Paul Eastwick

So, yeah, some of them are filtering for quote unquote good things, but they're not like idiosyncratically appealing to the user.

Yeah, it feels so intuitive that we should click with people when we have more rather than fewer things in common.

But I think what we underappreciate is that people, especially when they're having face-to-face conversations, we largely start with the assumption that we would like these conversations to go well.

We would like them to be pleasant rather than unpleasant.

We would like them to be smooth.

And what we're often trying to do, and this is even true on awkward first dates, is we're trying to find points of connection.

Now, it can be challenging if you don't find anything to talk about with somebody else.

But many times the things that we can find to chat about are very small.

They're not actually all that, like, central to who we are as a person.

Now, if we're thinking about then what cascades out into a long-term relationship, okay, fine.

Like you found a way to talk about, you know, French cinema together, like bully for you, but that's not going to predict whether you're going to fit well together in the long run.

But the thing is, there are so many things out there that people can build around as they're forming a relationship.

And this is why we often like to think of the whole compatibility process.

It's something that people are constructing over time rather than something that they're finding by swiping the right people on the apps.

But I think really the problem here is that it's so much choice that we feel like we have to do something to narrow it down to something that's going to be manageable.

But this does have downstream consequences, because in any environment where people feel like they have too much choice, there's just too many options for them to consider, they're a little bit less likely to commit to any one option.

This is very much a shopping mentality that I'm describing.

And in fact, these studies were originally conducted

at supermarkets.

And to the extent that we've turned dating into something approximating a supermarket, well, we shouldn't be surprised that now people are treating it this way.