Often, two perspectives are met defending the idea of over-abundance of choice; “lots of options is a good thing, how else will you find the best match?” and “i want all these options. why can’t you be grateful?” and while yes, there is some merit in both of these ideas, the reason why this many options on dating apps isn’t a good thing actually ties the two thought processes together - i’ll loop back to this at the end.

So, to start off, I do wanna say that I do wanna tackle this from a more personal pov as well as a general broad one. I’m a bisexual man who doesn’t have his dating apps open to men - the reason for this is simple; whenever I do the men outnumber the women on these apps to a crazy extent (we’re talking 1 woman for every 7-8 men) and the amount of likes/matches you get can get overwhelming. Given that discovery of my abundance of choice, i began feeling overwhelmed and needed to filter these guys down, in other words, I got MUCH pickier with men than I did with women… until I eventually removed my apps for male access because all this pickiness resulted in is constant dismissal and that’s just not fun.

Now, I also began thinking about this from a woman’s pov, if she’s talking to 30-50 men on the apps at the same time, she has to find a way to filter all of them - meaning she has to pick the most immediately appealing man out of all these options (even if he isn’t a good option in the long run), this process is both exhausting and overwhelming and I do sympathize. This is one big reason why I think women don’t use apps nearly as much as men do, actually.

And as a man, you have this added pressure to pretty much be as appealing as possible to keep your match interested.

Now, back to my first paragraph to wrap things up. Is it validating? 100% - but it’s also exhausting and grueling because you have to start filtering people out in all these ways. This also could very well mean that from a purely relationship and compatibility pov, you might not be getting what fits you best because by filtering so many options out, you’re going for the most appealing which means the better long term choice may be left ignored.

And I know how both sides feel, cause i’ve been on both sides. I’m not a great texter, so the pressure to be the pursuer is daunting and when i’m being pursued, i have to be constantly intrigued because if i have so many choices, im looking for any reason to disqualify an option - so it feels like a lose-lose both ways.

This is just another way of showing that dating apps are fundamentally flawed by design. The vast majority of people are unhappy using them and they hate them but they feel like there are no other options - get out there and find ways to socialize, there are a bunch (which i’m not gonna get into cause that’s a whole tangent), i think we would al be much happier and frankly all this internet gender war ideological bs would start to slowly be forgotten.