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You swipe left. You swipe right. You send clever messages into the void. You show up to coffee dates with people who looked better in their photos and told better stories in their bios. Six months later, you’re still doing the same dance. But here’s the twist: staying single might be the most rational decision you’ve ever made.
Gary Becker, the economist who won a Nobel Prize for applying rational choice theory to human behavior, would have had a field day with Tinder. In the 1970s, when he suggested that people approach marriage like any other market transaction, his colleagues thought he’d lost his mind. Who reduces romance to spreadsheets? Who thinks about love in terms of supply and demand?
Turns out, everyone. We just don’t like admitting it.
The Marriage Market Isn’t Just a Metaphor According to Gary Becker
Becker’s insight was simple but radical. People search for partners the same way they search for jobs or houses. You have preferences. You have constraints. You gather information, compare options, and make choices that maximize your expected happiness. Romance involves feelings, sure, but it also involves decisions.
The marriage market operates with the same forces as any other market. There’s supply and demand. There are search costs. There’s imperfect information. There’s competition. And like any market, it can be efficient or inefficient, depending on how well it matches people who would benefit from being together.
This framework explains something your friends probably won’t tell you: being single isn’t necessarily a failure. Sometimes it’s proof that the system is working exactly as it should.
The Paradox of Infinite Choice
Your grandparents probably met within a five mile radius of where they grew up. Their dating pool consisted of maybe a hundred age appropriate people. They picked someone, got married, and that was that. Limited options meant limited anguish.
You, on the other hand, can theoretically date anyone in your city. Dating apps let you browse thousands of profiles. Social media lets you reconnect with old flames or slide into the DMs of attractive strangers. The market has expanded beyond anything previous generations could imagine.
Economics tells us that more choice should make us better off. But there’s a catch. Search costs.
Every hour you spend evaluating potential partners is an hour you’re not spending actually being in a relationship. Every date with someone just okay is a date you’re not having with someone potentially great. The larger your pool of options, the more expensive it becomes to search through them all.
Think of it like shopping for a apartment. When you have three options, you can carefully evaluate each one. When you have three hundred, you develop decision fatigue. You start using shortcuts. You reject candidates for trivial reasons. You wonder if someone better is just one more swipe away.
This is the paradox Becker identified. More options increase your chances of finding a truly compatible partner. But they also increase the cost and difficulty of finding them. At some point, the search costs outweigh the expected benefits of continuing to look. Rationally, you should either settle for someone good enough or stop searching altogether.
Many people are choosing the latter. Not because they can’t find anyone, but because the search itself has become exhausting and expensive.
The Economics of “Good Enough”
Here’s where it gets counterintuitive. In a world of limited options, you settle. In a world of unlimited options, you also settle. But you settle in different ways.
Your grandparents settled for their high school sweetheart because they didn’t have access to anyone better. You settle for staying single because you have access to too many people and can’t process them all.
Economists call this the satisficing principle. You don’t optimize. You satisfice. You find something satisfactory and sufficient, then stop looking. The difference is that in the modern dating market, being single has become the satisficing option for many people.
Why? Because the benefits of a relationship have to exceed not just the benefits of being single, but also the opportunity cost of all the other potential relationships you’re giving up.
Imagine you meet someone who’s a seven out of ten. In your grandparents’ world, that was a great match. In your world, you wonder about all the eights and nines you haven’t met yet. The relationship has to clear a higher bar because your outside options are theoretically better.
The irony is that those theoretical options rarely materialize. You reject the seven, keep searching, and end up alone. Not because sevens are bad, but because the possibility of an eight or nine makes the seven feel insufficient.
The Hidden Costs of Staying Single
Becker’s framework forces us to think about what we’re actually trading off. Being in a relationship has costs. You lose autonomy. You compromise on how you spend your time and money. You deal with someone else’s family and friends and quirks. You risk heartbreak.
But being single has costs too. We just think about them less clearly.
There’s the obvious stuff. You don’t have a built in companion for events. You don’t split rent. You don’t have someone to share household tasks or emotional labor. You potentially miss out on having children or building a family.
