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Disposable Desire: The Economics of Objectification in Dating Apps

  • Writer: Vicenta Wheatley
    Vicenta Wheatley
  • May 20
  • 8 min read

Source: Image by freepik
Source: Image by freepik

What happens when desire becomes disposable, and intimacy is no longer cultivated, but consumed? In a culture increasingly shaped by convenience, dating apps have taken something as complex and vulnerable as intimacy and made it instantly accessible - and just as instantly dismissible. But in a system where people are sorted, evaluated, and discarded with the flick of a thumb, we’re left to grapple with some confronting questions: what is the cost - economic, psychological, ethical - of objectifying each other in the pursuit of love? Of rendering human desire disposable? Those questions don’t yield easy answers, because for all the talk of superficiality, these platforms often run with striking economic efficiency. They are marketplaces in the most literal sense: users compete for scarce attention, send costly signals in the form of curated bios and polished photos, and make decisions guided by limited information and bounded rationality. Like any market, dating apps can come with inefficiencies and distortions - and users feel them viscerally. Women often report being overwhelmed by a flood of unsolicited messages; men, on the other hand, frequently feel invisible in the endless scroll of profiles.  These aren’t just dating complaints - they’re symptoms of a deeply imperfect market with power imbalances, asymmetric information, and emotional externalities we rarely name, let alone price. And yet, these platforms can work. For all their flaws, distortions, and dilemmas, sometimes they succeed in facilitating real connection - in fact, around 20% of adults under 30 now report meeting their partner on a dating app (Vogels et al., 2023), and I’m one of them. I met my  boyfriend on the app Hinge - on the very first date I went on. But while my experience was surprisingly simple, even lucky, I’m aware it’s far from typical, and that many users may remain caught in a system that trades human attention and emotional vulnerability. And when intimacy becomes something to be browsed, not built, we’re left with a market that confuses volume for value, forgetting the fact that connection, at its core, can’t be standardised, scaled, or sold. 



Swipe Right to Signal - The Commodification of the Self

On dating apps, attraction isn’t just expressed, it’s marketed. The moment a user selects their best photos, crafts a bio, and tweaks their ‘interests’, they’ve entered an informal auction of desirability. As Erving Goffman once argued in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, we all perform our identities in social spaces, but dating apps transform that stage into a marketplace, where the self isn’t just shown, but sold. In economic terms, it’s a textbook case of asymmetric information: each user knows more about themselves than the person swiping on them, so we resort to imperfect proxies to estimate compatibility. This drives the incentive to craft an idealised version of the self, even if it means sacrificing authenticity along the way.  In fact, one study found that 81% of users admit to stretching the truth on their dating profile (Hancock et al., n.d), not necessarily out of malice, but out of a quiet understanding: attention is scarce, and the best-advertised selves tend to win. But the stakes aren’t just economic - they’re personal, psychological, and ethical. Research has consistently shown that online environments promote self-objectification, especially among women. A meta analysis (Grabe et al., 2008) on objectification theory shows that online environments heighten body surveillance and anxiety. Dating apps aren’t passive platforms in this regard - they amplify these dynamics. And these pressures play out differently across gender lines. Pew Research reports that 54% of women on dating apps say they feel overwhelmed by the sheer volume of messages - many of which are unwanted or explicit. In contrast, 64% of men report feeling overlooked, even invisible. Younger women in particular, are disproportionately exposed to harmful behaviour: 56% of those under 50 have received unsolicited explicit content, and 11% have faced threats of physical harm. These aren’t just mismatched user experiences, but reflect an attention economy with sharp asymmetries and unpriced emotional costs. But as users adapt to the logic of this market, it’s worth asking whether we’re still choosing each other freely, or whether we’re just becoming more efficient at performing what we think others want. And if desire is shaped by these dynamics of performance and pressure, what happens when intimacy itself begins to collapse under the twin forces of scarcity and saturation? 



Scarcity of Connection and Saturation of Choices - The Market Failure of Human Intimacy

In theory, more choice should empower us. But dating apps create a peculiar paradox in this regard — one defined not by genuine abundance, but by simultaneous scarcity and saturation. The problem here isn’t a lack of options, but the overload of them. Studies in behavioural economics reveal that an excess of options can diminish satisfaction and impair decision-making. Schwartz’s Paradox of Choice illustrates how too much abundance breeds paralysis, not freedom, leaving individuals less content with their decisions, and newer research , like by Martijn van Galen, has extended this to digital dating, finding that users were significantly less satisfied with their eventual matches, often questioning whether they could’ve “done better”. This is because the constant exposure of alternative ‘options’  creates a kind of psychological scarcity: a persistent sense that each decision comes at the cost of missing out on something better.  Faced with this cognitive burden, many users adopt the logic of strategic optimisation - what economists call utility maximisation — trying to secure the best emotional return with limited time, energy, and attention. In the dating app environment, this might mean swiping with calibrated filters, crafting carefully curated profiles, or timing messages for maximum response — all in an effort to increase perceived value and minimise regret. But in such an oversaturated market, even this strategy begins to fray. Data visualisations comparing Tinder like- distribution to U.S income inequality - such as a Lorenz curve or Pareto chart - reveal that attention on these platforms is distributed even more unequally than wealth in America.


