Are We All Relation-shopping Without Realizing It?

Every time I go out to dinner, I read reviews of the restaurant I'm about to go to. I check the menu, look at the photos, and ask myself whether it's what I'm looking for. In the balance between an experience to be had and a service that is paid for, what wins most of the time is the desire to make sure it's worth it. It is a method that, in today's world, seems to be extended to almost every area of our lives, including dating.Maybe at first we tried using dating apps while trying to maintain a certain spontaneity, and now we have found ourselves approaching profiles with the same meticulous obsession we reserve for Trip Advisor or beauty product reviews. The principle is the same: trying in every possible way to know whether the experience, the product—or in the realm of relationships, the person—will be worth our time, our effort, our money. In the field of dating, this phenomenon has been given a name: it is called relation-shopping.What Is Relation-shopping?Relation-shopping means the tendency to see potential partners as if they were products for sale. Dating apps and sites, because of the way they are structured, tend to encourage this attitude. You are faced with an extremely wide range of options, you have to make selections based on specific criteria (age, interests, type of job, willingness to commit, and so on), and at the same time you try to self-promote with marketing tactics. Then, even after the match, the doubt remains that you could do better.Many compared their profile to a promotional tool for bringing out the “best version of themselves.”The study Relationshopping: Investigating the market metaphor in online dating, which predates the dating-app boom that took place during the pandemic, analyzed the extent to which dating-site users used consumerist metaphors linked to the free market when talking about their experience. Indeed, many compared their profile to a promotional tool for bringing out the “best version of themselves,” while others emphasized the importance of strategically highlighting certain characteristics of their own and carefully studying other people's profiles to understand who is in front of them and avoid being deceived.Add Cosmopolitan as a preferred source in your Google search results.Use your Google account to add this to your settings.One participant in the study said he had gone out with a woman who turned out to be much older than she appeared from her profile, and that he had therefore sworn never to go out again with someone who had only one photo. Another participant spoke about how important it is to cross-check multiple pieces of information to get a clearer picture before putting oneself out there. “These strategies of profile analysis and triangulation among different sources of information are techniques for assessing others' "market value"”, the researchers observe, “similar to the way savvy consumers learn to treat marketing and advertising campaigns with skepticism.”Being faced with profiles to study and select makes it harder to focus on human interaction and it is easier to focus on the promise of the perfect partner.Being faced with profiles to study and select makes it harder to focus on human interaction and it is easier to focus on the promise of the perfect partner. The risk, however, is thinking that it is possible to reduce a person to a list of characteristics that can satisfy us. “The decision-making process based on the qualities of potential partners was found to be very different from that of offline encounters, in which individuals often get a more holistic impression of the person, usually taking into account non-quantifiable aspects of personality (such as energy level) and interaction (such as chemistry).In certain cases, this analytical approach can be useful for filtering and getting to know people with whom you already think you might have some degree of affinity, and in this sense it can even prove reassuring. Some of the respondents, however, reported misgivings and, in fact, relation-shopping may even play a role in the recent crisis of dating apps which are losing ground. In a turbo-capitalist world where everyone wants to sell us something, love can still prove to be a free zone where we do not feel reduced to more or less desirable commodities or to consumers with little purchasing power and many responsibilities. You are constantly evaluating, rather than meeting someone without knowing anything about them.“Online dating is a great start, but it can also become a bit impersonal” points out Max, a man from Los Angeles who took part in the study, “It all becomes much more clinical, and quantitative aspects are already taken into account: age, profession, and everything else. You are constantly evaluating, rather than meeting someone without knowing anything about them.”And in the end, what I think when I am at a restaurant with a 4.5 rating on Google applies: if I know the dishes by heart before I have eaten them, if I have already decided what to order based on the photos, if I have studied the location and read that the staff are kind, it is very difficult for anything to still manage to surprise me.