phase. I just haven't established my baseline yet. The rule encourages a specific kind of decision avoidance, but it dresses it up as analytical. Rigor. Which is very dangerous. The math is right, but it's applied to a problem that doesn't exist in human relationships. You aren't hiring a secretary. You are navigating a dynamic, unpredictable human ecosystem where the candidates are evaluating you right back. And that realization is the ultimate takeaway from all of this data. The math can explain the invisible pressures we face, but it cannot make the leap of faith for us. We've seen how expensive dating has become. Forcing a K-shaped economy where we prioritize financial stability over fleeting chemistry just to survive. Right. We've seen how Peter Bacchus used the Drake equation to prove that rigid, compounding demographic filters mathematically destroy your dating pool, whittling millions of people down to 26. And we've learned that playing hard to get is a mathematically losing strategy because the Gale Shapley algorithm proves the proposer always wins the highest possible value. If you sit at the table and wait, you only get the leftovers. Exactly. We've explored how Berkson's paradox and the order of our dropdown filters create one-dimensional stereotypical illusions out of complex human beings. And we've seen how the sheer unnatural volume of choices triggers a rejection mindset, making us biologically incapable of evaluating partners fairly after just 30 swipes. Modern dating is undeniably a mathematical minefield. It is expensive. It is deeply mentally taxing. And the algorithmic systems we rely on are often fundamentally misaligned with our evolutionary biology. But by understanding the math, you can actually hack the system. You really can. Limit your daily swipes to twenty to avoid that twenty seven percent biological rejection drop. Loosen your Drake equation demographic filters. Drop the strict height or education requirements to organically expand your pool by 300%. Very important. Take the initiative to message first and trigger the Gale Shapley proposer's advantage. And please, if you take nothing else away, do not let the 37% rule trick you into an endless calculated search for a mathematical perfection that simply doesn't exist. If we synthesize all of this, I want to leave you, the listener, with one final lingering question to ponder long after this deep dive is over. We talked heavily about Gail Shapley. And how these apps use algorithms to match us based on our past swipes and our explicitly stated preferences. Yeah. But if these machine learning algorithms are constantly learning from our history, feeding us exactly what we think we want based on who we swiped right on yesterday, are these apps fundamentally trapping us in our own historical biases? ⁓ wow. By mathematically optimizing for our stated superficial preferences. Is the algorithm actively preventing us from experiencing the true serendipity of falling for someone completely unexpected? Are we mathematically optimizing ourselves out of the very magic we are looking for in the first place? That is a terrifying and brilliant thought. If the machine only ever gives you exactly what you ask for, you will never discover what you didn't know you needed. Exactly. Thank you for joining us on this incredibly deep dive. Take these mathematical insights out into the real world. Hack your filters, protect your cognitive load, be the proposer and send that first message. But always remember, math and algorithms can only bring you to the edge of the cliff. You still have to make the leap of faith to yourself. Welcome to Speed Mingle, where making real connections happens in Stream, swipe, socialize, your ultimate connection network. Jump in now. Thanks for tuning in to the Speed Mingle Network.