Single by choice is not a smaller appetite for love. It is a bigger one the apps cannot sell.

The people who take connection most seriously are the first to quit the apps. The business model needs them to stay and keep paying to look.

An essay has been making the rounds, the kind that lands in a dozen group chats before lunch. The people who stay single by choice, it argues, are not running from connection. They feel it more intensely than everyone else, and that is exactly why they will not accept a watered-down version of it to fill a chair society keeps insisting is empty. It is a generous reading. For some people it is even true.

I run a relationship platform, so when I tell you the apps are built to fail the people who take connection most seriously, treat it with the suspicion it deserves. Then look at the numbers, which are not mine.

Because the interesting question was never what the single-by-choice person feels. It is why the dating market loses that person first, and why it has every incentive to call their leaving a flaw.

What the research actually says, and does not

Start with the part the viral essay skips. The serene, self-possessed single who has simply transcended the need for a partner is a lovely figure, and the real evidence on long-term singlehood is messier than that. A 2026 study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, by Krämer and colleagues, looked at consistently single young adults in Germany and the UK and found that, on average, never-partnered people reported lower well-being than partnered ones, more so the further they moved past their late twenties. The same researchers were careful to add that people who became single by choice look psychologically different from those who were never partnered at all, and that the science on both groups is thin.

Hold both of those at once. "By choice" is doing an enormous amount of work in that sentence, and almost none of the research is Indian. The essay everyone is sharing is a Western lifestyle idea, and it is being read in a country where the social meaning of an unpartnered thirty-three-year-old is nothing like what it is in Berlin or Manchester. So set the therapy-poster version aside. The thing worth examining is not the single person's inner life. It is the machine they opted out of.

The worst customer a dating app can have

Here is the part the apps will never put in a pitch deck. The person who is most serious about finding a partner is the worst possible customer for a swiping app.

Think about what the business actually sells. Not relationships. The search. The boosts, the super-likes, the premium tiers that promise to put you in front of more people are all a tax on the time you spend still looking. The longer you keep looking, the more you pay. A user who meets someone in three weeks, deletes the app, and does not come back is, in the cold logic of that model, a failed transaction. The model needs you to keep almost finding your person, forever.

Now picture the high-bar single inside that machine. They are slow to match because they are discerning. They are quick to leave because they would rather be alone than be in something thin. They convert into exactly the outcome the business is structured to prevent. To an app that lives on engagement, a person with high standards and low tolerance for waste is not a premium user. They are a leak.

This is not a morality tale. It is just incentives, and the incentives are showing. Industry revenue per user has been sliding for years, from around US$46.5 in 2018 toward a projected US$39.25 by 2028, even as the total number of users climbs. Match Group and Bumble have lost somewhere between half and three-quarters of their market value since their 2021 peaks. The apps optimised relentlessly for engagement and, in doing so, quietly selected against the one result their users actually wanted. The serious daters felt the misalignment long before the share price did. They just called it "I'm taking a break from the apps."

Why the serious leave first

In India the exit happens faster, because the cost of staying is higher for precisely the people with the most to protect.

In our own research at Pinnaya, 60% of women rated their experience on dating apps as below average. The reason was not a shortage of matches. It was the quality of what arrived, and the fear of being publicly identified while sorting through it. Layer on the wider numbers. 83% of women report harassment on dating apps. 26% of users report having talked to a bot. In 2024 India accounted for roughly 12% of the world's romance-scam profiles, with Rs 200 crore in reported losses.

Put yourself in the position of someone who actually wants something real. Every one of those costs lands hardest on you, because you are the one taking it seriously enough to be hurt by it. You are not swiping for entertainment. You are auditing for a life. And the platform keeps handing you noise, exposure, and the low-grade dread that the charming message might be a script. The rational response to a market that taxes discernment is to stop showing up to it. So the most serious people clear out first, and what remains looks thinner and lower-signal, which pushes the next tier of serious people out behind them.

The exposure part is sharper here than the essays from abroad understand. In a city like Ahmedabad, the dating pool and the family network are close to the same network, three degrees of separation wide. A woman's photo on a dating app is not a vanity decision in that setting. It is a social-exposure risk with real downside, because the stranger scrolling past is rarely a stranger. The person with the highest standards is often also the one with the most to lose by being visible while she holds them. She does the math and logs off. Then a relative asks why she is still single, as if the answer were a mystery.

"By choice" is not one thing

Which is where the phrase itself starts to wobble. "Single by choice" assumes the choice is the person's to make and to name. For a lot of urban Indians, it is neither.

For a thirty-four-year-old woman, "by choice" is frequently disbelieved outright. The assumption runs the other way: not that she would not, but that she could not. For a man the same age, the label gets read as fecklessness, a failure to settle down rather than a considered stance. And the pressure she is refusing is not even one pressure. In one family it is a horoscope and a sub-caste. In another it is a balance sheet and the next wedding season. For the engineer on a work visa abroad, it is a clock none of the others are watching. "Indian family pressure" is four different machines wearing one name, and the single-by-choice person is fighting whichever one she was born next to.

So when the market, or the mausi, calls someone picky, it is worth asking who benefits from the word. Picky is what discernment gets called by people who need you to lower the bar. The app needs you to keep playing. The family needs the picture completed. Neither of them is wrong to want what they want. Neither of them is describing you accurately.

The honest version

Here is what I think is actually going on, stripped of the flattery and the worry alike.

The people staying single on purpose in urban India are not a special breed who have outgrown the need for love. Most of them want it badly. That is the whole problem. They want it badly enough to refuse the diluted version, and they have correctly intuited that the dominant way of finding it is built to keep selling them the diluted version forever. Their withdrawal is not avoidance. It is a market signal. The product failed, and the most demanding customers churned, the way demanding customers always do first.

A platform that wanted those people back would have to do something the swiping model structurally cannot. It would have to make money when you leave, not while you stay. It would have to be built for the person who wants three real conversations and an exit, not three hundred matches and a subscription.

Single by choice was never the smaller appetite. It is the larger one, held by the people who refused to pretend otherwise. The apps could not sell to them. That is not a verdict on the people. It is a verdict on the apps.

Three real conversations, not three hundred swipes.

Pinnaya is a verified relationship platform built for people who would rather find someone and leave than keep paying to look. A three-active-match limit, not three hundred. The opposite of the machine you walked away from.

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