Then there are the less obvious costs. Loneliness compounds over time. Your married friends gradually have less time for you. The dating pool shrinks as you age. The uncertainty about whether you’ll ever find someone creates background anxiety.
Economists talk about revealed preferences. What people do matters more than what they say. If you’re staying single, you’re revealing that the costs of relationships currently exceed the costs of being alone. This could be a rational calculation based on your actual options. Or it could be a miscalculation based on inflated expectations.
The question is whether you’re making this choice with accurate information.
The Quality Distribution Problem
Here’s a puzzle. If dating apps make it easier to meet people, why do so many people complain that dating has gotten harder?
Becker would point to information asymmetry and adverse selection. These sound like jargon, but the concepts are simple.
Information asymmetry means you know more about yourself than potential partners know about you, and vice versa. On dating apps, everyone presents their best self. Professional photos. Witty bios. Carefully curated stories. You don’t see the bad breath or the annoying laugh or the fact that they’re still hung up on their ex.
This creates adverse selection. The people who look best on paper are often the ones who’ve optimized their presentation precisely because they need to compensate for something. The genuinely great catches often aren’t trying as hard because they don’t need to.
Think about it like used cars. The sellers know which cars are lemons. The buyers don’t. So the market fills up with lemons because the owners of good cars don’t need to sell them as desperately. Similarly, the people who are constantly on dating apps, messaging everyone, always available for dates? They might be there for a reason.
This doesn’t mean everyone on dating apps is defective. It means the signaling is broken. You can’t easily distinguish between high quality and low quality partners based on profiles and text messages. So you have to meet lots of people in person, which brings us back to search costs.
The result is a market flooded with options that look good but often disappoint. This makes people simultaneously more picky and more pessimistic. You raise your standards because you feel like you have options. But you also lose faith in the process because most options turn out poorly.
The Opportunity Cost of Commitment
Let’s talk about why successful, attractive people often stay single longer than others. It seems paradoxical. They should have the easiest time finding partners. Instead, they’re often the most selective and the most likely to remain unattached.
Becker’s framework explains this perfectly. The opportunity cost of commitment is higher for people with better options.
If you’re moderately attractive with a decent job and okay social skills, the difference between your best possible partner and your average available partner isn’t that large. Settling doesn’t cost you much. You might as well pick someone and see how it goes.
But if you’re very attractive with a great career and excellent social skills, the gap between your best possible match and your average option is enormous. Settling costs you significantly more. Every relationship with someone merely good prevents you from finding someone truly exceptional.
This is why conventionally successful people often have such specific requirements. They’re not being unreasonably picky. They’re correctly identifying that their opportunity cost of a mediocre relationship is very high.
The problem is that everyone else in their league is doing the same calculation. So you get a standoff. High value people hold out for other high value people, but all the other high value people are also holding out. The market clears more slowly at the top.
When Being Picky Becomes Irrational
There’s a flip side to this. At some point, waiting for perfection becomes irrational. You’re making an error about probabilities.
Say you’re thirty five and you want children. You meet someone who’s good but not perfect. An eight out of ten. Your ideal partner would be a nine or ten. Should you keep looking?
It depends on your estimate of finding that nine or ten and how long it will take. If you think you have a 50% chance of meeting your perfect person in the next year, holding out makes sense. If you think you have a 10% chance of meeting them in the next five years, holding out becomes risky.
Most people overestimate their odds. They anchor on the best relationship they’ve ever had or ever seen, and they assume they can find that again or better. They discount the role of luck and timing. They ignore the fact that they themselves might not be as desirable as they think.
This is where Becker’s rational actor model breaks down a bit. People aren’t perfectly rational. They make systematic errors in probability estimation. They fall for sunk cost fallacies. They let their emotions override their long term interests.
But even acknowledging these irrationalities, the broader point holds. Many people stay single because they’re rationally responding to a market that gives them too much choice and too little good information.
