Spend enough time online, and you could reasonably conclude that dating is currently a failed social experiment. Boyfriends are embarrassing. Everyone cheats. Nobody wants commitment. Dating apps are hell. That totally innocuous thing your date did is actually one of 47 red flags you should have noticed immediately. And here's someone recounting the worst Hinge date you've ever heard while casually doing her makeup. Of course, complaining about dating is hardly new. And plenty of today's discourse is genuinely valuable. Women are talking more openly about unequal emotional labor, relationship safety, shitty behavior they won't tolerate anymore, and the fact that having a partner should probably make your life better, not worse. But according to Suzanne Wallach, LMFT, licensed marriage and family therapist and founder of SoCal DBT in Los Angeles, “There’s a difference between saying ‘I’m no longer willing to accept a relationship that makes my life worse or makes me unhappy,’ and believing that relationships with men inherently make women’s lives worse.” Somewhere between that conversation, the rise of heteropessimism, and the whole “having a boyfriend is embarrassing” discourse, dating has started to feel...pretty fucking bleak. And what's different now isn't that we're pessimistic about dating. It's that an algorithm can feed us an effectively endless stream of other people's pessimism. Watch one nightmare-date TikTok and suddenly you've got another. Then a cheating story. Then a red-flag list. Before long, your feed can start to look like fairly convincing evidence that dating really is as terrible as everyone says it is. So what happens when you see those messages over and over? Can they make you more cynical, suspicious, or likely to expect the worst before you've even met someone? And, because “brain chemistry” is a phrase we love throwing around on the internet, can all this pessimism actually do something to our brains? Well...kind of. Just not exactly in the way you might think. Your Algorithm Is Not a Representative Sample of Dating Okay, so, you probably know that engaging with something online doesn't necessarily mean you agree with it. Maybe you watched the entire six-minute dating horror story because it gave can’t-look-away-from-the-car-crash energy. Maybe you sent the cheating video to your group chat because the audacity needed to be studied. Maybe you opened the comments because 4,000 strangers were fighting and, sorry, you wanted to know who won. To you, that's entertainment. To the algorithm, that's engagement. And negative content can be especially good at getting it. Noelle Perdue, digital intimacy historian for Feeld, points out that posts generating strong reactions tend to rack up the comments and shares platforms reward. So the more you engage with nightmare dates, cheating stories, and declarations that dating is hopeless, the more of them you may see. Suddenly, your feed starts to make it feel like this is what dating is like now. Except, as Kati Morton, LMFT, author and host of the Ask Kati Anything podcast, puts it, “Your feed isn’t necessarily showing you reality; it’s showing you what keeps you watching.” There's also a pretty obvious selection problem: Normal dating experiences make shitty content. Nobody is rushing to TikTok to announce, I went on a perfectly pleasant date with a perfectly pleasant person, nothing particularly noteworthy happened, and then we both went home. The nightmare date? We're all seated. So if your FYP is overwhelmingly horrific, that doesn't mean dating is overwhelmingly horrific. It might just mean TikTok has figured out you fucking love a disaster. Guilty. So, Is Dating Pessimism Actually Changing Our Brain Chemistry? Well, not exactly. “I probably wouldn’t call it ‘changing our brain chemistry,’” Morton says. “That phrase gets used as a catch-all for almost everything psychological, and it makes the process sound much simpler than it is.” What repeated exposure can do, Morton explains, is shape our expectations, attention, and associations. If we're constantly consuming content that connects dating with betrayal, disappointment, or danger, those ideas can become easier to access when we're actually dating. “The more available those stories are in our minds, the easier it can be to assume they’re common, or even inevitable,” she says. And once you've started expecting dating to go badly, confirmation bias can kick in. If you've absorbed the idea that nobody wants commitment anymore, someone taking a little longer than usual to text back can quickly become See? I fucking knew it. None of which means shitty dating experiences are all in your head. People ghost. People cheat. People lie. Sometimes that weird behavior really is a red flag. But there's a difference between recognizing something that's actually wrong and approaching every interaction already looking for proof that something will be wrong. As Morton puts it, “we can start approaching dating almost like we’re looking for danger.” Can Expecting Dating to Suck Actually Make Dating Suck? Unfortunately, those expectations don't necessarily stay inside your phone. If you've spent your commute watching people get ghosted, cheated on, manipulated, and lied to, you might arrive at your date more guarded, less vulnerable, and already looking for the moment this person proves your algorithm right. That's where dating pessimism can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. “If I expect you to disappoint me, I’ll behave differently around you and become hyper-vigilant about finding behaviors that confirm my expectation, making me more guarded,” Wallach says. And there's another person on the receiving end of that guardedness. Maybe they pull away. Maybe there isn't a second date. Suddenly, the outcome looks a whole lot like confirmation: See? Dating fucking sucks. The deeply inconvenient reality is that connecting with another person requires accepting the possibility that they could disappoint you. “Dating requires some distress tolerance,” Wallach says. “You can’t completely shield yourself from being hurt or disappointed by people and simultaneously be open to connecting with new people...it’s just not possible.” And this can get bigger than any one shitty date. Wallach points out that culture influences behavior, and behavior reinforces culture. If people approach dating assuming no one can be trusted, everyone is disposable, and vulnerability is dangerous, they may invest less, disclose less, and leave faster. That doesn't mean your feed is single-handedly destroying modern romance. But it could create a feedback loop in which dating pessimism shapes how we date, and our experiences reinforce the pessimism. So pay attention to what your algo is actually doing to you. If you open TikTok feeling relatively okay about dating and emerge an hour later convinced everyone cheats and love is dead, that's useful information. “You don’t want your algorithm to have more influence over you than your actual life experiences,” Wallach says. After all, your FYP knows what keeps you scrolling. It doesn't know what your dating life is actually like.
