“Dating sites know that their product typically reveals to users that they don’t really know what they want in a partner, even when they can try to specify it with Sahara-level granularity. The sites’ wager is that these frustrating experiences, combined with a sense that there is nonetheless no “convenient” alternative to them, will lead to a willingness to instead trust what the sites’ algorithms tell us about who we should be interested in, based on the behavior it has recorded and the questions we’ve volunteered or refused to answer.

This is how, at the level of the most basic yearning for human companionship, consumerism can potentially fuse with a neoliberalist ethos, eliciting a flexible consumer who can desire whatever’s required and accept that yearning as authentic. If that means hundreds of first dates, then so be it.”