Why Modern Dating Feels Harder, Even When Meeting People Is Easier
Lunch Actually co-founder Violet Lim on dating fatigue, endless choice and what really matters in a long-term partner
Finding a date has arguably never been easier. Finding someone you actually want to build a life with may be another matter.
Dating apps have placed thousands of potential partners within reach, expanded social circles far beyond the office, neighborhood or friendship group, and made meeting strangers almost frictionless. Yet modern dating has developed its own vocabulary of frustration: ghosting, situationships, dating fatigue, bread crumbing and, increasingly, app burnout.
Violet Lim has watched that transformation unfold from an unusual vantage point.
Violet Lim is CEO and co-founder of Lunch Actually Group, which she launched with her husband, Jamie Lee, in 2004. The award-winning entrepreneur and matchmaking expert has spent more than two decades helping singles find meaningful, long-term relationships.
“I was working in a bank, surrounded by people who had everything on paper and nobody to have dinner with,” she recalls in an exclusive interview with Expats Lifestyle. “They weren't unlovable. They were unavailable, to everyone except work.”
While traveling, she encountered the idea of lunch dating: introduce two compatible singles for a relatively short meeting during the working day. She saw the appeal immediately. A lunch was long enough to discover whether there might be a connection, but short enough to keep the encounter low-pressure.
Lim left banking at 24 and launched Lunch Actually with Lee. What sounded unconventional in 2004 has since grown into a regional matchmaking business. The company expanded from Singapore to Kuala Lumpur in 2005 and Hong Kong in 2008, later entering Indonesia and Thailand. Its arrival in Bangkok came through the 2015 acquisition of Thai matchmaking agency MeetNLunch, while a Taiwan joint venture followed in 2022.
Today, Lunch Actually operates across six Asian markets and offers personalized matchmaking and dating coaching, with profiles verified rather than simply uploaded by users. The company says it has arranged more than 160,000 dates since its launch.
More than two decades of introductions have also given Lim a long view of how people choose partners, and why having more ways to meet has not necessarily made finding love simpler.
We Can Meet More People, but Are We Really Meeting Them?
“In 2004, for two strangers to end up across a table, a human being had to be involved: a friend, a colleague, an auntie with opinions, a matchmaker,” she says. “Meeting someone was effortful, which meant it was also intentional.”
Apps removed much of that friction. A person can now browse dozens of potential matches in the time it takes to commute to work. That convenience has obvious advantages, particularly for people with limited social circles, but Lim believes it has also changed the mindset with which singles approach one another. “Access is not the same as connection,” she says.
Lunch Actually's 2024 Singles Dating Survey found that 88% of respondents had taken breaks from dating apps, with lack of authentic connection the most commonly cited reason, according to information provided by Lim.
Part of the problem, she argues, is that swiping teaches people to screen rather than discover.
“A CV tells you where someone worked. It cannot tell you whether you'd want to sit next to them on a fourteen-hour flight,” she says. “We would never hire someone off a CV alone. We interview first. Yet in dating we reject people at that stage, dozens a night, and call it being discerning.”
The paradox of modern dating may therefore be that an abundance of choice encourages faster rejection. When another profile is only a swipe away, there is little incentive to investigate a connection that feels merely pleasant rather than
extraordinary. And pleasant, Lim argues, is underrated.
The Problem With Waiting for Fireworks
One mistake Lim repeatedly sees among accomplished singles is the expectation of immediate chemistry.
“Love at first sight mostly happens at the movies,” she says.
A first date without fireworks can easily be interpreted as evidence that two people are incompatible. But Lim says many lasting couples do not remember their first encounter as extraordinary. Some simply remember it as “pleasant.”
Instant attraction can be real, of course, but it is not necessarily evidence of long-term compatibility. Charisma, physical attraction, novelty and even nervousness can create excitement. Qualities that matter several years into a relationship tend to reveal themselves more slowly.
