Why We Can't Choose — The Commitment Series
I want to tell you something that took me an embarrassingly long time to understand about myself.
When a relationship started getting real, really real, I would feel a familiar pull. Not toward the door exactly. More like toward the mountains. A long drive with a podcast. A solo backpacking trip through the desert. Skiing a powder day completely alone. I told myself I just needed space to think. That the restlessness I felt was a signal, evidence that something was missing, that maybe this wasn't the right person after all. My brain would helpfully supply a reason. The attraction had faded. We wanted different things. The timing was off.
It never felt like an excuse. It felt like the truth.
Here is what I did not understand then: the feeling was real, but the explanation my brain handed me was a story. A very convincing, very old story. One that started long before any of the women I was dating ever entered the picture.
And here is what makes this article worth reading, whether you recognize yourself in that story or in someone else's: that same story, running on a different operating system, is sitting in the pocket of almost everyone still on the apps right now. The person who cannot commit and the person waiting to be chosen are often sitting across from each other at dinner, neither one fully understanding what is actually happening between them.
This article is about what is actually happening.
The Machine Nobody Told You About
Before we talk about the people, we need to talk about the system they are operating inside. Because the modern dating landscape was not designed to help you find love. It was designed to keep you searching.
"Dating apps don't sell love. They sell the feeling that love is one premium upgrade away."
Match Group, the company that owns Tinder, Hinge, and OkCupid, reported $878 million in revenue in a single quarter. That business model does not run on people finding each other and deleting the app. It runs on prolonged uncertainty. The variable reward mechanism the apps use, the same psychological hook that makes slot machines so hard to walk away from, delivers just enough positive reinforcement to keep you engaged without ever quite satisfying you. A match here. A flattering message there. The dopamine hit of being wanted by someone new.
This is not an accident. It is the product.
Psychologist Barry Schwartz called the broader phenomenon the "paradox of choice." More options should feel liberating. Instead, research consistently shows they produce anxiety, decision fatigue, and a gnawing dissatisfaction with whatever you do choose. There is a famous study in which shoppers were 10 times more likely to actually purchase jam when presented with 6 options rather than 24. More choices. Less action. Every time.
Dating apps are a 24-jam situation, running 24 hours a day, engineered by people whose bonuses depend on you never buying the jam.
But here is the part that will change how you see the whole landscape. The people most damaged by this system are not randomly distributed. The apps have a sorting mechanism nobody advertises. And once you understand what it is sorting for, everything looks different.
The Happiness Gap
Before we meet the 3 people at the center of this article, there is a formula worth understanding.
Mo Gawdat, the engineer and author of Solve for Happy, offers this: happiness equals reality minus expectations. When what you experience matches or exceeds what you expected, you feel good. When reality falls short, you suffer. The size of that gap between expectation and experience is where most human misery actually lives.
For one kind of person in the dating market, expectations have quietly drifted into the impossible. Having seen hundreds of profiles and been on dozens of dates, no actual human being, with their actual history and actual quirks and adult children and complicated finances, can compete with the theoretical perfect match one swipe away. Reality will always lose that comparison. The gap becomes permanent. Nothing ever feels like enough.
For another kind of person, the formula works in reverse. Expectations are honest and reasonable. And reality keeps falling short, not because the people they are meeting are terrible, but because those people keep not choosing them back. The gap widens from the other direction. Self-worth quietly takes the hit. "I want a real relationship" becomes "I just don't want to feel this alone."
Both people are suffering. Both are on the apps right now. And they are almost certainly swiping on each other.
What neither of them knows yet is that their struggle has a name. Several names, actually. And understanding those names is the first step toward doing something about them.
Portrait One: The One Who Wants to Go to the Mountains
I have written elsewhere on this site about the moment I learned, at 5 years old, that I could be thrown away. If you have read that piece, you know the story: the suitcase, the drive toward the county landfill, the absolute certainty of a small child that it was real. If you have not, the short version is this: I grew up with a mother whose affection was genuine and warm and then, without warning, terrifying. The shift could come at any moment. I became very good at reading the room, at staying invisible when the atmosphere changed, at finding reasons to not be home.
That is called hypervigilance. It is what a nervous system learns when the person who is supposed to be safe is also, sometimes, the source of the threat. And it does not stay in childhood. It follows you into every relationship you will ever have.
My marriage only deepened the pattern. I had, without quite realizing it, chosen someone whose emotional withdrawal under stress felt familiar in the worst possible way. I wrote about that too, and I will link to it rather than repeat it here.
