This article is probably behind a paywall for a lot of you, so I'll copy and paste it. If you can access it though, I also recommend reading the reader comments:
"Abby, 28, has been on dating apps for eight years, bouncing between OkCupid, Bumble, Tinder, eHarmony, Match, WooPlus, Coffee Meets Bagel and Hinge. A committed user, she can easily spend two or more hours a day piling up matches, messaging back and forth, and planning dates with men who seem promising.
But really, she is just over it all: the swiping, the monotonous getting-to-know-you conversations and the self-doubt that creeps in when one of her matches fizzles. Not a single long-term relationship has blossomed from her efforts.
Other aspects of the experience weigh on her as well. Abby, a financial analyst, asked to be identified by only her first name because she was harassed by one match, and said she has regularly felt pressured to have sex with others. She is not alone: A 2020 Pew Research Center survey found that 37 percent of online daters said someone continued to contact them after they said they weren’t interested, and 35 percent had received unwanted sexually explicit texts or images.
Yet despite all of it — the time, the tedium and the safety concerns — Abby feels compelled to keep scrolling, driven by a mix of optimism and the fear that if she logs off, she’ll miss her shot at meeting someone amazing.
“I just feel burned out,” said Abby, who is contemplating spending $4,500 to work with a matchmaker. “It really is almost like this part-time job.”
Tinder turns 10 in September, prompting a moment of collective reflection about how apps have reshaped not just dating culture, but also the emotional lives of longtime users. Like Abby, many perennial users say years of swiping and searching have left them with a bad case of burnout — a nonclinical buzzword borrowed from workplace psychology that has been extended to topics including parenting and Zoom. As an article in The New York Times noted recently, people in the throes of burnout tend to feel depleted and cynical. For some, the only real option is to quit the dating apps cold turkey; for others, it is about finding smaller ways to set boundaries.
“People just get fatigued. They get overwhelmed with the whole dating process,” said Helen Fisher, a biological anthropologist who is a senior research fellow with the Kinsey Institute and chief science adviser to Match.com. Not everyone, of course. The 2020 Pew survey found that 12 percent of Americans have married or been in a committed relationship with someone they met online, while 57 percent of those who said they’d tried a dating app said their experience was somewhat, if not very, positive.
“I think it’s important to keep in mind that mental health dynamics on hookup apps vary widely by the individual,” said Dr. Jack Turban, an incoming assistant professor of child and adolescent psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco, who researches gender and sexuality. He said that the mental health impacts of dating apps had been understudied, but that many people had used them to successfully find community and connection.
There is evidence that exhaustion may be common, however. An April survey of 500 18- to 54-year-olds by the data analytics company Singles Reports concluded that nearly 80 percent said they experienced emotional burnout or fatigue with online dating. In 2016, Match included a question about fatigue on its annual survey of 5,000 single Americans, and about half of respondents said they were burned out with their dating life.
“After a decade of fruitless searching, I started to ask myself: What has all that time, all that effort, all that money, actually given me?” said Shani Silver, 40, a podcaster and the author of “A Single Revolution,” whose work focuses on changing negative societal narratives about being single.
“When you are consistently disappointed by a space that was sold to you as a path to love over and over and over again — for many of us, for years at a time — you never really stop to ask yourself: ‘What is this doing to my mental health? What is this doing to my well-being?’” Ms. Silver said.
In the end, she decided that dating apps had taken her time, money and energy, while giving her nothing in return. So on Jan. 26, 2019, Ms. Silver deleted her apps (Tinder, Bumble and Hinge), a decision she described as a kind of epiphany that was the “culmination of a decade of misery.”
The improvement in her mood and energy levels was swift and profound. Before she deleted the apps, she spent any moments of downtime swiping; after, she found she had time throughout the day to rest. She realized she had been feeling anger and resentment toward the happiness of others, and emotionally, mentally and physically drained by existing in a state of constant anticipation.
