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What do you see when you peel back the curtain of a dating app? What does the app assume about love, and how you find it? We sat down with Michael Patterson, the president of the Mutual Dating App, to ask how the app envisions the arc from swiping to commitment. Michael was Mutual's first employee, so he has watched the app grow, learn, and improve over time. Though he's seen thousands of couples find love and get married, he's also heard countless complaints about dating apps, from swiping fatigue to safety concerns. 

Michael shares his own love story, in this conversation; he met his wife as a teen and dated only her until they married years later. This means he doesn't have first-hand experience with swiping for love, but he does have wisdom on what commitment is like: you get to a point where other options--no matter how many of them there are  -- simply aren't real to you. Can the rest of us get there, in our tech-enabled dating world, designed to feed us new options endlessly? Michael shares tips on how to maximize the effectiveness of dating apps and, most importantly, not lose sight of what we want along the way.

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