Lexicon ·
soft-cap dating
noun phrase
- Stated meaning
- Pausing new outreach to concentrate on one person while keeping at most one other conversation open, so that compatibility can be judged without losing every other lead.
- Operating meaning
- One person in focus and one conversation kept warm in case the focus does not hold, which is a rotation of 2 described as restraint.
- Origin
- Issued by an AI chatbot, in a conversation with the narrator, as a named strategy headed 'Soft Cap / Focused Funnel'. The cap is a sports term for a limit that may be exceeded in limited circumstances.
Soft-cap dating was not heard in the market. It was issued to me by an AI chatbot, in a conversation about my own dating, as one of several named strategies, under the heading “Soft Cap / Focused Funnel.” The instruction was to “pause swiping and new outreach,” concentrate on one person, and keep “at most one casual conversation open.” The cap is borrowed. In professional sports a soft cap (opens in a new window) is a limit that “may be exceeded in limited circumstances,” and the NBA’s best-known circumstance is a player the team already has.
The strategy came with a citation. It was said to satisfy “optimal search theory by preventing tunnel vision early, while cutting options before choice overload sets in.” Both theories exist. Optimal stopping (opens in a new window) rejects roughly the first 37% of candidates and then takes the first one better than all of them, and Johannes Kepler is recorded as having investigated 11 candidates for marriage over 2 years. The rule assumes the searcher knows in advance how many candidates there will be. Choice overload was tested in a meta-analysis of 50 experiments and 5,036 participants (opens in a new window), which found its overall effect “virtually zero.” The funnel cuts options ahead of an effect that, on average, measured nothing.
Under load, a soft cap of 2 is 1 person and 1 contingency. The contingency is told nothing about its status, and the focus is told nothing about the contingency. The arrangement depends on the second conversation staying casual, which is a decision only one of its 2 parties knows is being made.