“Imagine anticipating receiving something good for years,” Ms. Silver said. “Existing in that state of ‘any day now’ for an extremely extended period of time is incredibly unhealthy.”
But Dr. Turban believes that for some, simply deleting the apps is not enough. “It’s important to understand why the apps are causing problems for you,” he said, adding that therapists can be helpful for sorting these answers out. “Are you using the apps to self-soothe anxiety and inadvertently making your anxiety worse? Are you afraid you can’t attain love, so you’re settling for hookups, and that’s making you unhappy?”
In addition to examining why the apps are bringing up feelings of dissatisfaction, there are also strategies users can try to feel less burned out while still remaining online, one of which may be to simply slow down and talk to fewer matches at once.
Bumble encourages users to “browse mindfully” and “stay balanced” (by focusing on other interests, like friends, family, work and self-care). A Tinder representative said in an email that the company understands “some members may feel overwhelmed, which is why we continue to develop new features that help people feel safe.” It believes that offerings like Tinder Explore — which allows users to navigate profiles by topics of interest — will give users more control over their search experience.
“People binge, and that is what exhausts them,” Dr. Fisher said. She recommends that app users stop scrolling and talking to other matches once they have found nine people they feel some level of connection with, and dedicate their time to really trying to get to know those people first. She points to research suggesting that people’s short-term memory systems cannot handle more than five to nine stimuli at once.
Dr. Fisher also believes that it can help to meet matches virtuallybefore deciding whether it is worth the time and energy to meet in real life.
It can be challenging to set those kinds of boundaries, however, particularly on apps that have been built to gamify dating and intimacy — and that can feel at once overstimulating and emotionally underwhelming.
“For me, it’s a period of obsessive use, followed by a period of burnout or feeling alienated and jaded,” said Essy Knopf, 35, who has been a member of geosocial dating apps targeted toward gay users for more than a decade. At first, the apps tended to give him an emotional boost — a rush of validation that temporarily masked feelings of boredom, isolation and loneliness.
“But actually what it was doing was eroding my mental health slowly,” said Mr. Knopf, who is a social worker and someday hopes to work with L.G.B.T.Q. clients around how to manage their use of dating apps. “You start to feel very disposable. You start to feel like the promise of connection is just out of reach.”
Mr. Knopf is now in a relationship with someone he met online, and has deleted all of his dating apps. Even so, he cannot shake the worry that he will be sucked into the whole exhausting cycle again.
“To me,” he said, “the fear is, ‘Oh gosh, if this relationship doesn’t work out, I’m back to square one of trolling dating apps, and putting myself through that nauseatingly tedious process all over again.’”"
My opinion:
The confluence of dating apps which are profit driven (and thus little incentive to make better matches), pornography and video games (which keep men occupied with artificial 'wins' and unmotivated to pursue real women), social atomization (possibly U.S.-specific, less opportunities to mingle, everyone's in the car, at work, or in isolated 'burbs), and women leveling up in general with less incentive to pair up with unattractive, mediocre men has led to a steep decline in heterosexual relationships, and this will continue unless several of the above issues are addressed.
Really bad luck for us Millennial/Gen Z girls, honestly 😩
Also, just a mini-rant about some of the comments underneath the original article...some were decent but some were a little gaslighty. Like, if you haven't found a partner yet maybe 'sOmeThInGs wRoNg wITh YoU' which...might be true in some cases, especially as it applies to men who are clueless as to how the opposite sex perceives them, but I think it's absolutely heartless when applied to women given everything I've just said about the current culture and dating companies (well, really just Match.com) lack of regard for anything but their profit margins.
Ok, I'm done. Your turn!
I'm surprised the apps took off the way they did, aside from people being connected to their phones, the social media phenomenon and the fact that it's the lazy option when you look at it critically it's just an extension of the old dating scene which had a reputation for being full of scumbags.
