What 5,000 Singles Can Teach You About Getting Your Hopes Up

Photo: Julio Motta, via Pexels

Somewhere between your last breakup and your last dating app notification, you probably picked up a piece of advice that sounds like emotional armor: don't get your hopes up. Expect less, get hurt less. It's tidy, it's protective, and according to a new longitudinal study, it might be exactly backwards.

What the study actually did

Published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, the research followed 5,113 single adults across six waves of Germany's long-running Family Panel study, tracking not just how people felt about being single, but what happened to them afterward. Psychologists Tayler Wells, Elaine Hoan, and Geoff MacDonald, all at the University of Toronto, sorted people's expectations about relationships into three categories: how much intimacy and affection they expected from a partner, how much status or financial benefit they expected, and how many downsides, like stress or lost freedom, they expected.

Then the researchers tracked who stayed single, who partnered up, and how those new relationships actually turned out.

Wanting more made people worse at being single, and better at dating

People with high intimacy expectations, the kind who assumed a real relationship would mean real closeness, were less satisfied being single and wanted a partner more urgently. That part isn't shocking. What's more interesting is what happened next: those same people were also more likely to actually enter a relationship over the study period, and once they did, they reported higher relationship satisfaction than people who'd expected less going in.

Bracing for disappointment didn't pay off the way you'd guess, either. People with high negative expectations, expecting a relationship to cost them freedom or bring on stress, weren't any more content being single for it. Expecting the worst didn't make singlehood easier. It just meant that if they did eventually partner up, they liked it less once they got there.

There was a clear gender split, too. Women in the sample reported both higher intimacy expectations and higher negative expectations than men, who leaned more toward expecting status and financial gains. Wanting more and fearing more, apparently, aren't opposites.

The honest caveats

This study can't prove that optimism causes good relationships, and the researchers say as much. It's correlational, and there are two open explanations that are hard to tell apart: maybe high-intimacy-expectation people are just more accurate forecasters of what a good relationship offers, or maybe expecting more actually changes who they pursue and what they're willing to settle for, until the expectation becomes self-fulfilling. The sample also skews toward younger German adults, so it's worth being cautious about how far the pattern travels across cultures and age groups.

Even with those limits, it's a useful correction to advice that treats hope as a liability. Bracing for disappointment didn't buy anyone a better single life in this data, and it didn't buy them a better relationship afterward either.

What to actually do with this

Nobody's suggesting you convince yourself a stranger from a dating app owes you the relationship of your dreams. But the specific move this study casts doubt on is the pre-emptive shrug, deciding in advance that intimacy probably isn't coming so you might as well not want it. That instinct, the data suggests, doesn't protect you from anything. It just quietly lowers what you go looking for.

If you're already the kind of person who tracks your own dating app activity, RizzStats turns a Tinder or Hinge export into a match rate, reply rate, and an activity timeline you can watch over months. It's worth checking, next time your engagement dips, whether it lines up with a shift in what you were actually hoping to find, not just who happened to show up in your matches that week.