AI Dating Is Basically Hengshui High School

"Calling All Test-Takers"

This issue features a limited-time return appearance by Sanwenyan, author of Most Men's Chat Skills Are Worse Than EVE's.

Sanwenyan is a dating enthusiast. After trying out a pile of AI-era dating products, she concluded that AI dating is Hengshui High School, and sincerely suggested that LiangPei partner with civil affairs bureaus across the country to set up LiangPei marriage registration stations.

Here's what she wrote:

Since I didn't get big results from men back in the ancient pre-AI era, and now AI is blooming everywhere, I wanted to see whether today's dating apps could help me get big results.

Take LiangPei, the one that's been hyped a lot lately.

A full month passed between when I first heard about LiangPei and when I actually got to use it. It claims to do precision matching, and the registration process is notoriously long — extremely unfriendly to fragmented attention spans. Every time I exited midway, I'd forget about it.

First the AI matchmaker interrogates you for half an hour, then you fill out a mountain of information. You fight your way through checkpoint after checkpoint — it gave me the feeling that if you haven't suffered, you don't deserve to escape singledom.

LiangPei made me realize I'm still a looks person.

The app means well — it forces you to do endless questions and lays out everyone's values, family background, and partner requirements. In theory, I should be moved by all this information. But in practice, I speed-scroll through the photos first, then go back and read the text.

Because in dating, the order of attraction is: first you like the look of someone, and only then do you have the motivation to get to know them.

The most shocking thing, of course, was the "guaranteed marriage" membership: if you're not married within three years, you get a refund.

The marriage-and-dating world finally has its own version of Five Years of Gaokao, Three Years of Practice Tests. The grade director who used to bust students for dating too early is now nagging you to go on blind dates — ace the exam and get your tuition back.

And the entry-level LiangPei membership has gone from 100 yuan a month to 300 yuan per quarter at minimum. The bar for test-taking keeps rising.

The matching mechanism is 1v1: you send a like, and only when the other person replies does it count as a match. Then you can only chat with that one person — if it's not working out, you can unmatch.

Free users can only send one like per day. Members can send multiple.

It's easy to fall into a dead loop. The people who send me likes, I don't particularly want to reply to; the people I like probably don't particularly want to reply to me either.

Since you can only match with one person at a time, the psychological cost of starting a conversation is extremely high. If the other person doesn't seem that eager, you don't want to burn your one slot on them.

A while back, I finally managed to match with a guy on LiangPei. When we talked about registering, he said he'd chatted with the AI for 29 minutes and almost quit midway because it was such a hassle.

Meeting someone is really not easy — maybe that's what precision matching means. Only those who can finish the whole test paper are the honor students destined for big marriage results.

Along the way, I had the AI strategist in the chat window vet things for me, asking it from time to time, "Can we add each other on WeChat yet?" When it finally said the time was ripe, I sent my WeChat ID — and then nothing happened after that.

I don't know if the guy was too busy with work or what, but for two weeks after that, radio silence.

The AI strategist has a few preset prompts — conversation openers, the other person's attitude, post-chat reviews — like a cheat sheet, though you can also ask free-form questions.

But shouldn't the very beginning be the most exciting, freshest stage?

You're starting from zero — anything you talk about moves things forward. If you feel no curiosity about this person, and you need AI prompts just for basic daily conversation, what are you going to do when you actually meet in person?

If the opening is that laborious and you're forcing topics that aren't there, odds are you're just not on the same wavelength. And if you're headed in different directions while blindfolded and cheating, that's a problem — we really need to stop loving test-taking this much. Leaving the marriage question blank won't kill you.

Besides, the AI strategist isn't much good either. It's pure Doubao personality, and it doesn't factor in time.

Midway through, the guy and I went nearly two weeks without talking. I asked the AI how it thought things were going, and it answered "very well" — apparently it thought the whole conversation had happened "today."

The most awkward feature is "Find a topic." I assumed it would pop up a card of suggested topics for me to pick from. Instead, a question got sent straight into the chat. How embarrassing is that — there's even a class representative raising their hand on my behalf.

I was all set to savage this social-death feature, but then it occurred to me — the auto-sent message probably triggered a push notification, which reminded him of me. And so we added each other on WeChat.

Boldness works miracles. In dating, sometimes you can't predict which blind guess lands. But credit for that goes to the system's notification mechanics, not to AI.

This guy I met turned out to be the type who responds when pushed — no different from people I've met through other channels.

After all, on the other side is a real person with his own personality and behavior patterns, and AI can't change that.

Nor does the AI's analysis affect my assessment of him. With this little material, human intuition reads it faster than AI can.

If someone genuinely thinks that what gets said during a brief acquaintance needs an AI to interpret it, all I can say is this place is way too emotionally repressed — emotional comprehension skills lying dead on the roadside 😭

Most people online have no real-life overlap, limited mutual knowledge, and no irreplaceability.

Once the timing window for a conversation closes, it's hard to pick things back up. That's when you start thinking, maybe forget it — rather than wracking my brain to keep chatting, I could just go swipe on some other people.

Right — most dating app users have more than one product on their phone. If someone doesn't reply, it doesn't matter. As the saying goes, the ends of the earth are full of people to meet.

For example, the guy I matched with on LiangPei — the photos he posted were literally screenshots from the Tashuo app. He's probably genuinely too busy with work to dig through his photo album.

Dating culture really has gone mainstream. Even when it comes up in conversation, everyone is pretty open about it.

These days, most "AI social" is just dating apps bolting a big model onto an entry point — no real difference from before. Sign up for a new product and you'll run into familiar faces.

