A conflict of interest to flag: I'm the founder of Settled, a relationship and matchmaking company with free and paid tiers.  That may create bias in what I notice and what I recommend, so weigh these recommendations accordingly.  I’d love for some of you to sign up to Settled, but my aim here is to share something useful whether or not you ever do.
 

What this post is and isn’t 

• We’re writing this because we hope it provide helpful insights - people have also asked, so here it is!
• This post is based on:
  • Hundreds of hours of interviews and coaching  with 350+ singles
  • Data from Settled: nearly 2K completed questionnaires & hundreds of feedback forms from dates we set up
  • An ongoing literature review (with help from Claude) - 70+ papers reviewed
• Our insights are observational, there's no control group and we collected all data for the purpose of setting up good dates, not research or analysis. We're including it because operational data from inside a matchmaking service is rare, not because it's complete or correct. 

Some observations and learnings from building Settled 

1. Dating apps are problematic; you should probably still use them

There are a variety of known problematic dynamics associated with dating apps, ie:

• Apps waste a lot of time: we’ve talked to daters who spend tens of hours per week on the apps, and end up without quality dates
• App use is associated with worse mental health: two 2026 meta-analyses (Cela & Wood 2026; Sharabi et al. 2026) find small-to-moderate associations with worse depression, anxiety, loneliness, and behavioural dysregulation. Although it's important to note that these studies are cross-sectional and compare users to non-users, which is confounded by the users being single.
• Apps can increase unhelpful dating behavior: larger choice sets make daters more rejecting (acceptance falls ~27–29% across a session, Pronk & Denissen 2020), shift them onto cheap cues like height and weight (Lenton & Francesconi 2010), and produce less-satisfying, more reversible choices (D'Angelo & Toma 2017)
• Apps are incentivized to keep you single and on the app as noted on a recent post from Clearer Thinking:

And despite this, dating apps are still a common way that couples meet today. 

A massive number of single people are on dating apps, so they're your biggest pool of potential matches. They are also good if you have broad preferences, or if a specialised app (ex. Feeld, Coffee Meets Bagel, ChristianMingle) narrows down your pool of preferences.  If it does make sense for you to keep using the apps, here’s some tips: 

1. Use the apps alongside alternatives, ie: events, introductions through friends, communities you're in for their own sake, and matchmaking.
2. Limit your use by limiting session frequency or length, and cap time when sending messages – just send it!
3. Whilst Hinge and  Bumble tend to have the biggest pools, some apps that are built to avoid some of the dynamics listed above, two examples we know of:
   1. https://breeze.social/ (also has an EA aligned founder!) but worth noting it’s not in every region
   2. https://www.compassmeet.com/
4. Move to meeting quickly. Finkel et al. found that extended pre-meeting communication builds expectations that the actual person then has to survive. A long text rapport is not evidence of anything.

2. Just ask questions and be on time.

People overthink first dates enormously. Whether the joke landed. Whether the outfit was wrong. Whether they should have picked somewhere else. If they should have offered to pay instead of split, or criticizing why they fell short of producing the single best insight on planet earth.

We ask both people for feedback after every date we set up, including what the other person could have done differently, and here’s what it tells us:

• 54% of responses contained no improvement suggestion at all. The modal answer was some version of “no notes, they should just be themselves”

Among the responses that did suggest something, the most common themes we saw are:

• ~20% Ask more questions, show curiosity, balance the conversational airtime (often mentioned by women as their biggest complaint)
• ~11% Logistics: be on time, don’t end abruptly for because you take the date between engagements, etc

So, yeah: be yourself, ask questions, and be on time.

3. We’re bad at knowing how the first date went. 

If you've ever set two friends up and then spoken to both of them afterwards, you'll know how this goes: they describe two different evenings. That's not unusual, it's the normal case. Reading a stranger accurately, while also managing your own nerves and performance, is genuinely hard.

We see this phenomena at scale: we ask both daters for feedback after every date.  One question we ask is, “How interested did they seem in you?” on a 1-5 scale. Here’s how it pans out:

• Of the people who thought the other person was interested in them (rated 4-5), that person was not open to seeing them again 25% of the time.
• Of the people who thought the other person wasn't interested in them (rated 1-2), that person was open to seeing them again 73% of the time.
• Of the people who were unsure if the other person was interested in them (rated 3), that person was open to seeing them again 56% of the time.

So yeah, it’s sometimes hard to tell how the first date went. 

And, we also learned that it’s hard to know how the date went even from your own perspective.  When asked if they want to see the person again for a second date, 30% of daters choose our “middle” option of “"not sure yet.”  Figuring out the answer to this question is one of the things we often work on together in coaching. 

