'Too Many Choices' Is Rarely the Problem

Business writer Suzanne Lucas drew a good analogy between hiring and dating in a recent column, which she kicked off with a case of a woman choosing 72 of 8,000 dating app matches for a first date, all of whom she quickly ruled out.

Being an HR consultant, Lucas draws the obvious analogy to hiring and notes that both endeavors have changed with the adoption of technology that has made it easier to unearth more options than in the past.

The parallel continues with singles and potential employers often feeling overwhelmed with "bad choices:"

This woman whose dating app history was dissected on Reddit prescreened 8,000 profiles and dated 72, and didn't have a second date with anyone. The hiring manager gets 1,000 resumes and rejects them all, confident there will be another 1,000 tomorrow.

And so, like our dating queen, you just keep swiping through candidates. Too many choices seem to end in loneliness. The 80-year-old ladies whose nails I painted knew they had to choose among the local men, and they did, and they lived good lives.

The difference is, being super picky in dating makes a lot more sense than being super picky in hiring. And even this level of selectiveness in dating is unnecessary. Were all 72 men really so awful that even one didn't warrant a second date?

When you reject candidate after candidate, is it because they can't do the job? Or is it because you're chasing a unicorn? The critical question is, "Can this person do this job?"

Lucas contrasts modern dating with the many cases of people who, not so long ago, managed to live good lives with spouses they met in the small towns they lived in, often for their entire lives.

I'll grant Lucas a hit and a miss from the lesson she draws from yesteryear's singles:

These women not only didn't go on dates with 72 different men before getting married, they probably didn't even know 72 eligible men.

They settled, and they led good lives.

I find settled a bit of a harsh term to use in context, but that context does lead us to the truth: What is realistically possible to someone who lives in the middle of nowhere and is happy to stay there? That is part of the answer Lucas conveys with settling, but it's not the whole thing.

The rest of her answer comes from the earlier implied advice against hunting unicorns. Lucas is correct that coming up with some platonic ideal for a match is ridiculous, but there is settling and there's putting in the work to find the best one can reasonably expect to find. This entails less giving up on what's important than knowing what is and isn't important.

If I were to try to add to what Lucas said, it would be that. Yes, the internet can do a fine impersonation of a wishing-granting djinn, it still takes effort to craft the wish correctly and to figure out if you really got what you needed.

Swiping Sadie and Overworked Oscar are not victims of Too Many Choices, but often of not considering (a) what they want or (b) what their efforts turned up, or (c) both. (This isn't always the case: Small towns had their old maids and lifelong bachelors, too.)

Both kinds of searchers are crafting wish-lists, but no list can cover every single aspect of a role any more than a verbal description can nail down everything there is to know about a person. And if a list can't substitute for a degree of personal acquaintance, neither can a cursory glance at some search results.

Ages ago, I found myself divorced and wanting to date while I was in graduate school. Internet dating was in its infancy, but I tried it for awhile. I ended up meeting my wife of nearly 25 years through a friend. (My now-wife was on the periphery of my social circle, but that friend knew both of us and thought we'd like each other.)

I didn't swipe through thousands of candidates while I was internet dating. (Indeed, it was unusual to have anything more than a written description in a profile, in those days.) But I think my experience with it is relevant.

There were women who ticked every box I thought needed ticking, but who simply weren't interested in me. Some such women weren't at all my type, as I discovered at first sight. It took longer with others, of course. One ticked all the boxes, and was definitely my type, turned out to be not particularly bright. One woman I liked, but I came to realize I'd never get past the ... large ... number of pets she owned. Overall, it became clear that one learns much more about a person by meeting them and interacting with them than one can in print and a few images.

Getting input from others is also a huge improvement over checklists and results: Other people will know things about you, like your blind spots or idiosyncrasies, that you may not account for yourself, or that might make you and another person a better or worse fit for each other.

"Too many choices" reminds me a little of what I think of as the reverse alchemy of owning lots of very disorganized stuff. Skimming through 8,000 potential dates (and, hell, maybe even dating 72 people in five months for that matter) is akin to not looking at all. Getting good information takes time, involves the senses (rather than staying inside one's head with a description), and benefits from input from others. Without good information, one cannot make decent choices, let alone good ones.

While it is certainly possible to have a large number of wholly unsatisfactory choices, it is much more likely that the problem someone complaining about having "too many bad choices" actually faces is that they aren't really considering their choices.

-- CAV