Running into a familiar face on Kanzhun

I also tried Kanzhun. This is a social product under Boss Zhipin. "Kanzhun" started out doing company reviews years ago; after shutting down a couple of years back, the group re-employed it by transforming it into a dating app.

Scroll Xiaohongshu casually and it's wall-to-wall recommendation posts — the ad spending is as aggressive as the old "find a job, talk directly to the boss" elevator ad blitz. Which is to say, now you can date by talking to Luke too.

On Kanzhun's profile page you can pick tags to generate your ideal-type portrait; there's an AI chat pet in the chat window to keep conversations going; and an "acquaintance card" starts a 48-hour 1v1. Every time I open the list and see a pile of unread messages, I keep hallucinating that I'm on Boss Zhipin.

Tashuo added a "The One" mode — you can pick 24 hours or permanent — and it also has an AI relationship assistant that analyzes chat history and offers advice.

Wait, why is it that once AI showed up, everyone started researching how to lock couples down? Every second counts, everyone has to deliver results. Dating has entered the Great Hengshui Era.

Back in the day, Tinder was thinking about how to make dating more fun, and designed the swipe gesture. Here, with AI, the thinking is: how do we boost efficiency and reach the finish line — marriage — faster?

Using AI as a broker to arrange marriages for humans — the era of serious matchmaking, adapted to the Chinese baby's constitution, has arrived.

These test questions existed before AI, too. If we're doing a renaissance, shouldn't we look up Jiayuan?

So I downloaded Jiayuan. I assumed it was a last-generation product, but it turns out plenty of 20-to-30-year-olds use it. One setting lets you mark tags on profile cards as like/dislike — the user gets turned into labeled data.

Jiayuan currently has no overseas universities listed — you can only verify via CHSI (the domestic academic credential system). So in the matchmaking market, a returnee with a foreign degree ranks below someone with an upgraded junior-college diploma. But LiangPei can verify overseas credentials through the CSCSE — that's one point for LiangPei.

After registering and browsing for a bit, I felt right away that I'd found the flavor. Every one of these users could be ported straight into LiangPei — each of them radiating a hunger for marriage.

Baihe acquired Jiayuan back in the day. It might want to consider acquiring LiangPei, too.

My sense is that LiangPei's users are big-city matchmaking test-takers who can't find a partner. They'd honestly be better off on Tashuo — the pool is bigger, and the vibe is relatively "serious" too.

But in reality, choosing a "serious" channel doesn't guarantee you'll meet your good match. It's more likely you'll meet people who love taking tests — people determined to treat marriage like a project to be completed.

The founder probably thinks that building a high-friction, test-and-filter registration system can solve the pain point of fast-food socializing.

But the human problem isn't something a dating app, as a channel, can solve. Across every platform, I've fairly evenly encountered serious-minded types, people I felt sparks with, people just passing through to make friends, and total mismatches. It mostly comes down to base numbers — big volume gives you probability.

LiangPei's founder says that people cast wide nets in the past because recommendations were inaccurate; now that AI filters things down, the ocean has become a pond, and approaching a pond with a wide-net mindset will make you miss the right person. Let's go: slow is fast.

But has it occurred to anyone that what I need from the internet is the ocean? A big pool is itself a user experience.

A lot of the time, casting a wide net isn't because the algorithm's recommendations aren't refined enough — it's that people are lost when it comes to their own feelings. Many don't know what they want, and don't have LiangPei's founder-level ability to write a 1,000-word profile.

AI is a tool. It can't resolve that lostness. It can only filter for you on the premise that you already know what you want — and the thing is, most people don't know.

Dating and romance are, at their core, a dynamic process of self-exploration and emotional practice. It's through colliding with different people — awkward silences, sparks, disappointments — that you gradually figure out what you like, what you can tolerate, and what suits you.

AI dating tries to forcibly speed-run this process, delivering everyone a Tsinghua-or-Peking-University-tier marriage.

But a dating app's mission is to make connections. What it can control is everything before the connection: how big the pool is, how many real users there are, how few scammers.

Once users add each other on WeChat and move into real life, what happens after is beyond the product's reach.

All these AI strategists, relationship analyses, and CP-locking features are piled up in the transitional zone before the WeChat exchange. The biggest value of that stage is getting through it as fast as possible — nobody wants to set up a home in the waiting room.

That said, I still can't quite bear to trash LiangPei. The product exudes an earnest, hardworking test-taker vibe inside and out, and a lot of people on it really do seem sincere about finding a match.

Life doesn't have to have just one goal, of course. But what if someone does need that marriage goal? And that someone is very likely your coworker or classmate — just a person looking for another person to build a life with.

In any case, LiangPei's values are commendably positive. My suggestion: partner with civil affairs bureaus around the country and set up LiangPei marriage registration stations. Register your marriage on-site, get your refund on the spot — maximum ceremony, maximum publicity value.

Besides, the civil affairs bureaus are also figuring out how to do fun stunts. This is way more reliable than clubbing at INS Land. Your marriage certificate might take less time to get than your LiangPei registration.

Watching the AI teach me how to chat reminded me of a moment from a few years ago:

While waiting for a reply, I typed and deleted, typed and deleted. What I wanted to say was: if you're about to tell me something I don't want to hear, you don't have to say it — I understand, just don't say it out loud. In the end I held back and never said it. And he turned out to be far gentler than I'd feared.

Feelings are that small, unsettled margin between two people that never quite gets calculated.

AI can catch you, but human love is imperfect — because on the other side is a person who might refuse you. The most important thing is still to be yourself.

And to friends who truly love taking tests: I wish you a successful landing on shore.

(The cover image for this piece was generated by ChatGPT; the writing is 100% human.)

One last plug: you're welcome to join our hackathon in Hangzhou — hack together your own AI Tinder and land your big results.

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