What I want to tell you about is what happened after the divorce, after the therapy, after the long honest inventory of my own patterns. I tested into what attachment researchers call Earned Security, a term for people who did not have secure attachment modeled for them in childhood but have done enough work to function from a mostly secure place as adults. Dr. Sarah Hensley, the Love Doc, uses this term to describe exactly this kind of hard-won stability. I am genuinely proud of that. And I want to be honest that it is a tentative security. Relationships have a way of activating old patterns even in people who have done significant work. The styles are not fixed. They shift under pressure.
Here is what my particular flavor of insecurity looked like before I understood it.
When a relationship started developing real depth, real closeness, real daily-life texture, something in me would quiet down. Not the person. Not anything they did. The attraction would simply begin to fade. And my brain, reliably and immediately, would supply a reason. She and I wanted different things. The chemistry had run its course. Something just felt off. It never felt like an excuse. It felt like discernment.
What it actually was: a nervous system that had learned, in the most formative years of my life, that closeness precedes loss. That warmth is the setup for the withdrawal that always follows. That the only safe move when someone gets too close is to create distance before they do.
This is called Fearful Avoidant (FA) attachment. It is the most complex of the insecure styles because it contains a direct contradiction at its core: a deep longing for intimacy and an equally deep terror of it. FA individuals do not avoid closeness because they do not want it. They avoid it because they want it so much that the prospect of losing it is unbearable. The cruelest part is that the brain never presents this as fear. It presents it as clarity. As the reasonable conclusion that this particular person is simply not the right fit. And since no person is perfect, there is always evidence available to support that conclusion.
So I would go to the mountains. The relief I felt there was real. The solitude was genuinely restorative. What I did not fully understand then was that the relief was not about the mountains. It was about the temporary absence of the threat that closeness had always represented, even when the person offering it was genuinely safe.
Portrait Two: The One Who Has Been on 150 First Dates
Consider a composite we will call Marcus. His details have been changed, but his story is not uncommon in this community.
Marcus is 52, professionally accomplished, genuinely funny, and by any reasonable external measure, a very good catch. He has been actively dating for 3 years since his divorce. He has been on somewhere north of 150 first dates. Several relationships got real enough that the women involved believed they were heading somewhere lasting. And then, at various points, Marcus found a reason to leave.
One woman's faith was more traditional than his had become. Another came from a world different enough that he noticed the gap more than the connection. One was so steady and devoted that he found himself wondering, quietly and with some guilt, whether steady and devoted was the same thing as settling. The reasons were always different. The outcome was always the same.
Marcus does not think of himself as someone who cannot commit. He genuinely believes he has not yet found the right person. He may be right. But there is another possibility worth naming.
This is called Dismissive Avoidant (DA) attachment. Where the FA person wants closeness and fears it simultaneously, the DA person has largely quieted the wanting. Not consciously, and not completely, but enough that the pull toward intimacy is softer than the pull toward independence. DA individuals genuinely value their autonomy. They are not lying when they say they are fine alone. They have built a self that functions very well in its own company.
What they have also built, usually in response to early experiences where needing others led to disappointment, is a sophisticated internal system for finding reasons that this particular relationship is not quite right. The system is not malicious. It is protective. And it is almost impossible to see from the inside, because it presents itself not as avoidance but as discernment.
"Only 2.5% of app matches lead to meaningful long-term relationships, the natural result of a system that encourages us to view people as disposable."
In the LDS dating market specifically, where community estimates suggest anywhere from 14 to 30 women for every genuinely eligible man, the DA pattern has found a nearly perfect habitat. When being wanted is effortless, the perceived cost of leaving any specific relationship approaches zero. When the exit door is always lit and always unlocked, the room you are standing in never quite feels like home.
The cost Marcus is paying, without quite realizing it: every almost-relationship leaves a residue. Not grief exactly. More like a gradual narrowing of the capacity to be surprised by someone, to be moved, to let the texture of a specific human being matter enough to be inconvenient. The DA style, left unexamined, does not produce a person who is happily alone. It produces a person who is competently alone, which is a very different thing.
Portrait Three: The One Whose Chest Gets Tight
Now consider a composite we will call Dana.
Dana was married for 22 years. Active in her faith, devoted to her family, present in her community. And for the last 8 of those years she was, without ever finding exactly the right words for it, invisible inside her own marriage. Not dramatically unhappy. Just not chosen. Not noticed. Not made to feel, in any of the ordinary daily ways that matter most, that her presence in the room made it better.
Then the marriage ended, and Dana's phone started lighting up.
Within weeks of joining an app, she had more attention coming her way than she had experienced in 2 decades. After years of feeling like furniture in her own home, being wanted felt like oxygen. What followed is what people in this community call "divorce brain." The first year or 2 after a long marriage ends, particularly for those who spent years feeling unseen, can feel genuinely intoxicating. The freedom is real. The attention is real. The excitement of rediscovering that you are desirable is real.
