The Evolutionary Reason Why Tinder is Terrible for Men
Eggs and sperm have different strategies for evolutionary success

Dating apps can tell us a lot about human nature
If you spend enough time on Tinder you may notice some peculiar patterns and asymmetries in how likes and matches are distributed.
I started noticing these during a period of my life spent downloading and deleting the apps.
This has little to do with the algorithms (although there are some clear patterns in the distribution of profiles you are more likely to swipe right on). This does, however, have everything to do with evolution and its effects on male and female sexual preferences.
During this period of dating app use, I voiced my suspicions about these asymmetries to a friend who used the apps a lot (more than me, of course).
He told me that he once went on a date with a girl on the same night they matched, and on the date they got to the topic of Tinder and she showed him the number of likes she’d received.
Over 10,000!
He, however, was only just creeping over 100.
He’s a good-looking guy, and sure, she was pretty, but 10,000?!
She did have Tinder Gold, which showed her to international users as well, but the value of looking at people far away from you is presumably low enough to not account for 9,900 likes.
Why weren’t their numbers comparable?
Birds and Bees and Evolutionary Strategies
Forget about Tinder for a moment, and just think about the evolutionary pressures on males and females, or more specifically on organisms with sperm and those with eggs.
Sperm carriers and egg carriers ultimately want the same thing:
To get their genes into the next generation.
The Shotgun Method
So, if getting your genes into the next generation is your goal, the first strategy you might try is to just make as many offspring as possible.
In one sense, this is part of the male strategy:
Average ejaculation volumes are between 1.5–5mL, and average sperm counts are between 15–200 million per mL. That’s 22.5 million sperm at a minimum and 1 billion at a maximum, in every ejaculation.
Even taking a very conservative estimate, every ejaculation can be expected to contain at least 10 million sperm.
This is very much a shotgun method, if you’ll excuse the imagery.
(Here, and for the rest of the article, I’m only considering the heterosexual case).
Taken to the logical extreme in a very simplified version of the reality of sexual selection, a male could theoretically impregnate the same number of females in a day as the number of times he could ejaculate.
Even if he only had sex once a month for 60 years (which is about how long males are realistically fertile), so long as that was with a different female every month, and he successfully impregnated her, he could father 720 children. But he could do that in a year if he was doing it twice a day.
Indeed, there is at lease one case of a sperm donors fathering hundreds of children, and some estimates puts the direct offspring of Genghis Khan at at least 1000, though that number carries a considerable amount of historical uncertainty.
Sex For Generations
Either way, the point of such examples is that there does not seem to be much of a limit on the male sexual strategy once certain barriers are removed, and that the success of such a strategy suggests that the genes that lead to it should be fairly prevalent in the population.
That’s because genes that give themselves a better chance of being passed onto the next generation are the ones that survive — that’s what “selection” means in the evolutionary context.
That means that genes that lead to behaviour that increases it’s chances of being passed into the next generation are more likely to be found in the current population.
We can expect then that much of our behaviour is a result of genes that improved their chances of being passed into the next generation.
This is why we want sex.
Wanting sex makes us have sex and so increases the chances that we pass on the “want sex” genes to the next generation.
Hence, from an evolutionary perspective, a male with the desire to have sex multiple times a day with different females, and who successfully impregnates those females, has a much higher chance of passing on the genes responsible for that sex drive than the male who has sex once a week with the same female, so we would expect the gene for that sex drive to be more prevalent.
In other terms, we would expect most men to want a lot of sex and to want to have it with a lot of different people.
The Case of Eggs
Despite rare cases like prolific sperm donors and the Genghis Khans of the world, for the average male, successfully impregnating a different female every other day is an imaginary situation because certain obvious, and important, barriers exist.
Even an infinite number of sperm is of little use if there’s no egg around for it to fertilise, not to mention no females willing to provide the sperm with access to their eggs.
Indeed, females have developed their own strategies to taper the strategies of males, and more importantly to improve their own evolutionary chances.
Egg count, menstrual cycles, fertility windows and the whole pregnancy thing makes it very difficult for females to adopt the extreme male strategy in order to get their genes along on the generational train.
The best a female can do, from an evolutionary perspective, is to have each and every one of her eggs turn into offspring.
But it takes on average about 12 years for females to get to an age where they start releasing those eggs, and then they only do it once a month, and only for about 40 years.
Also, once impregnated, the value of being subsequently impregnated drops to zero. They need to wait 9 months and then presumably take a bit of a break before getting on with the next one. That means they can only reasonably expect to produce about 1 offspring per year.
So, at most, a female could have 40 children in her lifetime.
But that is extremely unlikely, not to mention extremely costly.
Burdens of Joy
It’s not like once the baby is out it’s ready to start hunting for a job and gathering the groceries. Someone has to look after it for about 16 years (or about 35 for some).
While getting genes into the next generation is the aim of the game, the costs of getting genes there make practical strategies towards that endeavour rather cautious.
This is especially true for females.
Because males have so many sperm and females so few eggs, the burden of child-rearing has evolutionarily fallen onto females (this is still the case regardless of how much societal norms have reinforced this).
This is because gestation happens inside the female and takes a long time, leaving plenty of time for the male to go off frolicking and potentially never return.
Such male callousness is slightly attenuated by the fact that the male has an interest in ensuring the safety of the female and the offspring, but females aren’t entirely defenceless and threats aren’t always present.
Also, the child being carried is the female’s only current and best chance of getting genes passed on, so it’s within the female’s genetic interests to keep the child alive regardless of what the male does.
Hence, there is always time for males to go out and hedge their evolutionary bets, so to speak.
That might sound strangely familiar.
What’s this got to do with Tinder?
All of this is to say that males, on average, are more naturally motivated to seek out a high quantity of short-term, varied interactions over a few long-term, dedicated interactions because the payoff of the former is greater than the latter in the evolutionary game.
Of course, they don’t know that this motivation is because of the evolutionary success of sex-drive genes, but that’s the trick of evolution: it works without you needing to think about it, and works even better when you don’t think about it.
What this all means for Tinder and dating apps and why it makes them suboptimal for men, is that:
Men are more motivated than women to use the app in the first place.
Which means there will be more men on there than women.
They will also be more active on there than women.
They will also swipe right more often than women.
So women don’t have to do much swiping to get a match.
And if they’ve paid to be able to see who has liked them, they can just scroll through and pick ones they like and be guaranteed to match.
Indeed, that was the case for the girl my friend went on a date with.
She didn’t swipe.
She just paid for the version that showed her who swiped right on her.
On the night they went for a date, she just scrolled through the list of 10,000 people and found my friend somewhere near the top.
That Can’t Be Good For Anybody
That’s not to say that it’s all rainbows and puppy dogs for women on the apps.
The same evolutionary drivers that brought 10,000 easy pickings to that girl’s Tinder are also those that motivate a lot of aggressive, abusive and exploitative behaviour.
Genghis Khan didn’t have so many offspring because he was a gentleman with a good Tinder profile.
But if you’re trying to figure out why dating apps suck (or work in your favour), it’s in part because of the strategies we evolved in order to get our genes into the next generation through sex.
If you’re struggling to find a date, maybe try putting that on your profile.
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