You cannot tell if someone on a dating app is looking for a relationship or a hookup until you've already invested time

Hinge says it's 'designed to be deleted.' Tinder is perceived as hookup-focused. But in practice, both apps have a mix of people seeking relationships and people seeking casual encounters, and there is no reliable way to tell which before matching and conversing. Profile prompts are performative — someone writes 'looking for something real' but means 'looking for something real eventually, casual for now.' The 'relationship goals' filter on Hinge (Life Partner / Long-term / Short-term) is self-reported and unverifiable. So what? You go on 3 dates with someone over 2 weeks. On date 3, they mention they are 'not really looking for anything serious right now.' You just invested 6+ hours and emotional energy discovering an incompatibility that could have been surfaced in 30 seconds. This happens repeatedly. Each failed connection makes the next one harder to invest in emotionally. Dating fatigue — the exhaustion from repeated investment in dead-end connections — is the #1 reason people quit dating apps. Why does this persist? Apps benefit from ambiguity. If everyone honestly stated their intentions, the perceived pool of 'compatible' people would shrink dramatically, and users would see fewer matches. Fewer matches = less dopamine = less time on app = less revenue. Keeping intentions vague maximizes the number of possible matches, even though most of those matches are incompatible.