The format is mercenary, dehumanising and the attitude the apps force you to have just to use them would get you thrown out of venues and social circles for anti social behaviour. My concern with the apps aside from safety is the way that framing people as a commodity changes people's perception of others, considering that it's young people using it and that's their first experience of dating for a lot of them I worry about how it may have wired their brains to favour that style of dating, that view of themselves and women, how the art of proper sincere dating is being lost, and how people are opting out or settling instead of finding good healthy connections. It's like water everywhere but not a drop to drink.
I never got the appeal of dating apps (I understand what drives other people to them, I just never felt that drive myself) and I only consider men worth dating if they don't spend time on OLD. It just feels wrong to me. I'd rather meet someone organically, or not at all. Online dating feels too much like gambling, too dehumanizing, too impersonal. It seeks to make love and attraction consumable, which is just bound to have negative repercussions (see porn). You can meet great people online, I have done so in my life, but the context in which I met them was never dating-focused. I still believe any situation that's specifically designed to make you "find love" will always fail in doing so (for the vast majority of people). Trying to find a shortcut to happiness makes you miserable. As Mark Manson said, the pursuit of a positive experience is a negative experience.
I have deleted my apps almost a year ago, and I haven’t missed it or thought about getting it back. I think it helps that I am 32, child and marriage-free. They should have asked these women if they want to get married and have kids and when. I feel like the pressure to do it just kind of left the social sphere and went to the online one. It is not “I want a date to have fun” but “ I want a date because I am 3x yo and have z more years to start building a family. I always say, if I wanted to get married I would hire a matchmaker
Not to derail this whole thread but this little piece of article sounds like capitalist propaganda to me. 'Burnout' is somehow a buzzword meanwhile they were pushing the "bimboification" trend that died like 2 years ago on NYT.
The definition of insanity is doing something over and over and expecting a different result.
I think I have been using the apps to self-soothe anxiety and this making it worse. I feel much better now they're all defunct. The exception is Bumble, because I have a lifetime subscription. But check it very rarely and go back onto snooze.
the problemas are men and the profit-driven apps in my opinion.
Men - most of them are really shitty in real life. why would they be better online? the anonimity, the distance, the detachment is amplified in online dating. it's easier to just show their dicks sending an unsolicited picture on an app than to flash it in person. so yeah, i think men are the main problem in OLD.
Profit-driven apps - like you said, what matters is the money. they make the free version very limited and boring so people will pay to have a more interesting experience. they'll come up with ways to keep you swiping endlessly because if you find the one, you'll leave the app and they'll loose their profit.
i think the idea that "the one" is out there looking for us or waiting for us is bs. that's why i'm at peace with being single. if i meet a HVM who wants to date me, good. I'll have him. if that never happens, i'm good too. i'm working on enjoying my life the way it is. its difficult. sometimes being lonely makes me sad. but i think that if i had the dream-boyfriend there would be times when i would be sad for not being able to do things i get to do as a solo woman.
I’m in my late 30’s (married twice, 1 child) and live in a small city. I moved back from abroad, don’t really have friends or a way to meet people (I work from home). I hate dating apps, but if it wasn’t for them I wouldn’t have had a single date in the last 4/5yrs. I feel in your 20’s its much easier to just go out and meet someone organically, but in my age group (38-43) most guys are damaged goods or simply off the market (especially HVM). I‘d love to get off the apps for good, especially since they’re filled with scrotes, but where would I meet a guy in my age range?! I think its easy to say, get off the app and just wait for the HVM to find you, but its not realistic. Guys here in my home country (European one) never approach me, whereas in the US or UK, they would. I know I’m way off topic with this post, but I wanted to share my view on OLD in general…
agreed with what you said. however i also agree with the burnout abby mentioned because i experienced that pre-FDS. now i no longer care about dating apps and focus on my own journey. if the right person is out there then i'll eventually find them. if not then i have a great life as is.