So a lot of people here (myself included) think that the dating market could be seen as some sort of iterated prisoner's dilemma. If you're not familiar with mathematical philosophy, that's not a problem, I'll explain it briefly: The idea is that there are two parties who have to interact with one another and who have the same options to act on the given situation. They can either cooperate or cheat on one another, which leads to four possible outcomes. The original thought experiment consists of two prisoners that commited a crime together and now face separate interrogation. They can keep quiet or snitch on their partner. If both choose to snitch (which would be the rational thing to do in that setting), that leads to the worst outcome for both. If only one snitches and the other one keeps quiet, it's the worst individual outcome for the one who kept quiet. If they both keep quiet, it will be the best outcome for both overall. But to do that, the two prisoners would have to trust each other (which they don't do in the original experiment). You can read more on that on Wikipedia.

Why is this situation somewhat similar to a date? Well, the dating market consists of encounters between two people who actually have the same options: They can either cooperate and thus trust that the other party has good intentions. Or they can choose to cheat and lie about themselves in order to get what they want from the other person without investing anything themselves. One example would be a man who actually doesn't want to have a relationship, but tries to deceive a woman about that in order to get sex. The woman gives it to him, and then he leaves without establishing an emotional connection, meaning he won't invest anything the woman wanted to get out of that encounter. Of course genders and motives are completely interchangable for that thought experiment, it could be a woman who wants to have financial stability and thus dates a man she's actually not interested in, it could be a man who actually just wants to have a child without being interested in having a wife actually, it could be anyone having a date with ulterior motives that you don't know about. These things happen and therefore many people are somewhat distrustful when it comes to dating (looking at you, TRP, incel community, MGTOW, FDS and so on).

The question is: Is that a useful strategy to avoid being played? Well, findings of game theory suggest that it's not, at least not necessarily. It depends heavily on the structure of the social group where these repeated encounters happen. For example, if the notion is true that most men are trash and most probably will cheat when it comes to dating (in the game theory sense, not in the sense of infidelity), then it is a wise strategy to not cooperate in the beginning until they've really shown their intention to cooperate themselves. If the respective society consists mostly of well-intentioned people, too much mistrust will lead to erosion of trust for anyone, as people learn that their cooperation oftentimes isn't met. So it's crucial not only to talk about dating strategies as an isolated 1-on-1-game, but to also take a look at the average motives of the people that are part of the dating market.

Some time ago, I've found a really helpful page in understanding the concept of the prisoner's dilemma which let's you simulate societies by calculating what happens when a given number of people with a given mindset have several iterations of encounters in that sense. I strongly advise you to go through the whole tutorial if you want to try it, just to get a grasp of what's going on in the simulation and how to tweak different parameters to influence the outcome. If you're already familiar with mathematical philosophy, you can skip to part 7, which is basically the sandbox simulator. You can find it:

HERE

Some personal thoughts: I already stated it somewhere else, but the strategy I apply myself and that works best for me is double-tit-for-tat, meaning that I won't cheat on someone on the first and second iteration. Only if I get cheated twice, I will start cheating on that person myself. Why wait for the second encounter to check of someone's a cheater when they already cheated in the first place? Well, people make mistakes - and many times you can't really know if someone misbehaved towards you on purpose or by accident. If it was by accident, they won't do it again, which is why I think they don't have to be sanctioned for that. In my view, that worked extraordinarily fine for me.

I am really curious of what you make of the simulation and what conclusions you draw for the dating market! Have fun!