Dating in the Age of Algorithms

As the executive director of the Kinsey Institute and scientific advisor to Match—known for the popular online dating site/app Match.com—I find myself at the heart of sex research during a pivotal moment in our sexual evolution.

We’re at the dawn of an age in which technology is fundamentally changing the way people meet and connect. We live in a time of totally redefined gender roles and relationship norms, filled with clicks and swipes, and courtship not bound by geography or tradition. We have seemingly infinite access to potential mates, seemingly infinite potential for being swept off our feet, seemingly infinite technological capacity for chatting, flirting, and loving globally.

But the research shows that we find ourselves stuck. Rates of depression and loneliness are on the rise, even among people in relationships. People of all ages, but especially young adults, are reporting burnout with today’s dating norms. There are proportionally more single adults than ever before, and our mating patterns are in flux around the globe. In the United States alone, close to 40 percent of the adult population is single. That’s well over 120 million adults, moving in and out of romantic and sexual relationships across the course of a life. There’s almost no other society we know of in the cross-cultural literature where so many adults have been single at a given time. In contemporary Japan and some other industrialized nations, however, there’s evidence that something like this is also happening, suggesting we may be on the shoreline of a global singlehood wave.

Billions of daily swipes yield an average match rate of less than 2 percent. Beneath the possibility dating apps provide to people of all ages is the reality that whether we are 25 or 65, we’re losing something when we shift courtship practices to internet platforms. I’ve heard hundreds of stories about potential matches that fall apart once the senses of smell, taste, feel, and so on are invoked.

People react strongly to an affront to their senses. Two friends of mine, for example, seemed beautifully matched in terms of intelligence, empathy, attractiveness, interests, and goals. After flirting for months, they finally had their first kiss. It did not spark fireworks. In fact, one of them shared with me that the taste of cigarettes on the other was such a turnoff that the drop in his interest, both sexual and romantic, was so precipitous he could practically hear it hit the ground.

This isn’t uncommon. A 2007 study showed that roughly half of college students said they have kissed someone and known immediately that there was no chemistry. Many researchers have speculated that this is because we transmit chemical information in our saliva when kissing, but there’s very little evidence for this argument—in fact, for this to hold true, it would require hormone receptors in our mouth and tongue, which we do not have. “What kissing can tell us is whether a new partner is compatible—if they pick up on our comfort, tempo, and interest and know how to adjust accordingly.

In addition to engaging our senses when assessing potential partners, we also cannot discount the fact that over the course of human history we have always had at least some indicator of the community they might belong to, which is an equally important signifier. In the past, we dated within our communities, and although proximity might have limited our options, it also provided us with knowledge and shared networks. If you lived in a small town, chances are you knew the person you were dating—or you knew people who knew them. You had a shared understanding of the cultural context.

Online, our community is not defined by proximity—or if it is, that community is too wide-ranging to provide the knowledge we might once have gleaned from mutual acquaintances and family history. Online, we usually date outside of our networks; meeting people we would not otherwise encounter is, in many cases, the whole point.

And the geographic range of dating apps further decreases the likelihood of shared community. Even if you limit your search to people within 20 miles, there’s no guarantee that a potential match is even in the same town as you, and if they are, there’s no guarantee that they even live there or that they have lived there long.

A colleague of mine confronted this very issue when a potential date he’d met on an app suggested they meet at a local bar in a small town about 30 miles from where we live in Bloomington. Although he was interested, as an African American man, he’d encountered racism in rural areas in the past and was wary of finding himself in a similar situation. He decided against meeting at the bar because it wasn’t a community he felt confident he could navigate safely. Evolutionarily, having no knowledge of the person we’re about to encounter increases the risk of danger, just as it did for my friend in the current political climate.

The most common story I hear about the search for love in the digital age is that people who meet on apps before meeting in person find their dates to be visually different: taller, shorter, fatter, thinner, lighter, hairier. There are two biological reasons that people tend to misrepresent themselves. First, the data show it’s not that people generally lie about their looks; it’s simply that we try to put our best foot forward. Contrary to what you might think, dating app users don’t tend to lie about easily measurable things like their height; it’s too easy to be caught. Instead, they tend to accentuate the positive: people on the digital mating market are loading photos that present them in the most attractive way, where the lighting is soft and the angle is flattering.

This is understandable, given that the visual region of the brain is closely tied to our mating system. We make a lot of instantaneous decisions about the things we see, and attraction is very much tied to the visual cortex. Dating apps have capitalized on this—it’s why we swipe on the person’s picture, not their list of interests. It’s also why many dating apps are actively developing broader technologies to help users present themselves in the most favorable light.

A person’s looks are usually what pique our initial interest. But successful daters don’t swipe based on looks alone. Even more helpful than photo filters to make you look younger or thinner, I would argue, has been the rise of the virtual dating coach: services that (for a fee) can help a user “optimize” their profile to include more relevant and enticing data for potential partners. Some apps have also experimented with allowing friends to weigh in on your choices, or limiting how many connections you can make per day in order to force users to slow down, focus, and prioritize thoughtful partner choice.

That said, the reason that, despite their sophisticated algorithms, dating apps don’t always deliver what people initially hope for is that they’re simply an insufficient platform for the human nervous system. In the last few years, we’ve seen more dating apps try to incorporate more sensory information for our brains to process by including short clips and recordings of a potential partner’s voice, and even encouraging video dates on the platform. Even so, given that it’s physically impossible to smell or touch another person virtually, even the most sophisticated data apps can only offer a few of the senses for us to evaluate, meaning they provide less “data” than we’d take in from real-world interactions.

Really, these matching technologies are in competition with the incredible human brain, which is the best possible computer for processing attraction and connection; it evolved over millions of years to synthesize endless stimuli and let us know what we want, whether we comprehend it intellectually or not. But we can still learn to use the promise of dating technologies more efficiently and effectively.

One paradox of dating apps is that despite their limitations, research suggests that over the long term they still yield desired results. Though it may take time for users to find desirable matches, studies have shown that those couples who met on dating websites and decide to keep dating enjoy similar stability in their relationships to those who met in person. And a more recent study found that those who met their partners through a dating app, compared to in-person methods, were just as strong in terms of reported relationship quality.

Perhaps the single most powerful thing we can do to manage our own experience and the amount of data we receive when we first meet someone on a dating app is to slow down. Allow your brain to process the information it’s been provided—read the profile carefully, look at the pictures critically, take the time to evaluate the glimpses of personality the person on the other side of the screen has included (wittingly or not). Are they funny? Shy? Do they look like they’re having a good time in their photographs? Do they seem to have interests similar to yours? So much of the online dating experience is oriented toward efficiency. But that means that we often don’t spend enough time interacting with a potential match’s profile, allowing our highly efficient brains to actually process the massive amounts of data available to us.

Online dating is efficient, but like intimacy itself, it’s also work. And the effort we put in impacts the outcomes. Even in a decidedly modern dating world mediated by technology, it is the old-fashioned, analog dedication to building our relationships that actually dictates whether or not they succeed. When we understand that there’s no magic wand to wave to be connected to our “perfect match,” no secret love potion for endless satisfaction, we can allow ourselves to enjoy the uncertainty and the journey of unpacking and fulfilling our desire.

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Adapted from The Intimate Animal by Justin Garcia, PhD. Copyright © 2026 by Justin R. Garcia. Used with permission of Little, Brown Spark, an imprint of Little, Brown and Company. New York, NY. All rights reserved.