What matters more, in Lim's experience, is how someone behaves when things are less exciting: when they are tired, disappointed or told no; whether they follow through on small promises; whether they remain interested in a partner's ordinary life rather than only the polished parts. “Chemistry can happen in ten minutes,” she says. “Trust cannot.”
That distinction is difficult to capture on an app profile, where the information most easily displayed, such as appearance, occupation, education and lifestyle, can become disproportionately important.
When Preferences Become a Checklist
Lim calls another modern dating problem “Checklist Fatigue.”
Knowing what you want in a relationship can be useful. But the list can become so detailed that almost no real person can satisfy it.
She remembers one client arriving with requirements covering both sides of an A4 sheet. Some even contradicted one another. He wanted an intelligent, independently minded and ambitious woman who would also immediately give up her career after marriage.
Lim sees particularly rigid checklists among high achievers. In their professional lives, criteria, analysis and risk management often produce results. It is understandable that the same approach gets applied to relationships.
The problem is that humans are considerably less compliant than spreadsheets. “You build a list of fifteen non-negotiables. Every real human being fails at least one,” she says. “Each near-miss gets discarded, the pool shrinks, the list hardens to justify the shrinking, and a year later you are flatter, more frustrated, and no longer sure what you were looking for in the first place.”
The more useful distinction is between preferences and values. Height, occupation and postcode may be preferences. Kindness, emotional stability, honesty or the ability to respect boundaries are closer to values.
“If your checklist has stopped you from giving a decent person a second lunch, it is no longer a guide,” Lim says. “It's a gate, and you're the one locked in.”
Stop Turning Dates Into Job Interviews
Professional habits can follow successful people into their romantic lives in another way: they assess.
Questions are asked, information gathered and compatibility mentally calculated. By dessert, a verdict has been reached. Lim believes this can create dates on which two people exchange plenty of information without necessarily connecting.
Instead of leaving knowing only where someone studied, what they do and whether they want children, she suggests paying attention to a simpler question: How did you feel while sitting with this person?
That does not mean ignoring practical compatibility. Quite the opposite. Lim argues that singles may be scrutinizing the wrong practical details.
Job titles and salaries are highly visible. How somebody handles stress, disagreement, boundaries, family obligations and an unexpectedly wrong restaurant bill may reveal much more.
Financial Compatibility Is Not About Matching Salaries
Money remains an important consideration in dating, especially when relationships become serious. But Lim draws a distinction between financial success and financial compatibility.
“A high income guarantees nothing,” she says. “Two people earning very well with opposite money philosophies will fight harder than a couple earning half as much who agree on what money is for.”
Rather than concentrating only on how much a potential partner earns, Lim suggests noticing how they think about money.
Are they a saver or spender? Do they plan or simply hope things will work out? How do they approach debt, property or obligations to parents and siblings? Is money treated as a shared resource, a marker of status or a means of control?
These differences may remain relatively invisible during early dating. They become harder to ignore later, particularly when couples encounter property decisions, school fees or aging parents.
“Alignment on how money is handled, talked about and valued matters far more than matching salaries,” Lim says.
You Are Dating a Lifestyle, Not a Job Title
Career success presents a similar blind spot. Ambition, competence and drive can be attractive. But the lifestyle that creates professional success can also mean long hours, frequent travel, canceled plans and a partner who arrives home physically present but mentally still at work.
“You are not choosing a job title,” Lim says. “You are choosing a daily reality.”
Rather than discussing career only in terms of ambition or income, she recommends couples talk early about what ordinary life actually looks like.
What happens on a typical Tuesday? How much alone time does each person need? When stressed, does someone want to talk or withdraw? What counts as quality time when both people are busy?
Those conversations may not sound particularly romantic, but mismatched expectations around everyday life can become much more significant than the impressive career that initially caught someone's attention.
Some Dating Rules Are Disappearing. Others Aren't.
Social expectations around relationships have changed considerably during Lim's career.
