Stop Searching for a "Match." Start Thinking in Systems.
After a very long relationship and with old wounds healed, I decided to start dating again.
I remember watching my friends scroll through dating apps and thinking it must be kind of fun. So I gave it a try. The first couple of days were entertaining. Everything looked promising when matches started ticking in.
But then it quickly became a steep hill.
“Hey, how has your day been?” didn’t seem to cut it, so I had to up my game in how I communicated. After some experimenting, I eventually managed to go on dates. Some of them even led to intimacy, but rarely to anything more serious.
At some point, I started realizing that my ten-year relationship had actually been quite an achievement. Many of the women I met had never had a partner for longer than two or three years, at best. That became very clear when I tried to engage in something more serious.
It felt like there was a missing layer. A willingness to sacrifice something of oneself, to go deeper, and to stay when things weren’t perfectly aligned. Everything was kept on a shallow level, just deep enough to be enjoyable, but shallow enough to allow a quick exit if something didn’t match a pre-formulated checklist.
That’s when it really dawned on me. This wasn’t just about chemistry or timing. It was about skill. The skill of actually connecting to another human being in a durable way.
But here is the catch: skills don’t exist in a vacuum. If you put a master craftsman in an environment that rewards speed over quality, their skill eventually degrades. We haven’t just lost the skill; we are inhabiting an environment that systematically punishes it.
That realization led me to start thinking about modern dating from a systemic point of view.
If you haven’t already, you should read my previous post about how we can collapse psychological terms into more fundamental system dynamics:
So if you’re exhausted from using dating apps, you’re not alone.
Around 78% of users report dating app burnout, and the fatigue is even more pronounced in larger cities like Stockholm, NYC, and London.
I’ll explain why this happens and what you should do instead to maximize your chances of finding someone.
Spoiler: dump the dating apps.
The problem
This isn’t isolated to dating. It’s part of a much larger trend.
Entropy levels are rising. The degree of freedom in our lives is higher than ever. We can watch any channel, listen to any music, travel anywhere, and eat whatever we want. Dating apps are just another expression of this mass-abundance dynamic, scaled to relationships.
I’ll be very explicit: this is bad for us as humans.
Our entire existence is about lowering entropy, not raising it. This pattern appears across nature and is also echoed in frontier neuroscience, such as Friston’s Free Energy Principle. The only way to do this is by limiting choices and committing to something irreversible, something you invest yourself deeply in. That’s how great relationships form.
Dating apps do the opposite. They make exit cheap and choice infinite.
Every stable system requires negative feedback and friction. That friction makes the process costly, but it’s also what allows meaningful structures to emerge. This isn’t unique to humans. You can observe it everywhere in nature.
Lab mice with unlimited food become obese and infertile.
Overfed predators lose their hunting skills.
Dating apps supply constant validation, infinite choice, and a near-zero energy cost to exit. Every signal collapses. The nervous system becomes overstimulated by dopamine spikes, and regulation breaks down.
A biological parallel
Modern dating can be understood by looking at the immune system.
Healthy immune systems:
tolerate weak signals
respond proportionally
escalate only when necessary
Autoimmune diseases occur when:
detection thresholds drop
everything feels like a threat
regulation fails
Modern dating shows the same pattern, but relationally:
Minor friction becomes a breakup.
Normal ambiguity becomes a “red flag”.
Emotional discomfort leads to withdrawal.
This is essentially immune overfitting.
Interestingly, well-educated people may be more prone to this under high-optionality conditions. They tend to detect more patterns, update faster, and are better at verbally justifying withdrawal, which can lower tolerance for ambiguity and friction.
How should one date in 2026?
As an engineer, I’ve always been skeptical of viewing the world through a wishful humanistic lens where individuals are granted godlike immunity and unlimited willpower. I don’t see humans that way.
I see us, and the world around us, as systems.
Every stable biological system has:
costly entry
slow feedback
irreversibility (skin in the game)
shared fate
These are the cornerstones I use to derive my remedies.
Another way of looking at it is that you have to stop optimizing for perceived quality, in other words, drop the checklist, and instead optimize for continuity. The first thing you should do, therefore, is to remove dating apps entirely.
The key is to start meeting people in real life, but not in a speed-dating or pub-style setting. Instead, it should happen through longer-term engagement in shared activities. That’s the only way to form bonds and trust in a way that satisfies the principles outlined earlier.
There are plenty of studies supporting this. One of the more interesting ones comes from social psychology, by Festinger et al. in 1950. Studying friendships and romantic bonds in university housing, they found that proximity and repeated exposure were far stronger predictors of connection than shared interests or deliberate choice. It destroys the myth of the "perfect match." These people didn’t bond because they were soulmates; they bonded because they were neighbors. Trust and attraction emerged as a byproduct of continuity, not selection, even when initial attraction was modest.
So the obvious follow-up question becomes where this actually happens.
The answer isn’t a specific activity. It’s a type of environment.
Environments where relational skills compound share a few simple properties. You keep seeing the same people over time. The group is finite rather than constantly rotating. Your behavior is visible and remembered. Crucially, there is a real social cost to bad behavior. In a climbing crew, if you act like a jerk, you lose your belay partner and your standing in the community. On Tinder, if you ghost someone, the cost is zero. Social cost is the glue of trust.
Once you have that filter, the examples become fairly obvious.
It can be long-term skill-based communities, like martial arts dojos, climbing gyms with stable crews, or dance studios with progression over time. These environments force repeated interaction, embodied trust, and regulation under mild stress. You can’t optimize your way through them. You have to be part of it.
It can be craft and mastery spaces, such as ceramics studios, choirs, or small maker collectives. These reward patience rather than charisma. Ego dissolves into process, and people are revealed slowly, over months rather than minutes.
It can also be responsibility-based groups, like volunteering where reliability matters more than presentation. In these settings, trust forms through action. Your presence, or withdrawal, will be noticed.
What matters is not the activity itself, but the structure around it.
Important note
Not all group settings work. Environments with constant churn, low accountability, or an explicit dating intent often recreate the same dynamics as dating apps, just offline. The moment optimization returns, entropy rises again, and you’re essentially back at square one, repeating the same dynamic the apps simulate, just in real life.
Take this one to heart. The key inversion is this: community cannot be treated as a means to an end. When dating becomes the goal, the system collapses. The moment you stop trying to extract outcomes and instead commit to continuity, relationships start to emerge as a byproduct.
That’s not romantic advice.
It’s a systems consequence.