Love in the Time of Dating Apps: A Denver Workshop Series
A Five-Part Series on Modern Dating and Decision-Making
Navigating the collapse of decision defaults.
Dating apps have not just changed who we meet; they have fundamentally restructured the environment in which we choose. We are living through a period of choice inflation, where the sheer volume of information is compounded by the loss of historical defaults.
In the past, the "how" of meeting and discerning a partner was governed by shared social scripts. Today, those scripts have been replaced by choicetech. This means you are no longer just deciding who to date. You are being forced to decide how to decide: constantly auditing your own strategies, filters, and digital boundaries while navigating tools designed for engagement, not discernment.
The Problem is Multi-Layered
The friction of modern dating is a combination of systemic pressure and the evaporation of communal rules. We focus on three core areas:
Systemic Architecture: How platforms prioritize high-frequency swiping over intentionality.
Information Overload: A byproduct of ChoiceTech that makes moral and personal clarity difficult to maintain.
Strategic Gaps: The challenge of building a functional personal strategy when the traditional "rules" of engagement have disappeared.
Joining the Series
In-Person in Denver: We meet at the Bob Ragland Branch Library (1900 35th St, Denver, CO 80216). These sessions are grounded, intellectual conversations for neighbors to deconstruct digital systems together.
For Those Outside of Denver: The Cycle of Exhaustion, where uncertainty leads to more choicetech, affects decision-makers everywhere. If you are navigating decision drag from a distance, I offer 1:1 Choicetech Consulting and Coaching to help you audit your personal decision environments.
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2026 Workshop Logistics & Access
The Focus: We examine the systems we are dating inside and how those architectures influence how we think, feel, and choose over time. Each session introduces a distinct lens on modern dating, helping participants make sense of common frustrations.
The Scope: These sessions are intentionally dating-goal, orientation, and identity agnostic. Whether you are currently online, returning after a break, or simply curious about why dating feels harder than expected, these frameworks offer a way to reshape your relationship to your own decision-making. Each session stands on its own, but together they offer a deeper framework for understanding and reshaping how you relate to dating apps.
Sliding Scale Pricing In alignment with our Ethics and Advocacy commitment, this series uses a Sliding Scale ($5 – $35).
The Five Sessions
Uncertainty and the Information Age
Why does dating feel so ambiguous today, even with more access and information than ever before? This session explores uncertainty as the defining condition of modern dating and how the Information Age has reshaped meaning-making, social scripts, and expectations.The Rise of Choicetech
Dating apps don’t just present options, they actively shape how information and choice interact. This session explores dating apps as choicetech: tools designed to structure decision-making under uncertainty by filtering, ranking, pacing, and framing information. We’ll look at how these systems influence perception and evaluation in modern dating, often in ways that are easy to miss but hard to opt out of.Living with Choice Inflation
There are more choices to make, and each one asks more of us. This workshop examines how choice inflation has changed what’s required to choose at all. Even when the goal remains the same, the baseline effort required to reach a decision has expanded.Information Overload and Modern Dating (more info coming soon)
Profiles, prompts, messages, and social media create an information-dense dating environment—but not necessarily a more informative one. This session explores why more data rarely resolves uncertainty and how interpretation becomes labor.Decision Fatigue and Dating Burnout (more info coming soon)
When dating starts to feel exhausting, it’s often a decision-making issue, not a motivation problem. This session examines how repeated micro-decisions drain capacity over time and why burnout is a predictable outcome of modern dating systems.