The second in a three-part series on Melbourne dating culture.

Here is a scenario that those who have dated recently may be familiar with. You go on a first date. It goes reasonably well—there's warmth, a sense of ease, a moment or two where you catch yourself thinking, maybe. 

On the way home, you open the app. There are three other conversations waiting, their curated profiles shimmering. The date you just left begins to recede.

This is the paradox of abundance. The same technology that makes meeting people more accessible has made investing in any one person feel optional, even naive. There is always, hovering just off screen, the suggestion of something better.

But it’s not just the apps. We are living in an increasingly judgmental era, where due to our immediate access to those around us we justify our castigation of the tiniest of flaws. Despite the natural awkwardness of a first date, in Melbourne more often than not, there isn’t a second.

“Because there does seem to be so much more choice, there's almost an anxiety around settling down,” says Dr Brady Robards, Associate Professor of Sociology at Monash University, whose research spans digital culture and young people's relationships. “What if you're missing out on something better?”

The result, Robards argues, is a kind of paralysis—not inaction, exactly, but a continuous deferral, a refusal to fully commit to the person in front of you while you hold the door ajar on possibility.

The commodification of dating

Robards believes dating has become commodified. Single people are not meeting each other as much as evaluating a product. “You might be dating a bunch of different people at the same time and the best one kind of rises to the top—as if you're in the market for a washing machine,” he said.

When you approach dating as a market—with options, comparisons, and the constant knowledge that better options might exist—you begin to evaluate people against imagined alternatives rather than appreciating them on their own terms. The checklist mentality takes over.

“Criteria-based dating takes human empathy, that desire for connection, out of the equation a bit,” Robards says. “There is something liberating in saying ‘no one's good enough for me’ —but that doesn't require you to do much introspection. Rather than thinking: what am I putting out there that's maybe repelling the people who do meet my checklist? Or: are these people realistic? Do they actually exist?”

Not enough introspection is undertaken. It’s much easier to say that the other person “must only be into losers,” after being rejected, than to do some necessary soul searching. The media you consume may be sucking you into the notion that your dream person is just around the corner, waiting to tell you how wonderful you are before you ride off into the sunset.

But they’re not. The dealbreakers or icks you stand by aren’t helping you either. Some I feel are reasonable. Being in your late 20s and having never left home, or perhaps never having heard of Jane Austen. Others are ridiculous, such as favouring cow milk or happening to be an only child (actually, that is a fair concern).

That’s not to say you shouldn’t have standards. I went on a date recently where the woman openly acknowledged that she had to keep checking her phone in case her date from the previous week—a “chill, country boy” that I was clearly not—had texted her back. I was very comfortable letting that one go by.

Macken Murphy, a former New England boxing champion and PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne, studies mate preferences and mating behaviour. “ The ritual of discarding people as options,” Murphy says, “is so disconnected from how real human mating works.” In real life, he points out, you don't assess someone as a potential partner before you've spoken to them. You talk to them in class. You run into them on a night out. A connection forms, and then something shifts. The attraction, crucially, has time to develop. “People often meet,” Murphy says, “and someone is below their initial desirability threshold, but as they get to know them, they realise they have things in common and a crush forms.” Apps don't allow for that. You either pass the photo test in the first few seconds, or you disappear.

A 2025 research paper by Jessika Witmer and colleagues, which Murphy cites, found that photos on dating apps are somewhere between nine and twenty times more important than biographies in determining whether someone receives a right swipe. Everything else—education level, shared interests, stated values, the carefully considered prompt responses people spend an hour writing—barely registers.

What are we?

If the apps have rewritten how people select each other, they've also blurred what happens next. The era of the situationship—that ambiguous, undefined arrangement that is more than casual but never quite a relationship—has arrived with full cultural force. A 2026 Australian study interviewing young adults aged 19 to 25 found that situationships were widely experienced as “socially normalised, yet psychologically challenging,” particularly for those who wanted the relationship to progress. Participants described the emotional pain of situationships as “soul-crushing” —while simultaneously feeling that their distress didn't quite count, because what they had wasn't a “real” relationship.

Lucy Winter co-hosted the University of Melbourne radio show Hook Up with Shaid Siddiqui—which was a show dedicated to exploring dating culture through a gender studies lens. “People probably want to be in relationships just as much,” she said, “potentially they're slightly more discerning. But we've had this encouragement to gear away from the defined roles in dating—who initiates, who pays, who says I love you first—and I don't think we've really caught up with what we do instead.”

The old scripts, in other words, have been critiqued out of existence without being replaced. The result is a vacuum where nobody is quite sure what the rules are, which makes it much easier to drift in ambiguity than to risk having an explicit conversation about what you both want.

The situationship is not resulting in the outcomes young people say they want. A report from Hinge found that 56 per cent of Gen Z users said fear of rejection caused them to stop pursuing a relationship, and 57 per cent admitted they'd held back on confessing their feelings for fear it would be a “turn-off.” The nonchalance that Melbourne women complain about in men on a night out turns out to be something much broader—a cultural posture of strategic detachment that transcends gender.

None of this resolves the tension at the heart of modern dating: between the human need for genuine connection and a technological ecosystem that makes genuine connection structurally difficult. But Robards, for one, doesn't think the situation is irredeemable.

“We're seeing a maturation of the landscape,” he says. People are becoming more strategic about how they use these platforms, more willing to delete them and come back on their own terms, less inclined to take rejection as a verdict on their worth. The conditions are difficult, but the people navigating them are not passive.

For Murphy, the advice is simple. “Millions of years of evolution have honed your mind to make good romantic decisions,” he says. “ Trust your gut and trust your intuitions. Just relax, follow your heart, fall in love—don't think too much about all the noise. Follow your intuitions and relax into them.”

It's easier said than done. But in a city full of people being nudged in the opposite direction, something has got to be worth holding on to.

Next: What people want—financial pressure, the rise of voluntary singlehood, and whether commitment is becoming optional.