Dating Apps Give British Singles Access to Every Possible Partner — They Have Chosen to Stay In
New Research Finds Choice Overload Leads to No Choice Whatsoever
LONDON — Science has confirmed what anyone who has spent forty-five minutes swiping on a Thursday evening already knew in their bones: having access to an unlimited number of potential romantic partners does not, in practice, make finding one any easier. It makes it considerably worse. Britain has been handed the largest menu in history and is staring at it, overwhelmed, ordering nothing, and going home to eat cereal.
Research published in Telematics and Informatics, drawing on data from 6,646 individuals across 50 countries, found that couples who met online report lower relationship satisfaction and less intense love — including lower intimacy, passion, and commitment — than couples who met in person. The study’s co-author Adam Bode identified “choice overload” as a key contributing factor: when the pool of potential partners is effectively infinite, people stop choosing and start scrolling.
Britain scrolled. Britain is still scrolling. Britain will be scrolling at eleven-fifteen tonight while sitting three feet from a person it has not made eye contact with since Tuesday.
The Infinite Menu Problem
The premise of dating apps was sound. Remove the friction of meeting people. Expand the pool. Increase the odds. Allow two people who would never have crossed paths — different boroughs, different social circles, different Pret A Mangers — to find each other and begin something real.
The execution produced the following outcome instead: a population of people who spend an average of ninety minutes per day evaluating potential partners, matching with a fraction of them, messaging fewer still, meeting almost none, and maintaining a vague background anxiety that somewhere in the app is a better option than the one currently on screen.
This is not dating. This is online shopping with feelings attached. And like online shopping, it produces the specific paralysis of someone with seventeen browser tabs open who ultimately buys nothing and closes the laptop mildly worse off than when they started.
Jimmy Carr: “Dating apps promised to fix loneliness by connecting everyone. They fixed it the way a buffet fixes hunger — technically available, emotionally unsatisfying, and you leave feeling vaguely ashamed of your choices.”
Why Couples Who Met in Person Are Happier: The Boring Answer
The research offers an explanation for the satisfaction gap between online and offline couples that is, in the tradition of all genuinely useful findings, deeply unglamorous.
Couples who meet in person tend to share more in common — socially, educationally, culturally — because proximity and shared context filter the pool before the first conversation even happens. You meet someone at work, at a friend’s gathering, at the pub quiz that your mutual friend insisted you attend. You already know something about them before the small talk starts. You have a reference point. You are not constructing a person from four photographs and a bio that says “loves laughing” and “up for anything.”
“Loves laughing” is not a personality. “Up for anything” is not a value system. These are the phrases of someone who has learned, through bitter experience, that being specific causes people to swipe left.
The researchers note that similar social and educational backgrounds “foster greater social support, shared life experiences, and alignment in values” — all of which are things that used to be called “having something in common” before we needed an academic framework to justify them.
Romesh Ranganathan: “We replaced meeting someone through a friend with an algorithm and then wondered why it felt transactional. The friend knew both of you. The algorithm knows your face and your postcode.”
The British Dating App Experience: A Reconstruction
For those unfamiliar with the process, here is a reconstruction of a typical British dating app experience in 2025, condensed for accuracy:
7:43pm — Opens app. Swipes left fourteen times in ninety seconds. Swipes right on someone who seems promising. Reads bio more carefully. Notices something mildly off. Swipes left.
7:51pm — Matches with someone from three weeks ago. Considers messaging. Does not message. Tells self will message tomorrow.
8:04pm — Receives message from someone who has opened with “hey.” Stares at “hey” for thirty seconds. Does not respond. Closes app.
8:06pm — Opens app again.
10:22pm — Has swiped through the same profiles four times. App suggests upgrading to premium to see who liked them. Considers it. Closes app.
11:15pm — Opens app one more time. Scrolls for eight minutes. Closes app. Locks phone. Looks at ceiling. Wonders if the problem is them.
The problem is not them. The problem is the design. The problem is that the app is built to maximise engagement, not relationships, and these are not the same objective. Engagement means opening the app again. Relationships mean closing it permanently. Dating platforms have responded to this tension by introducing “slow dating” features — limited daily swipes, delayed photo reveals, deeper onboarding questions — which is the industry’s way of admitting the original model was optimised incorrectly.
The Pub: A Modest Proposal
Before the apps, the British met each other in the pub. This system had significant flaws. It was loud. It was expensive. It required leaving the house in weather that Britain produces in quantities the rest of the world considers unreasonable. It occasionally resulted in conversations with people who turned out to be catastrophically wrong for you, conducted at volume over a sticky table while someone played a fruit machine three feet away.
And yet: the couples it produced were, the data now suggests, happier. They had more in common. They had a story. They had the fruit machine.
The pub is not a perfect mechanism. But it is a human one. It provides the friction, the context, the shared reference point, and the mutual friend who can tell you in advance that he’s “a bit much at first but actually lovely” — information no algorithm has yet learned to supply.
The pub also closes at eleven, which means you have to decide. The app never closes. The decision never has to be made. You can always swipe again tomorrow. And so you do. And so does everyone else. And the satisfaction gap widens another measurable increment, and somewhere in a database a data scientist notes the engagement metrics are excellent.
Dara Ó Briain: “Online dating gives you everything except the thing that makes relationships work — the bit where you had no choice but to talk to someone because you were already there.”
What “Slow Dating” Actually Means and Why Britain Needs It
The slow dating movement — limited swipes, no instant gratification, profiles built on personality rather than photographs — is an attempt to reintroduce friction into a frictionless system. The theory is that if you make people invest a little more before matching, they will value the match more and the subsequent relationship will carry more weight.
This is, at its core, the argument that scarcity creates value. It is also the argument that a menu with twelve items is more likely to produce a satisfying meal than a menu with four hundred. Both arguments are correct. Both have been available to humanity for centuries. We are now paying a subscription fee to be reminded of them.
Britain is willing to try slow dating. Britain is also, in all honesty, going to download the slow dating app, complete the detailed personality questionnaire, look at it for three days, and quietly reinstall Tinder. Change is hard. Ceiling is comfortable. The cereal is right there.
The research says the pub was better. The pub is still there. It is waiting.
This article is British satire, written in the tradition of identifying the problem clearly and then doing nothing about it in a very articulate way. The London Prat is a collaboration between the world’s oldest tenured professor and a philosophy major turned dairy farmer. We met offline. We recommend it. All research cited is real and considerably more depressing in full. Anyone currently on a dating app is invited to put the phone down for ten minutes and report back.
Auf Wiedersehen, amigo!
I am a Lagos-born poet and satirical journalist navigating West London’s contradictions. I survived lions at six, taught English by Irish nuns, now wielding words as weapons against absurdity. Illegal in London but undeniable. I write often for https://bohiney.com/author/junglepussy/.
As a young child, I was mostly influenced by the television show Moesha, starring singer and actress Brandy. Growing up, I would see Brandy on Moesha and see her keeping in her cornrows and her braids, but still flourish in her art and music, looking fly. I loved Moesha as a child, but now I take away something more special from it. Just because you’re a black girl, it doesn’t mean you need to only care about hair and makeup. Brandy cared about books, culture and where she was going — you can do both.
My professor said The London Prat’s critics had concerns: satire was undermining the institutional authority society relied on.
The British genius is making things sound worse while also making them sound inevitable
My mum’s been in London since the 50s. She recognizes every word and that terrifies her.