Source: (Tinder Experiments II, 2015)
Source: (Tinder Experiments II, 2015)

A  study found that Tinder’s Gini coefficient - a measure of inequality based on a scale between 0 and 1, where 0 corresponds with perfect equality and 1 corresponds with perfect inequality  - was 0.58, significantly higher than the Gini coefficient for  U.S income of 0.41. This makes the Tinder economy more unequal than 98.8% of countries in the world, ranking only below South Africa and Namibia. 


Source: Graph created by author using income inequality data from the World Bank (2023). Tinder Gini coefficient adapted from Tinder Experiments II (2015)
Source: Graph created by author using income inequality data from the World Bank (2023). Tinder Gini coefficient adapted from Tinder Experiments II (2015)

A small percentage of users receive the majority of likes, while the vast majority are left little to none. When every swipe carries the illusion of a better match just beyond reach, emotional investment feels riskier, and connection begins to resemble a gamble more than a gift. However, scarcity resurfaces not only in the search for quality matches, but also in the emotional availability users can realistically offer — a finite resource stretched thin across too many shallow interactions. The result is a kind of emotional inflation, where expressions of interest become routine, their perceived value declines, and meaningful engagement becomes harder to distinguish from performative interaction. The outcome is a market failure of intimacy, where abundance fosters indecision and the scarcity of meaningful connections persists. As users struggle in this, they often find themselves not only navigating options, but performing effort - chatting, curating, and signalling interest - just to stay visible. This labour, while deeply personal, is also quietly profitable, fuelling an economy that profits not from connection, but from the performance of it. 



Desire as a Revenue Stream - Emotional labor and the Price of Connection

In the ecosystem of online dating, emotional labour (the energy invested in crafting profiles, initiating and maintaining conversations) is an often overlooked form of effort that people put in, not just in their interactions with others, but also as part of how the dating apps themselves operate and make money. Sociologist Arlie Hochschild called this kind of effort emotional labour: the work we do to manage our feelings and the feelings of others, often to fit into systems that expect it. While she originally wrote about jobs like customer service, the idea fits dating apps too. Users are constantly performing versions of themselves to stay visible and competitive, not because it guarantees connection, but because it keeps them in the game. Rather than engineering connections directly, dating apps are structured to optimise user activity - a subtle but important distinction. Features like Super Likes, Boosts, and premium memberships are designed to enhance visibility and perceived competitiveness within the ‘marketplace’, offering users marginal advantages in exchange for payment. But these tools don’t guarantee connection; instead, they commodify the possibility of it, by incentivising users to spend more time and emotional energy on the app, thereby increasing platform engagement, and ultimately, revenue. Investor reports and monetisation models reveal that dating apps derive most of their value not necessarily from successful matches, but from sustained user engagement - with revenue primarily coming from in-app purchases and subscriptions rather than long-term relationship outcomes. This system subtly commodifies emotional labour, transforming emotional effort into a kind of unpaid, invisible work that sustains user engagement - and thus profitability. But this constant effort can wear people down. A 2020 study published by BMC Psychology found that excessive dating app use was significantly correlated with emotional exhaustion, lowered self-esteem, and higher rates of burnout, especially among users who reported pressure to continually perform or present idealised versions of themselves. Similarly, a Pew Research Centre survey reported that 45% of online daters under 30 felt “overwhelmed” by the process, and that 30% felt “burned out”. The economic system underpinning these apps doesn't necessarily objectify users maliciously - but structurally, it benefits when people are seen more as profiles to engage with than people to understand. It’s here that emotional labour becomes not just a cost for the individual, but perhaps a symptom of a deeper philosophical shift - one in which it becomes normal to treat intimacy as a transaction. 



What Are We Worth?

Dating apps have undoubtedly opened new doors for connection, making it easier for many people to meet others beyond their immediate social circles. For some - like me - they provide a valuable space to explore relationships that might not have otherwise formed. Yet beneath these benefits lies a system that often encourages viewing ourselves and others as commodities, with  profiles to optimise and interactions to monetise. Philosopher Immanuel Kant reminds us that human beings should never be treated merely as a means to an end. But in dating apps, users are routinely positioned as a means to profit, to engagement metrics, and to someone else’s idea of desirability.  The real cost of disposable desire may be our capacity to see each other - and ourselves - as more than a profile, as beings to be known, not browsed.



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