And the decision-making during this period is almost universally compromised.
"Dating app burnout affects 80% of Millennials, 79% of Gen Z, 78% of Gen X, and 70% of Baby Boomers. Women consistently report higher burnout rates than men."
This is not a character flaw. It is neuroscience. A nervous system that has been running on scarcity and emotional rejection for years responds to sudden abundance the way a person who has been in the desert responds to water: by taking in far more than is actually useful, because some part of the brain is not yet convinced the supply is stable.
Then came the shift, as it often does, through pain. A relationship that got close. Real feelings. Real investment. And then a ghost, the sudden, unexplained silence of someone who had seemed, just days before, completely present.
Heartbreak at 48 hurts exactly as much as heartbreak at 22. What changes is the narrative around it. At 22 you grieve openly. At 48 you are more likely to update your profile, tell your friends you are fine, and quietly add one more layer of armor to the place that just got hit.
Now there was a new pattern. Dana texted more frequently than she used to. Checked for replies more quickly. Read more into a slow response or a changed tone. When someone she liked went quiet, even briefly, she felt it physically: a tightening in the chest, a low-level panic that had no logical basis given how little time she had invested.
This is Anxious Preoccupied (AP) attachment. Where the DA person has turned down the volume on their need for connection, the AP person has turned it up, far too high, in response to early experiences where love was inconsistent or conditional. AP individuals do not fear closeness. They are desperate for it. What they fear is its loss. And because their nervous system learned that connection can disappear without warning, they are constantly scanning for early signs of withdrawal, constantly seeking reassurance that the connection is still intact.
The exhausting irony: this scanning and reassurance-seeking often produces the very outcome they are trying to prevent. The person on the receiving end, particularly if they are DA or FA, begins to feel the pressure and pulls back. The AP person reads the pulling back as confirmation of their fear and increases the pursuit. The cycle is as predictable as it is painful, and neither person is the villain.
What Dana does with the frustration she feels at avoidant partners matters enormously. Attachment researchers have observed that people with AP patterns tend to move between 2 responses. The first is external: genuine, often legitimate frustration at the partners who keep not showing up. The second is internal, a quieter, more corrosive question that forms in the gaps: what is wrong with me?
The answer is nothing. But "nothing is wrong with you" is very hard to feel on a Tuesday night when you are alone again and the person you liked has not responded in 3 days.
The Same Fear, Opposite Directions
Here is what Marcus and Dana and the version of me that used to go to the mountains all share, underneath the very different ways we moved through the world.
We were all terrified of being truly known and then losing it anyway.
The DA person keeps the exit door open because closing it means risking everything on one person, and they have already lost things that mattered. The exit door never feeling frightening is not confidence. It is self-protection dressed in the language of discernment.
The FA person wants nothing more than real closeness and is wired to sabotage it the moment it arrives, because closeness was never just closeness. It was always also the prelude to something unpredictable. The brain does not present this as fear. It presents it as a perfectly logical reason the relationship was not quite right.
The AP person is not needy. They are exhausted. They have been on high alert for abandonment for longer than they want to admit, and the vigilance that exhausts their partners is the same vigilance that once kept them emotionally safe.
All 3 patterns make complete sense given where they came from. All 3 are also, without awareness and without work, quietly incompatible with the lasting connection every single one of these people says they want.
What the Apps Are Actually Sorting For
Here is the part nobody is saying clearly enough.
Secure individuals, those with a stable, trusting, comfortable relationship with both intimacy and independence, tend to find partners and leave the apps relatively quickly. Not because they are lucky. Because they approach dating without the same distorting fears. They can assess someone clearly, move toward them without panic, tolerate the ordinary imperfections of a real relationship, and choose, with both feet in the room.
The people who remain on the apps longest, who accumulate the most matches and the least lasting connection, are disproportionately the insecure styles. The DA person who is never quite ready. The AP person who is always ready but not with the right people. The FA person who cycles between both.
If you have been on the apps for a long time with a long string of connections that got close but not quite there, that is not evidence that you are unlovable or that the right person does not exist. It may be evidence that you are operating from an insecure attachment pattern inside a system that was specifically designed to keep insecure patterns activated. The apps do not cause insecure attachment. But they reward it commercially, by keeping you engaged, searching, and spending.
Understanding this changes the question from "what is wrong with me?" to "what is this system doing to all of us?" And that is a significantly more useful place to start.
But understanding is only the beginning. The harder question, the one most people stop short of asking, is this: now that you know what is actually driving the pattern, what do you actually do about it?
That is what Part 2 is for.
Chris Roberts is the founder of Unchaperoned Life. He writes about dating, identity, and what it looks like to start over with your eyes open. Read the full Religious Trauma series and other articles in this community at unchaperonedlife.com/resources.