Somewhere in the last decade, the average person went from meeting a handful of potential partners a year to swiping past hundreds in a weekend. The theory was that more options would mean better matches. Instead, most people report the opposite: dating feels harder, less satisfying, and strangely, more exhausting than it did with fewer choices.
There’s a name for what’s actually happening, and it isn’t burnout.
The research
In 2010, psychologists Amy Lenton and Marco Francesconi studied how people behave at speed-dating events when the pool of potential partners grows. They found that as options increased, daters didn’t get better at identifying who they actually connected with. They shifted toward judging people on easily comparable traits: height, income bracket, job title. Traits that take longer to assess, like humor, warmth, or emotional intelligence, got crowded out entirely.
Around the same period, psychologist Barry Schwartz distinguished between “maximizers,” who keep searching for the objectively best option, and “satisficers,” who choose something that meets their standard and stop looking. Maximizers report lower satisfaction with their choices even when the choices are objectively better, because the search itself resets their baseline for what counts as good enough.
Put these together and you get what I call Threshold Creep. The more options a person is exposed to, the higher their bar climbs for what disqualifies someone, not because their standards got smarter, but because volume trains the brain to keep sorting instead of settling.
What Threshold Creep looks like in practice
A client tells me someone was kind, funny, and genuinely interested in her, but she couldn’t stop thinking about his height being half an inch under her stated cutoff. Another passed on a second date because the man’s job title sounded less impressive than the one before it, despite the first date going better than any he’d had in a year.
Neither of them is shallow. Their thresholds crept up from exposure to volume, the same way a person who tastes fifty wines in an afternoon stops being able to tell a good one from a great one. The palate doesn’t get more refined. It gets exhausted, and exhaustion masquerades as high standards.
How to work against it
Cap your exposure. Twelve years of matching people has shown me that clients who go on fewer, more intentional dates report higher satisfaction than clients who maximize volume, even when the volume produces more matches on paper.
Notice when a disqualifier is about the person or about your fatigue. Ask whether the thing that bothered you would have registered at all after a normal, well-rested week, or whether it only became a dealbreaker because you’d been sorting people all month.
Give traits that take time to reveal themselves, actual time. Humour, loyalty, and emotional steadiness rarely show up in a first conversation. If your threshold requires proof of these things in an hour, you’ve built a filter no real person can pass.
The apps didn’t make you harder to please. They made you forget what pleasing even feels like.
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