Dating Became a Marketplace. We’re Building Something Else.
Why do dating apps feel more like shopping than connecting? Endless choice changed how we browse, match, and communicate. Pace is building online dating around attention, follow-through, and what happens after the match.
No one decided that online dating should feel like shopping. It happened slowly, one reasonable-seeming dating-app design choice at a time, until one day we looked up and realized we were browsing people the way we browse everything else. Comparing. Sorting. Keeping a tab open in case something better came along.
Dating apps promised greater access and more choice. They delivered both. But they also created a new problem: our options expanded while our attention did not.
This is how online dating became a marketplace, why that changed the way people connect, and what it would take to build dating differently.
Why do dating apps feel like shopping?
Dating apps feel like shopping because many are designed around large catalogs of profiles, rapid judgments, frequent comparison, and a continuous supply of new options. Those mechanics increase access, but they can also spread attention thin and make each potential connection feel easier to replace.
The promise of dating-app abundance
The early pitch for dating apps was simple and genuinely appealing: more people. For most of human history, people met partners through a small, slow set of channels: school, work, the neighborhood, or a friend of a friend. The apps blew that open. Suddenly the person you were looking for might be three miles away, and you could find them tonight.
If the problem was not enough options, then more options had to be the solution. So the apps optimized for exactly that. The interface became a feed of faces, and the core gesture became the swipe, a motion designed to be fast, light, and endlessly repeatable.
It worked. People got more options than any generation before them. And then something strange happened. More did not feel like more.
More did not feel like more.
What too much choice did to attention
Here is the part the original pitch missed. Attention is not infinite. The number of people you can actually see, talk to, and care about in a given week is small, and it does not grow just because the pool does.
When access expands but attention stays fixed, the math turns against you. Every person becomes one of many. The natural response to a feed of options is to skim, compare, and keep looking, because there is always someone else one swipe away. You are not being shallow. You are responding rationally to an environment designed to make everyone feel replaceable.
That is the quiet damage. Not that people got worse, but that the design taught all of us to treat each other like options in a catalog. We learned to browse, compare, collect matches and leave many of them untouched. We learned to let a conversation end without ending because there was always another one to start.
Researchers describe a related pattern as choice overload: under certain conditions, a larger number of options can make decisions harder and reduce satisfaction with the eventual choice. A well-known 2000 experiment found that shoppers presented with 24 jam options were less likely to purchase than those presented with six. Later research has shown that the effect is not universal, but becomes more likely when choices are complex, preferences are uncertain, and decisions require greater effort.[1][2][3]
Online dating often brings those conditions together. The options are difficult to compare, people may still be discovering what they want, and the decision carries far more emotional weight than choosing a jar of jam.
Why dating began to feel like a marketplace
Once you see it as a marketplace, the rest makes sense.
In a marketplace, the goal is to maximize selection and minimize commitment until the last possible moment. You keep your options open. You comparison shop. You do not invest in any single item until you are sure there is nothing better, and you are never sure, because the inventory refreshes daily.
That logic is fine for buying a couch. It is corrosive for meeting a person. People are not inventory. They do not get better the more of them you collect, and treating them as interchangeable does something to you, too. Spend enough time shopping for people and you start to feel like one of the products.
The apps did not do this out of malice. They did it because the marketplace model is easy to measure and easy to grow. Matches are a number. Swipes are a number. Time in app is a number. Connection is harder to measure than any of those, so it rarely became the thing the system optimized.
What dating apps miss after the match
Notice what the marketplace has historically struggled to measure: what happens after two people match.
A match is the moment the marketplace celebrates. It is the transaction, the little burst of validation. But a match is also where the real thing is supposed to begin, and the apps mostly leave you there, alone with a list of people who liked you back and a blank message box. Too many matches never become conversations, and too many conversations never become dates. The marketplace got extraordinarily good at generating the match and then lost interest in everything that was supposed to come next. It optimized the part that feels like progress and ignored the part that is progress.
You can have a hundred matches and no one to talk to.
That gap, between matching and actually connecting, is where the loneliness lives. The fatigue shows up in survey data as well. In a Forbes Health and OnePoll survey of 1,000 U.S. dating-app users, 78 percent said they experienced dating-app fatigue at least sometimes, with especially high rates among Gen Z and Millennials.[4]
A different premise for online dating
So what would it look like to build dating that was not a marketplace?
You would begin by questioning the assumption that more is always better. For many people the problem is no longer too little access. It is too many possibilities competing for too little attention. So you would stop optimizing for volume and start protecting attention.
You would limit how many active conversations a person can hold at once, not as a gimmick or a punishment, but because attention is the scarce resource and pretending it is infinite is the original mistake. You would design for follow-through instead of the next swipe, treating a match as a beginning that deserves effort rather than an endpoint that deserves a notification. You would give conversations room to develop, and when a connection is not right, you would provide a clear, respectful way to end it instead of letting silence become the default. You would design the entire experience, from discovery to conversation to closure, around the reality that attention is limited and people deserve clarity. Instead of adding isolated wellness features to the same endless-feed model, you would make those principles part of how the entire product works.
You would build around enough. Enough choice to explore, and enough focus to give the people in front of you a real chance. Not fifty conversations competing for attention.
This is the premise behind Pace: online dating built around attention, not volume. Not because slower is automatically better, but because the marketplace made a specific trade: more access for less attention. We believe that trade has run its course.
Access went up. Meaningful connection did not.
Dating became a marketplace one design choice at a time. It can become human again the same way.
That is what we are building at Pace.
Frequently asked questions
Why do dating apps feel like shopping?
Many dating apps present a large, constantly refreshed set of profiles and encourage rapid comparison. That increases access but can make each connection feel more replaceable.
Can too many dating-app choices make dating harder?
More choice can make it harder to focus, invest attention, and feel confident in a decision. The effect varies by person, but endless options can turn dating into continued comparison.
How is Pace different from traditional dating apps?
Pace is designed around limited active matches, timely follow-through, clearer endings, and the part most dating products leave unmanaged: what happens after two people match.
Does Pace limit how many people you can talk to?
Pace is designed to allow up to five active matches at a time, giving people room to explore without spreading their attention across unlimited conversations.
Sources
- Sheena S. Iyengar and Mark R. Lepper, When Choice Is Demotivating: Can One Desire Too Much of a Good Thing? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2000.
- Benjamin Scheibehenne, Rainer Greifeneder, and Peter M. Todd, Can There Ever Be Too Many Options? A Meta-Analytic Review of Choice Overload, Journal of Consumer Research, 2010.
- Alexander Chernev, Ulf Böckenholt, and Joseph Goodman, Choice Overload: A Conceptual Review and Meta-Analysis, Journal of Consumer Psychology, 2015.
- Forbes Health and OnePoll, survey of 1,000 U.S. dating-app users on dating-app fatigue.
Further reading
Pew Research Center, “From Looking for Love to Swiping the Field: Online Dating in the U.S.” 2023. Context on how common online dating has become and the mix of positive and negative experiences users report.
Pace is currently in development. The experience described here reflects our product direction and may evolve as we test and learn.