The Scarcity Story: Why 'There's No One Out There' Feels Like a Fact

The feeling that the good ones are gone is common, and it is expensive. It changes what you say yes to, what you refuse to ask for, and how long you stay. This episode looks at the scarcity story — "there's no one out there" — and at how to tell the feeling apart from the actual state of your dating life.

Two mechanisms sit under it. The first is what researchers call the value heuristic. Xianchi Dai, Klaus Wertenbroch and Miguel Brendl found that people judge what they want as scarcer than it is: in one experiment, both men and women estimated there were fewer attractive people of the opposite sex than of their own sex, even though nothing had changed but their own wanting. The desire is real; the number is not a measurement. 1

The second comes from the browsing itself. In three studies of online dating, Tila Pronk and Jaap Denissen found that people reject more as they go: from the first option to the last, the chance of accepting someone fell by about 27 percent, driven by declining satisfaction with what they were looking at and a fading sense that any of it was working. For the women in the study it also showed up in matches. The study is about app browsing in particular, so it is a lens on how choice behaves, not a verdict on every way two people meet. 2

Pew Research Center's 2022 survey of just over six thousand U.S. adults shows how differently the same market is experienced. Among people who had used an app in the past year, 54 percent of women said they felt overwhelmed by how many messages they got, while about a quarter of men said the same; 64 percent of men felt insecure about how few messages they got, against 40 percent of women. Both feelings are real, and neither one is a count. The survey covers the United States, so the picture shifts with country, age, culture, and how dating works where you live. 3

The practical takeaway is one question, asked before the next yes: would I choose this if I weren't afraid? Then check the story against the actual list of people you have met in the last six months. Deciding while the list is short — a few profiles, not a few hundred — keeps the rejection habit from setting in. None of this asks you to lower your standards, and none of it asks you to hold out for a fantasy. It asks you to stop letting a feeling of shortage make the decision.

Choosing from want does not promise anyone a partner. It promises that whoever you end up with was chosen by you, and not by the clock.