number of matches, number of replies to messages, number of dates, number of longterm relationships
I personally don't have a desire to maximize any of these numbers. Do you know anyone who explicitly wants to maximize "number of longterm relationships?"
I was being Socratic but the point I was trying to make is that I don't think there exists *any* metric that can adequately capture what people are looking for in a relationship. Hence, it becomes difficult to conclude that anyone is being "suboptimal", either.
How do you measure "success" at dating? It is not clear to me that most people are "bad" at it unless you define the criteria for success.
I made tulpas because I was curious about the phenomenon. I did not find the creation process difficult. I thought for a long time about how to make tulpas useful but the best application I could find for them is possibly as a way of training an internal random number generator. I imagine they would be useful for fiction writing as well.