Our advice:

1. Overthinking afterwards is usually a bad use of your evening. Distraction techniques can be helpful. We often recommend worrying techniques like Worry Time and Practical vs. Hypothetical Worries.
2. When in doubt, give it some more time to develop. If you’re not sure whether to go on a second date, we always suggest giving it a go. First and second (and even third dates!) are high-pressure, usually with a limited amount of time to get to know the person, so there’s a lot of noise and not much signal. Just collect more data; old habits and thought patterns can get in the way of genuinely great matches if you quit early. We’ve seen people not be sure about whether to give it a second date and then end up married with two kids to the same person!
3. Signal clearly, don’t play it cool. If you want to see someone again, say it simply and clearly. We recommend doing this after the date. It’s more about solving for confusion than a wildly romantic gesture. We’ve seen many potential relationships die because of lack of communication and both people guessing what the other thinks.
4. Don’t expect it to be obvious to you how the date went. Debriefing with friends can be great, and journaling can soothe an active mind, but watch out for finding yourself in a bit of an echo chamber, and remember that people bring their own experiences, biases and frames into how they give advice, which is often very unreliable. Coaching, journaling, or talking to trusted friends can be good ways to think through this. 

4. Physical attraction is just one ingredient amongst many 

The topic of physical attractiveness comes up often and in many different ways in dating. We don’t want to undercut its importance: research shows that physical attraction is not a minor factor (Eastwick et al. 2014), and there are real population-level patterns in what people find attractive.

But mostly, we talk to people who care about physical attraction amongst many other things, have a rough ‘type’ that’s somewhat flexible, and are generally more worried about things like kindness, intelligence, and open mindedness.  A few items we think are worth mentioning:

All of the dates we’ve set up are blind dates, meaning neither person sees a photo of the person before the date. So, there are 100s of smart, kind EAs who are happy to go on dates without seeing the other person in advance.  

Here’s what 1K+ singles from the Settled community reported when we asked, "How important are looks when it comes to who you're attracted to?" As you can see below, 12% ranked it as very important, but also 13% say they have no type or that looks don't matter. Many say attraction builds once they know someone.

Note that this group is people who have self selected into dating via our service which does blind dates and are mostly EA/Rationalist, so we expect these numbers reflect those factors.

OkCupid “blind-date day” saw that blinding dates made almost no difference in whether people enjoyed the date. 
In 2013 OkCupid ran a blind-date app, Crazy Blind Date, that paired about 10,000 people for in-person dates. Each person saw only a first name and a scrambled photo of the other. Afterwards, the app asked both people how the date went. When OkCupid matched those answers against the daters' attractiveness scores, the gap in looks between the two people made almost no difference to whether they enjoyed the date. About 75% of women and 85% of men had a good time. 
 

Rudder's summary: people "appear to be heavily preselecting online for something that, once they sit down in person, doesn't seem important to them." 
 

Note: this is company data reported in a book, not a peer-reviewed study.

5. Dating doesn’t have to suck. 

When people tell us dating is miserable, they're usually describing a fairly specific set of things:

• Being ghosted, or having your time wasted (usually repeatedly)
• The hours spent on swiping, profiles, and texting that amount to nothing
• The uncertainty of having no idea why you're not getting first or second dates.
• And then concluding there's something badly wrong with you, losing hope, or feeling terrible about it.

Notice that most of these are not about the dates themselves. Most of the misery is in the overhead and the silence.

We think dating sucks less when a few conditions are true, and these are the conditions we try to create at Settled:

• Dates are set up for you, without all the faff
• You’re dating within a curated, screened pool of people who are intellectually curious and deeply kind
• You’re dating others with the same community affiliations (and we try to take into account sensitivities related to work in our matchmaking)
• You have someone in your court to debrief with before and after dates
• We help you break out of negative patterns, identify limiting beliefs and improve your confidence
• You get feedback on how you’re showing up and how it's being interpreted 

Now, do these conditions mean that we will definitely find your person? We don't know, and per 70+ paper reviews, nobody knows. 

But here’s our evidence that dating doesn’t have to suck: 85% of the time, daters say their Settled date was a good use of time. 78% said that they’re open to seeing their first date again and 72% end up in a serious relationship within 6 months.

If this resonates with you, join us

We hope this write up was helpful.  

If this thinking resonated with you and interested in trying a different approach to dating, you can:

• Sign up to join Settled’s database here
• Follow us on X - we post anonymous profiles of EA singles, so you can browse for yourself or for a friend :)
• Come see us at an upcoming EAG singles events
• Reach out to me at [email protected]

A few things to know that may be unusual about how we work:

• Dates are blind dates, meaning they are set up without photos in advance
• Feedback after every date is mandatory. It’s how we improve at the individual and aggregate level.
• We have free and paid offerings
• We started in London, but have expanded across the EU and to hubs in the US including San Francisco, New York, and Washington DC - sign up to our EAG mixer NYC or Berlin
• Our database is gender balanced.