You have to kiss a lot of frogs before you find your prince — that’s the usual advice given to frustrated singles.

One might assume that online dating, with all those algorithms and preferences, would help highlight the princes (and princesses) faster. But unfortunately, according to a working paper for the Federal Reserve of St. Louis, the rise of dating apps has not made it any easier to find a soulmate.

That came as a bit of a surprise to the research team, economists Anton Cheremukhin, Paulina Restrepo-Echavarria and Antonella Tutino. They had expected to find that online dating would be a turbo boost to assortative mating — the decades-long trend of similar people coupling up.