The Efficiency of Modern Matchmaking
Dating apps should, in theory, make the market more efficient. They reduce search costs by letting you browse thousands of profiles from your couch. They reduce information costs through messaging before meeting. They expand your pool beyond your immediate social circle.
And yet, most people find them frustrating and exhausting. Why?
Because they solve the wrong problem. The hard part of dating isn’t finding people who meet your basic criteria. It’s finding people you have chemistry with. It’s finding people whose neuroses complement your neuroses. It’s finding people who want the same things at the same time as you.
These are things you can’t determine from a profile or even a first date. You need time and shared experiences. You need to see someone in different contexts. You need to see how they handle stress and conflict and boredom.
Traditional dating, where you met people through friends or work or hobbies, was actually better at this. The people you met had already been pre vetted by your social circle. You’d often known them casually before dating them. You had context.
Dating apps strip away all that context. You’re meeting strangers and trying to assess compatibility in an hour over coffee. It’s like trying to hire someone after a single phone screen. Sometimes you get lucky. Often you don’t.
The Marriage Market Versus the Dating Market
Here’s something Becker understood that many people miss. The marriage market and the dating market are different animals.
In the marriage market, people are looking for a long term partner. They care about stability, compatibility, shared values. They’re willing to compromise on some things to get others. The market clears when two people decide they’re each other’s best available option for building a life together.
But much of modern dating happens in a different market. People are looking for something more ambiguous. Companionship, sure. Physical intimacy, yes. But not necessarily commitment. Not yet, anyway.
This creates a coordination problem. Some people are shopping for a spouse. Others are shopping for a situationship. Everyone’s using the same apps and going on the same dates, but they’re operating in different markets with different rules.
You can be a great catch in the marriage market but struggle in the dating market, and vice versa. The person who’d make a wonderful spouse might not be exciting enough for casual dating. The person who’s thrilling to date might be terrible spouse material.
The result is a lot of mismatches and miscommunications. You meet someone looking for one thing, they’re looking for another, and everyone ends up disappointed.
The Rational Single Person
So what’s the takeaway? Is staying single a mistake or a rational choice?
Becker would say it depends entirely on your specific situation. If the costs of searching exceed the expected benefits of finding someone better than your current best option, staying single is rational. If the benefits of a relationship with your available options don’t exceed the benefits of remaining independent, staying single is rational.
The mistake is thinking that being single means you’ve failed or that being in a relationship means you’ve succeeded. Both are just different equilibria in a market making tradeoffs.
Some people are single because they’re legitimately difficult to match. They have unusual preferences or personality traits that make compatibility rare. For them, holding out makes sense. The search costs are high, but the cost of a bad match would be higher.
Others are single because they’ve miscalibrated. They’re overestimating their options or underestimating the costs of continued searching. For them, adjusting expectations might lead to better outcomes.
Still others are single because they correctly understand that the benefits of independence currently outweigh the benefits of the relationships available to them. This is neither sad nor a mistake. It’s a preference being expressed in a market.
The key is being honest about which category you’re in. Are you single because you’re rationally holding out for a rare but attainable match? Or are you single because you’re chasing an illusion of infinite choice?
The Wisdom in the Spreadsheet
Here’s the final irony. Thinking about dating economically sounds cold and calculated. Love is supposed to be spontaneous, not strategic. Romance is supposed to be about feelings, not cost benefit analyses.
But Becker wasn’t saying feelings don’t matter. He was saying that feelings operate within constraints. You can fall madly in love with someone, but if they live on another continent and neither of you can move, the relationship won’t work. You can have amazing chemistry with someone, but if they want kids and you don’t, you’re headed for heartbreak.
Acknowledging the economic reality of dating doesn’t make you less romantic. It makes you more realistic. It helps you understand why you’re making the choices you’re making. It helps you distinguish between preferences you should stick to and standards you should reconsider.
And sometimes, it helps you understand that being single isn’t a bug. It’s a feature. You’re not failing at dating. You’re succeeding at making rational decisions in an irrational market.
The person for you might be out there. But they might also not be. And either way, you’re doing the math, whether you realize it or not. Might as well do it honestly.
