Ten years after the launch of Tinder, some long-term online daters say endless swiping has been bad for their mental health.
Credit...Max Guther
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 virtually before 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.'"
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/31/well/mind/burnout-online-dating-apps.html