We all play the numbers game in online dating

07 Mar 2025

I frequently hear the sentiment that women have it easier than men in online dating. This is because at a high level we most commonly see that women receive all the messages and get their pick, while men toil away, taking their shots one after another and frequently getting no response.

Let’s go deeper

I feel the need to rebut this sentiment. Everyone in online dating is playing a numbers game. Receiving messages is still a numbers game of sifting through and evaluating whether people feel like a good fit to proceed.

Perhaps that still sounds better. That is because the ego stroke of being contacted appeals to us all, while we overlook the real challenges of being on the receiving end.

The Paradox of Choice

I think there is a lot of unseen labour on women’s parts to sift through messages and try to evaluate who to move forward with in conversation. The ‘Paradox of Choice’ is a real psychological phenomenon - the more options we are faced with, the harder it can become to make any decision, if we can even make one at all. Studies have shown this behaviour time and time again. One experiment involves giving people a coupon for a discount on jam at a grocery store and people being sent to an aisle with with a small set of jam choices, maybe 6, versus an aisle with 30. Results showed that fewer people bought the jam at all when overwhelmed with choice.

This jam is very volatile

Let’s take this analogy back to reality though. We aren’t picking just any jam in a grocery store, we are evaluating partners. The stakes feel even higher. This jam can be highly aggressive and prone to sometimes behave poorly or throw slurs when not selected. This is starting to sound like the shopping experience from a fever dream.

My point is simply that there’s a lot of labour still happening on women’s sides. Getting all the messages isn’t just this cool and breezy ego boost with no downsides or challenges. Between the amount of messages and the proneness of some of them to be volatile it can leave one in an analysis paralysis where no choices are made.

One more trans problem

There’s also another twist on this problem that may be truer for trans women than cis women - we often have no clue who is into us. On most dating sites men rarely honestly list in their profile whether they are open to dating trans women. It makes it very hard in a sea of men to act first and not come to feel alienated if time after time they ignore or tell you they aren’t into trans women. Sometimes I really wish I could be the one messaging first, but whenever I have tried the probability to contact someone who is flat out not into trans women is very high. Meanwhile many trans-attracted men live in the shadows with profiles that have no face pictures and limited self descriptions. They aren’t even searchable by filtering parameters.

There’s really not an easy way for trans women to find men that are into us proactively. We are often faced with the waiting game. Simply sitting and hoping for messages from the right kinds of men that demonstrate enough care, honesty and safety for us to think it worth taking a chance to reply.