Love and the Market

Recently, the media released a video of dating coach Sadia Khan allegedly speaking to a married man with whom she was in a relationship. There would be nothing particularly shocking about someone having an affair in our times, where the moral threshold is very low. But this particular woman charges a $500 hourly rate as a dating coach—a rate based on nearly 2 million followers across various social media platforms. Men pay her that sum to get love advice. And if a relationship is an achievement, it seems odd to hire a side chick for advice. And yet, people are willing to pay extraordinary amounts for the promise of connection. Where once dating apps were the default tool, now a new market of coaches and strategists has emerged, selling not just access to others but a supposed method to approach love itself.

Dating as a Strategy

In the UK, personal coaches can average around £125 per hour, though this can vary depending on experience and location. In some ways, they represent an upgrade from the spending caused by dating apps. In the US, the average person spends $243 on dating apps each year, and in the UK, more single people than ever are paying for apps. A dating coach is seen as someone who can help their clients approach dating strategically. They are no longer stuck in the dating app trenches on their own. But can we apply strategy to love? Is it love if it is strategic? Or is it just like the job market? This is not a new question. Literature reminds us that love has long been entangled with calculation. Few authors capture this tension better than Jane Austen.

Dating and love in general have never been easy fields. All Jane Austen’s books can be boiled down to women navigating their dating lives, maximizing their “value” as much as possible through a good marriage. But by modern standards, where 50-50 is a thing, Jane Austen would be accused of having a gold-digger mentality. All she talks about is annual income, land, and properties. It is clear that resources are very important for her characters in assessing whom to love. Romance, in that context, is largely about a person’s market value. Even Elizabeth, my favourite character from Pride and Prejudice, who wants to marry for love, is well aware that she can’t really afford it. It is by a stroke of luck that the guy likes her, despite her not being the most rational choice for him. If Austen’s heroines faced a narrow but structured playing field, our modern landscape presents the opposite problem: endless choice, but no clear rules. And that chaos has its own costs.

The job market of the heart

If we pay close attention, dating app fatigue and the complaints around it are the same ones we hear about the job market: that it is not fair, that it is overcrowded, that it is ultra-competitive, that it is rigged against employees, and that we do not have all the cards to truly play the game. And things have gotten worse. Jane’s characters had to compete within a small pool of options, with similar backgrounds and clear rules. Today? Potentially, one can fall in love with anyone out there, and we are told, “there are no rules.” This creates an even stronger sense of failure when, in this Valhalla of options, you do not manage to find your “one.” Love is still seen as a market, but it has become less efficient. Part of the inefficiency comes from the disappearance of traditional filters. In the past, families, communities, and social class created boundaries around who you could meet. Those invisible structures have dissolved, leaving individuals to navigate a vast and uncertain terrain.

In the past, dating had a strong social component to it. Your circle pre-selected your options, and it introduced you to someone who could not possibly be that far from your circle. It used to be someone close in terms of profession, political ideas, and background. Today, boundaries are far more blurred. Again, potentially, you could meet and be with whoever you wanted. And yet the “love market” has already replied to the need to lower “risks” with a plethora of dating apps that cater to the ultra-rich. Raya is an exclusive, invitation-only app for celebrities and influencers; Luxy is a millionaire dating app with income verification; MillionaireMatch is a platform for wealthy individuals seeking serious relationships; and The League, a selective app for professionals, can be accessed by those with higher income or influence. At this point, the resemblance to a marketplace is undeniable. But this is also where my personal struggle begins: how to reconcile a culture that treats love as a commodity with my faith, which insists love is a gift beyond price.

It is always difficult for me as a Christian to reconcile the need to work with reality, one where the majority of people do see love as a market they participate in, where capitalism is applied to love, and my faith, which tells me that people are intrinsically valuable, that everyone is deserving of love and lovable, and that love is an encounter of souls. For Christians, love isn’t much of a product. I have reconciled these two ideas with the view that love is a universal capacity people have, but it is only exercised by a very small minority. True love, I believe, possesses a force that overcomes any logical calculation, those we use to negotiate in a market, be it the “love market” or the “job market.” Love requires a courage that is easier to display when we are free individuals.

AI and the Future of Love

And just as we wrestle with capitalism’s grip on love, another force arrives on the horizon: artificial intelligence. Will it deepen the commodification of relationships, or strip away the illusions that markets can ever measure love?

AI is already being used massively as a therapist substitute. Lots of teenagers use it daily to confront feelings they have nobody to share with or entrust with their vulnerability. But AI is and will increasingly impact societal structures. In a way, it democratizes access to resources, making it possible for anyone to build a solution with AI and get paid for it. In other ways, AI replicates long-standing prejudices and malfunctions of our society. What is clear is that AI is coming for the consultants. Places like McKinsey, whose employees used to serve as a social marker of success, are no longer that, with AI making markers of success far more opaque.

If we consider the market perspective on love, social standing increases your chances of being “loved,” or I should say, finding a partner. With AI coming into the picture, job security is at risk, and many societal hierarchies are at risk, too. Social standing becomes far more opaque; therefore, the “value” of a partner is more difficult to pin down. How will the love market adapt to this? Will it create new metrics of value judgment, or will it collapse under the weight of its own contradictions?

My hope is, in fact, that in the mess created by the transition that we will have to face because of AI, we will all have to confront the fact that, in essence, love is not a market to be optimised but an act of grace that cannot be priced, predicted, or gamed. And if I let my imagination and utopia take over, I dream of this phase leaving us naked from the idea that external markers are what make us lovable. The concept of the soul has been missing for a long time in the culture our society produces. The soul, funnily enough, is the ghost of our ghosting-prone society. Perhaps when the algorithms that promise efficiency fail us in this domain, we will return to something far older and far deeper: the mystery of love as an encounter of souls.