She sees greater acceptance of women earning more than their partners, age differences in either direction, and intercultural and interfaith relationships. Marriage is also increasingly approached as a decision to make when ready rather than an automatic milestone attached to a particular age.
Yet some traditional expectations remain. In Lunch Actually's survey, 54% of women respondents said men should make the first move.
Lim interprets that not simply as an attachment to traditional gender roles but also as a desire for clarity: people want to know when someone is genuinely interested.
For all the new terminology around modern relationships, she believes ambiguity itself remains unpopular.
“Situationships are tolerated, not desired,” she says. “They want to know where they stand, with one person, out loud.”
The Person You Would Have Swiped Left On
Perhaps the greatest limitation of dating by profile is everything a profile cannot communicate.
Warmth does not fit neatly into a bio. Neither does timing, humor, generosity or the feeling that you can relax around someone. Lim has seen this repeatedly in matchmaking, including with one of Lunch Actually's early matches.
Chris, a lawyer, was initially unimpressed when the agency suggested Ben, a performer who juggled and rode a unicycle. On paper, he was far from the partner she imagined. Lim and her team encouraged her to meet him anyway.
In person, the pair discovered shared values and a similar sense of humor. They became engaged within three months, married within a year and later had two daughters. For Lim, the story illustrates how easily profile-based dating can eliminate someone before the qualities that actually make them compatible have any opportunity to appear.
She makes the point even more personally: she believes that had she and Jamie encountered one another through a dating app, he probably would not have swiped right on her. “‘Not my type’ is a description of your past,” she says, “not a prediction of your future.”
What to Do When Dating Becomes Exhausting
Taking a break when dating begins to feel like another unpaid job can help. But Lim considers the break temporary relief rather than a solution.
Her first suggestion is to stop mindless swiping, particularly the habitual browsing that happens without serious attention to the people on screen. Then reconsider the list. Which requirements genuinely represent values, and which are preferences that have acquired the status of non-negotiables?
Finally, change where the encounters happen. That could mean curated introductions and singles events, but equally a class, sport or activity someone would enjoy regardless of whether a romantic prospect appears.
“Dating is still partly a numbers game,” Lim says, “but it should be a numbers game of real encounters, not thumbnails.”
Three Less Glamorous Signs Someone May Be Worth Keeping
After more than 160,000 dates arranged by Lunch Actually, Lim's indicators of long-term potential are strikingly ordinary.
The first is whether someone can accept a boundary. A partner who can hear “I need a night to myself” without sulking, withdrawing affection or applying pressure is revealing something important about how they may handle boundaries years later.
The second is consistency. They call when they say they will. They remain reasonably kind during disagreements. They remember the meeting you were worried about.
The third is curiosity about the person behind the polished version presented during early dating.
“Being put on a pedestal feels wonderful for about six weeks,” Lim says. “Being genuinely known lasts.”
None makes for a particularly dramatic dating profile. Collectively, however, they may tell you considerably more about a future relationship than height, job title or an impressive photograph.
Will AI Fix Dating?
Technology is unlikely to disappear from dating. If anything, artificial intelligence could become more deeply embedded in it, from improving matches and writing profiles to suggesting messages and identifying relationship patterns.
Lim is not opposed to that development. She believes AI can make some parts of dating more efficient, including filtering, scheduling and coaching. But efficiency has a limit when the objective is human intimacy.
“The goal is not to screen faster,” she says.
Her expectation is that dating will eventually settle into a combination of technology and deliberately human interaction: smarter tools helping people find possibilities, followed by more emphasis on curated introductions, offline environments and face-to-face meetings.
“Technology will be the bridge,” she says. “It was never the destination.” Perhaps that is the useful contradiction at the heart of dating in 2026. We have more sophisticated ways than ever to find people, assess them and eliminate them. But the qualities that determine whether we want to see someone again remain stubbornly analog.
Two people still have to sit across a table and talk. And, occasionally, have a second lunch.
[PHOTO: Courtesy of Lunch Actually]
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