We’re all holding onto something we’re sure we can’t give up on, but research shows that letting go can boost our happiness a lot more than we might think.
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Posted October 22, 2026 Reviewed by Gary Drevitch
In my last post, I explored why dating apps leave many people exhausted, pointing to a mismatch between our evolved minds and endless choice. Here, I look at who feels that exhaustion most, who the apps still serve well, why run clubs (or any club, really) may feel different, and what an exhausted dater can do.
Dating exhaustion is not the same for everyone. Take, for example, the results from a 2022 Pew Research Center survey of 6,034 people in the USA. Of those who had used a dating site or app in the past year, about 54% of women felt overwhelmed by the number of messages they received, compared with 25% of men, while 64% of men felt insecure about receiving too few messages, compared with 40% of women. Among everyone who had ever dated online, women were also less likely than men to describe their experiences as positive (48% versus 57%).
These differences fit an evolutionary view. One of the core tenets of the field is that the sex investing more in offspring becomes a limiting resource, courted by the other sex and choosier about whom it accepts (Trivers, 1972); in humans, this logic has been used to explain why women tend to be the choosier sex. An app that gives many women a flood of interest and many men a trickle may simply magnify an asymmetry already present.
There is a competitive side, too. Much of my own research concerns intrasexual competition, meaning competition with members of one’s own sex for mates. In one early study, I found that women rated other women’s faces as less attractive when they were near peak fertility, while their ratings of men’s faces did not change (Fisher, 2004). Apps make the competition feel ever-present, given that every profile you admire is presumably being admired by others as well. I would predict that the sense of a crowded field adds to the exhaustion, but this idea needs proper testing.
None of these findings means the apps are failing everyone. By 2017, meeting online had become the most common way heterosexual couples in the USA met, accounting for an estimated 39% of couples (Rosenfeld et al., 2019). In Pew’s 2022 survey, about one in 10 partnered adults had met their partner online, rising to about one in five among those under 30 and about one in four among lesbian, gay, and bisexual adults. LGB users were also more likely than straight users to describe their experiences as positive (61% versus 53%). For people whose local pool of potential partners is small, a wider net may be helpful.
I recently spent a month in Chile as part of a partnership-building grant. While I was there, everyone in the university labs I interacted with seemed to have taken up running. Many group members were running long distances or even running marathons. Truthfully, I was surprised. They were all using Strava, the fitness-tracking app, which reported a 59% increase in running clubs on its platform in 2024. In Strava’s own survey of more than 5,000 active people, more than half of Gen Z respondents said social connection was their main reason for joining a fitness group, and four times as many respondents preferred to meet new people through a fitness group than at a bar. My experiences in Chile certainly point to this change.
But why are we turning to fitness groups when we want to meet new people? A group or club shrinks the pool of new people to a number of faces you can actually come to know, and it provides repeated exposure, which tends to build liking. In a classic study, Moreland and Beach (1992) had four women of similar appearance attend a large college course 0, 5, 10, or 15 times without interacting with anyone. At the end of the term, students reported greater attraction to the women who had attended more often and saw them as more similar to themselves. The attraction measured was not specifically romantic, and those women never spoke to anyone, whereas a run club involves real conversation, but the study shows how much familiarity alone can do.
Shared activities also reveal what a profile cannot, such as how someone treats other people, copes with a hard hill, or makes a group laugh. Joel and colleagues’ work suggests that compatibility tends to show itself only once people meet. Whether run clubs actually produce more lasting relationships than apps do is, as yet, unknown, but I suspect the answer is “yes.”
What, then, should an exhausted dater do? I must note that none of the following has been tested per se, but each stems from the research I have described here and in my last post.
References
Fisher, M. L. (2004). Female intrasexual competition decreases female facial attractiveness. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 271(Suppl. 5), 283–285. doi.org/10.1098/rsbl.2004.0160
Joel, S., Eastwick, P. W., & Finkel, E. J. (2017). Is romantic desire predictable? Machine learning applied to initial romantic attraction. Psychological Science, 28(10), 1478–1489. doi.org/10.1177/0956797617714580
Moreland, R. L., & Beach, S. R. (1992). Exposure effects in the classroom: The development of affinity among students. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 28, 255–276.
Rosenfeld, M. J., Thomas, R. J., & Hausen, S. (2019). Disintermediating your friends: How online dating in the United States displaces other ways of meeting. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 116(36), 17753–17758. doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1908630116
Trivers, R. L. (1972). Parental investment and sexual selection. In B. Campbell (Ed.), Sexual selection and the descent of man, 1871–1971. Aldine.
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Maryanne L. Fisher, Ph.D., is a Full Professor and award-winning teacher in the Department of Psychology at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax and an Affiliate Faculty member at the Kinsey Institute in Bloomington, Indiana.
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We’re all holding onto something we’re sure we can’t give up on, but research shows that letting go can boost our happiness a lot more than we might think.
Self Tests are all about you. Are you outgoing or introverted? Are you a narcissist? Does perfectionism hold you back? Find out the answers to these questions and more with Psychology Today.
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