Keeping up with the conversations on your dating apps can sometimes start to feel like a bit of a chore – life admin that you don’t particularly enjoy but feel obliged to trudge through anyway.

But now, new research has shone a light on why we often find it so difficult to keep up with – and it could be to do with how many people we’re trying to talk to at once.

Researchers from the Oxford Internet Institute used data from dating site eHarmony to find that we have a “maximum limit” of people we can communicate with at once. The majority of us send message requests to, at most, 12 new people per week – and can concentrate on no more than seven replies at once.

If you consider yourself ‘attractive’, you’re also less likely to respond to or initiate conversation and are likely to have fewer chats going at once.

This is how many people we can talk to at once on dating apps