“Romance is dead.”
The phrase often floats through conversations about dating. It serves as a constant reminder of a bygone era when love was perceived to be more authentic and less transactional. However, is romance truly dead? If romance appears to be fading, it may not be because humans have lost the desire for connection, but rather because of changes in the structure of the dating market. Dating today operates much like an economy: the dating economy. It is governed by the two key principles – supply and demand. So let us analyse the dating market through an economic lens to understand this change.
Online dating 101: Everything is not as it seems
Like any market, the dating market is governed by supply and demand. Yet unlike goods with fixed prices, people negotiate their value through presentation. Here there lies a key problem: individuals have incentives to sell themselves at a higher value. On dating apps, this often takes the form of exaggeration, or even blatant deception, where individuals choose to edit their pictures or outright lie about their height, age, or interests. A Nationwide survey in the UK revealed that at least 36% of singles admitted to telling “white lies” on dating apps. However, the actual numbers are likely higher, as this only accounts for those who have openly confessed to it.
This misrepresentation creates market failure due to the presence of asymmetric information. Asymmetric information is when one individual/party has more information than others in the market. In this instance, just as in a used-car market where the sellers know more about the car’s flaws than buyers, daters cannot fully assess the authenticity of potential partners. This results in disappointment when expectations clash with reality and decreased trust in the market as a whole.
The Commodification of Love and Hookup Culture
With the rise of dating apps and social media, people are being treated less like humans and more like commodities. Scrolling through dating apps is like browsing through a catalogue or an online shop. It’s essentially packaging and advertising. You scroll, see someone attractive, swipe right, and keep going. Individuals “consume” profiles by swiping, evaluating goods based largely on visual appeal before deciding to engage further. This commodification of individuals strips away nuance, reducing unique personalities to easily marketable traits.
Usually, colleges and workplaces act as self-contained dating pools and restrict choice. However, with the rise in dating apps, the market has become larger. From an economic perspective, this resembles the logic of consumer markets where buyers face an overwhelming selection of goods, which could lead to the paradox of choice. Paradoxically, an abundance of choices can make it harder to feel satisfied. When products become abundant, consumers develop short attention spans, searching for instant gratification rather than long-term investment. In dating, this translates into fleeting connections and reluctance to settle/commit.
Hookup culture thrives in this environment because it aligns with the logic of commodification. If people are products, then the incentive turns into one of quick consumption rather than long-term investment.
One swipe. One message. One night.
For many, this represents a rational choice in a saturated market: when the cost of commitment is high and the quality of goods (here the individuals) uncertain, short-term, low-investment “transactions” offer immediate payoff. However, just like fast fashion cheapens clothing by prioritizing speed over durability, hookup culture cheapens intimacy by emphasizing quantity over quality. Over time, this reinforces a constant cycle of instant gratification, against which genuine romance struggles to compete.
The commodification of individuals in the dating world has become so normalised that it is used as a marketing technique. Recently, in promoting the movieThe Materialists, A24 staged a stunt at the New York Stock Exchange where people’s dating “value” was displayed as if it were a financial asset. Each individual was reduced to numbers, where their age, income, height, and a fictional desirability score were projected on a trading board that fluctuated like actual stock prices. The audience was then invited to decide whether they would “invest” in the person. It was satire, of course, but it reflects the deeper issues lurking in our society. In today’s dating world, individuals are often treated less like partners and more like assets whose “worth” rises and falls depending on the “market”.
How some experiences shape everyone’s assumptions
Another economic principle that explains the crisis of modern dating is adverse selection, popularized by economist George Akerlof in his study of the “market for lemons.” Now to understand this better, let us assume the example of the used car market. Here, buyers cannot easily tell the difference between high-quality cars (“peaches”) and defective ones (“lemons”). Because of this uncertainty, buyers hesitate to pay a premium, prompting sellers of good cars to withdraw, leaving mostly lemons behind. Dating works in a similar way: people cannot always distinguish genuine, high-quality partners from manipulative or unserious ones, so they hesitate to pay the price of commitment. When too many “lemons” circulate, trust in the market decreases, and those seeking serious connections often exit the market, leaving more “lemons” in the market and further deteriorating its overall quality.
In this instance, people who encounter low-quality partners repeatedly may generalize negative experiences across the entire market, concluding that “all men are trash” or “all women are manipulative.” Such cynicism spreads, creating distrust where even sincere efforts are reckoned with suspicion. Over time, this spreads into the large-scale idea of “Romance being dead”.
So is Romance Really Dead?
Considering these factors, declaring romance “dead” might be misleading. Love itself is not gone. What looks like the “death of romance” today may simply be a transitional phase of evolving cultural expectations and new technologies. The dating market, despite its inefficiencies and failures, will continue to persist, and human beings will always seek companionship and love. This guarantees that the market will endure regardless of new technology or a shift in norms. In this sense, we can be assured that romance is not dead, it is only transforming. Whether it’s for the better or worse, only time will tell.