What if dating apps are nothing but a recommendation system?

What happens when we optimize for attraction instead of connection.

Exactly six years ago, I was trekking through the Annapurna Circuit in Nepal. The air was thin and crisp, the kind that made every breath feel earned. The schedule was relentless. Most days, I had to wake up at 5 a.m. and start walking before the sun had even warmed the trails.

One afternoon, I met an interracial married couple at one of the lodges, and I connected with the woman immediately. She was Canadian-HongKongese, and as someone who grew up in Hong Kong, I felt an instant familiarity. We started trekking together and talking about home in the middle of the Himalayas, mostly about how much we missed the noise of a dim sum restaurant and the comfort of siu mai and har gow.

Both of us found the trek physically challenging. She told me she was doing it for her husband, who had been through military training. This whole adventure was really his idea.

They met on an app called Plenty of Fish. One thing about her stood out to me: she majored in computer science.

She very much focused entirely on her career until she turned 28. And when she finally decided she wanted to find a partner, she turned to what she knew best — technology.

The process involved A/B testing and competitive analysis. She created two different profiles to test performance, tweaking photos, bios, even messaging styles. She even made a fake male account to see what her “competitors” were doing and adjusted accordingly.

At the time, I was active on Bumble, not so much on Tinder. I thought I understood dating apps, but her approach actually surprised me. She had found her husband, the same man who patiently carried her 10kg backpack when the uphill got tough. It was true love, with shared weight and shared struggles.

This isn’t the only story I know of tech-savvy friends using dating apps to their advantage.

I know a guy who used to work at Amazon in the US. As an Asian man, he told me frankly that he often felt like he couldn’t outcompete his white counterparts in the dating market. There were times he even went the extra mile, literally driving from Seattle to Vancouver just for a date.

As smart as he is, he turned it into an experiment. He did 100 swipes in each of the cities he was considering moving to and ranked them by match rate. He chose Shanghai in the end. The other cities at the top of the list just weren’t career-friendly enough.

Another friend of mine, a woman who majored in mathematics and now works at a top asset management firm, used to go on 10-minute coffee dates right in her office building. “Getting a coffee” literally meant standing in line together to order one, and that was the date.

So, is dating just a math problem to solve? A KPI to hit?

The Tinder economy has turned dating into a free market. And the result? The top 10% of “most attractive” men are getting most of the matches while others struggle in silence. As women become more selective, many single men are feeling lonelier than ever.

In a dating economy, we’re constantly being assessed, not on who we are, but on how we perform in the eyes of potential matches. Apps like Tinder used to rely on what’s known as an “Elo score” , a ranking system originally used in chess to measure skill. Until 2019, Tinder assigned users an invisible score based on how often others swiped right on them. If your score was high, you were more likely to be shown to other high-score users. You were kept “in your league”. Hinge, on the other hand, uses Gale-Shapley algorithm, a solution for the stable marriage problem. It pairs users with potential matches they’re most likely to prefer, based on mutual interest and past swiping behavior.

As dating apps continue to fall short of creating meaningful connections, a wave of new platforms has emerged: Thursday to solve dating burnout, Feeld to create space for open-minded and non-traditional connections, and Breeze, which skips the endless chatting altogether and pushes people straight to real-life dates.

What’s dangerous about dating apps is that swiping isn’t a cure for loneliness. It can distract us just enough to avoid doing the real work, to heal old wounds, to sit with discomfort, to actually grow.

“I wanted to find a blonde, blue-eyed Brit to marry. I’m thinking I’ll settle for a blonde, blue-eyed American,” someone told me casually, the same person who once said he’d pay me a lot of money if I could find him a wife.

I’m not sure the real problem here is something that a recommendation system can solve.