The Dating Game and Nash Equilibrium: Why Most Don’t Find the Perfect Match 

Love, Logic, and the Inevitable Bad Match: 

Dating, as simple as it sounds, should be for people to meet, like each other, and form a perfect match. Reality, however, is rather messy—it is governed by strategic decision making and inefficiencies similar to those found in ‘game theory’. 

Dating at Eton is one-sided and doomed from the start. It’s like a group project, where half of the team is missing, and the other half is just you. It’s about more than emotions: economic forces shape people’s dating decisions in ways they do not even realize. 

This essay argues that dating is structurally broken—not because people are irrational, but because rational decision-making actually leads to unsatisfactory yet stable outcomes. Through concepts such as Nash’s Equilibrium, the Prisoner’s Dilemma, and market failures, it will be explained that most people do not end up happy with their perfect match—not by accident, but due in large part to economics. 

Dating is a Strategic Game: 

Economists like to picture life as a series of strategic choices, and dating is no different. The more complex it gets, the greater the chances for error. In essence dating is a multi-player game in which individuals make decisions based on available information, personal preferences, and perceived competition. 

Environments like Eton, where the dating market is structurally restrained, make ‘strategic decision-making’ even more important. The process resembles an optimisation problem: limited supply, high demand, and the only trading floor is a ‘chaperoned social’. The problem is not just individual choice—it’s that everyone is fighting over the same scarce resources. 

In theory, dating should follow the basic laws of supply and demand. People ought to matchmake smoothly according to their mutual preferences as pairs. 

The issue, though, is that people don’t just do what they want: they play a strategic game, attempting to optimize their decisions while accounting for what everyone else is doing. This is also the reason why the Nash Equilibrium provides suboptimal, but stable matches, which will be seen in due course.  

The Nash Equilibrium of Love—Why It’s Not Perfect: 

John Nash’s Nash Equilibrium describes a situation in which none of the parties can improve their position by acting alone. In dating, this means that though a relationship might not be ideal for both partners, neither of them has any incentive to leave if available alternatives are worse. This is the core issue—people remain in unfulfilling relationships because the perceived risk of searching for something better outweighs the potential reward. 

The Utility Equation of Dating 

Ui = aiP + biC – diS 

• Ui = Your overall happiness (utility) in a relationship 
• P = Your partner’s attractiveness 
• C = How well you get along (shared values, humour, interests, etc.) 
• S = The effort required to find someone new (search cost) 
• ai, bi, di​ = How much these factors matter to you individually 

Even if one is super-compatible (C is high), but not so physically attractive (P is low), they might convince themselves that appearance is secondary—only to later realize it plays a larger role than expected. No matter what, even if you can’t really choose on either side, it is kind of repugnant to just give up and quit. So, people end up where they are simply because breaking up means joining the dating-app nightmare again, dry conversations, and being ‘ghosted’ from behind. 

To put it bluntly, this equation makes it clear that dating is bent against finding the perfect match. People do not stay together because they have discovered true love. They do so just because breaking up and starting over again is something far too contrary to bother with. Nash Equilibrium doesn’t necessarily lead to happiness—it leads to stable relationships, even if they aren’t ideal. 

Dating’s Prisoner’s Dilemma: 

Dating is also like the Prisoner’s Dilemma, a classic problem in game theory where two players must decide whether to cooperate with each other or act in their own self-interest. The dilemma arises because while mutual cooperation leads to the best collective outcome, each player has an incentive to betray the other to avoid the worst individual result—often leading both to worse outcomes than if they had trusted each other. The predicament in dating can be summed up as follows: Hold out for the perfect match, and you might find yourself alone forever. Just settle down and bag a partner—even if it’s not your first-choice one.  

If everyone waits for the absolute best deal that they can get, then nobody pairs off and everybody loses. If everyone moves too early, many people end up in relationships that are not what they actually want simply because they were afraid of keeping on waiting. The result? A self-fulfilling cycle where people settle out of fear rather than genuine compatibility. 

The Market Failure of Love: 

Dating is the process by which people pair off; the free market is not merely a metaphor for matchmaking. In fact, dating itself suffers from market failures. A common example is Akerlof’s “Market for Lemons” model, best explained by adverse selection occurs when one side of the market has more information than the other, leading to a decline in overall quality—just as in dating, where the best matches are taken early, leaving behind a pool perceived as lower quality. 

The Market for Lemons graph (Fig. 2) shows how high-quality options disappear over time, leaving a weaker market. At first, the best matches are available, just as panel A of Fig. 2 shows a market where high-quality options (Sh​) still exist. However, as people form relationships, these top choices leave, and the dating pool shrinks. In panel B the best options disappear, leaving only lower-quality choices (Sl). Even if there are still great people left, many assume that everyone still single is a “lemon”, making dating harder. 

As the market seems worse and worse to more people, they will get stuck in relationships earlier than they should just from the illusion of having a choice. Once high-quality options have vanished, the market never recovers. Contrary to popular belief,  the common phrase “all the good ones are taken” isn’t just for sour grapes—it is exactly what economics is predicting here. 

Dating should be a matter of picking the best match, but, economic pressures push many people into settling for what feels safe. Instead of seeking the best match, people panic, making what they believe to be mistakes with those around them—and this in turn worsens things for everyone else. Fig. 2 shows graphically that dating is quite inefficient 

Game theory and market failures help explain why dating seldom leads to ‘optimal’ pairings. This is not a failing of individuals—it is a systemic failing in how dating works. Dating is just an economic inefficiency, now turbocharged by dating app algorithms that promise infinite choice but mostly deliver recycled profiles.