Do I Need a Dating App Detox?

Hi Doctor,

I’m a 33yo cis/het man who recently deleted all of my dating app profiles. I’ve been using Hinge since February of this year and to be fair, I think I did a lot better than most men on the app. I’m able to reliably get matches and dates with women I’m attracted to. I hit a couple of milestones this year. I had my first hookup and I also connected with a woman I really liked and we dated exclusively for a little over a month (7 dates total, a personal record) but things took a turn for the worst after she and I got done. I was devastated as I liked her a lot and could see myself with her for a long time.

I went on a tear of going on dates and to be honest, not being very discerning with who I went out with (I just wanted to prove to myself she wasn’t a fluke and thought giving more women more chances was the answer). I got jerked around and got several last minute cancellations. The little rejections piled up on me. I was getting really down on myself and got rid of Hinge after having a breakdown.

I felt some relief after deleting my profile, but soon had that nagging voice telling me I’m missing out and won’t be able to make up the time I’m losing. I’m diagnosed with OCD and am prone to repetitive/intrusive thoughts so that and the FOMO were driving me nuts so I tried Bumble. I really didn’t like it. Compared to Hinge, it was very convoluted and I got several matches who expired (a few were women who matched with me on hinge too, funnily enough), so I deleted that.

Since then I’ve had this background noise anxiety where I’m feeling like I quit, I lost, I failed. I really don’t think re-downloading Hinge is the answer. I’m a very social person. I’m involved in improv, rock climbing, yoga, the dance community, exercise groups, and I have a lot of friends. I feel like the apps have broken my brain in a sense. I find myself comparing myself to the people around me when I’m out doing things, wondering if someone is too “good” or above me for me to speak to, feeling like I’m a fraud if I go out and pretend I’m feeling ok or tell my friends everything is fine. I’m hanging with a close friend tomorrow and I’m hesitant to even bring this up with her out of a mix of embarrassment and shame.

How would you spent your free time if you needed to detox from dating apps? I’ve relied on them for most of this year for finding dates. I don’t want to feel this way about myself anymore.

Bad Brain, No Biscuit

Alright BBNB, say it with me now: “the problem you have isn’t the problem you think you have.”

This really isn’t a dating app problem and it’s not really something that you need a digital detox from – though, to be quite honest, that’s something that will certainly help. You’re not alone in finding that the dating apps mess with your head and sense of emotional well-being and self-esteem; you just have a harder and more chronic case than most. This is why the problem is what’s going on in your head and heart. You have a toxic relationship with the apps, but that toxicity is reacting to issues you already have. The apps are just exacerbating it.

And in fairness, that’s basically what the apps are designed to do. One of the things that folks are starting to catch onto is the fact that most dating apps – the Match Group owned ones in particular – function like Candy Crush. They’re weaponized FOMO, using the algorithm to give you a little algorithmic boost at the start, then dialing it back once you get a taste. The app gets you hooked into a ludic loop – a tech-bro term for intermittent reinforcement – where you get a little dopamine hit from the anticipation of a match or finding a new profile. Much like slot machines, they encourage mindless swiping in hopes that maybe this one will pay out. Meanwhile – again, much like Candy Crush – they use little hints of what’s behind the paywall with their weekly rose/super like/whatever with the hint that somehow this will make these “exclusive” matches more likely to match with you.

(It’s somewhat notable how these matches never show up in your main feed, ever… which, ironically enough, punishes them as well, for the sin of being in high demand.)

They are, frankly, relying on making you fear that you’re missing out and you’re a fool for not spending more. Meanwhile this plays straight into your emotional issues and mental health challenges and manifestly makes your quality of life worse. So while there’re ways to be more mindful in your dating app usage, quite frankly, I think going cold turkey and focusing on your mental health is going to be more important.

There are a couple of things that I think you should be focusing on. The first is very simple: it’s ok to not be OK. There’s nothing shameful in admitting that things are hard, that you’re dealing with things that you may not be able to handle on your own, or that you might need reassurance or comfort from friends and loved ones. Nor is there anything shameful about saying “what I’m doing for my mental health isn’t working the way I would hope.” Mental health care is as much art as it is science, and often it’s a matter of figuring out what’s going to work for now as circumstances change.

It’s also perfectly OK to recognize that something isn’t working for you, isn’t meeting your needs, or otherwise is making your life worse. Quitting the apps because they’ve been having a profoundly negative effect on your overall quality of life isn’t “failing” or “giving up”, it’s recognizing a bad scene for what it is and responding accordingly. The apps were encouraging behavior that had a negative effect on your life and emotional well-being. We can debate whether that’s the intended outcome or a side-effect, but the effect ultimately is the same. That’s something worth excising from your life. It would be the same if it were a toxic friend or relationship, a job or anything else in your life. It just hits different because, in this case, it plays into your feelings of identity and self-worth. It feels like failing because they want you to feel like this is the only way to meet women. But strangely, the human race has been meeting, mating and falling in love without Hinge’s assistance for 99.9% of human existence.

But to be quite honest, I think you’re still going to have problems dating, regardless of how you meet people. The fact that Hinge exacerbated those feelings of worthlessness or not being good enough doesn’t mean that those feelings originated there. It just happened to be the trigger. At the risk of sounding like a feel-good-woo-woo-wellness influencer, I really think right now the relationship you need to focus on is your relationship with yourself.

The issue of your being “good enough” isn’t about objective comparisons; those are literally impossible. It’s about your own understanding and recognition of your worth, independent of other people or what other folks think. And yes, I understand the argument of “well, why should my opinion on my own worth matter if others might disagree”, I just reject it as relevant. After all, I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, but a lot of people are, frankly, morons, and I wouldn’t trust their judgement on cheese.

But also, when you can’t trust in your own worth, you end up having the precise issues you’ve run into before – dating people, not because you like them or because you feel like they would be a good partner for you, but because you have something to prove. It doesn’t matter if you’re trying to prove something to yourself, to the world or simply to the invisible Greek Chorus in your head. When you are dating to prove a point, you’re setting yourself up for misery and bad relationships. You will date people who aren’t right for you but who say “yes”, simply because you’re throwing bodies at a problem that can’t be cured by external means. The call is coming from inside the house, but so too is the solution.

You mention that you have OCD and this is how the intrusive thoughts currently manifest. I think addressing those should be the starting point for your digital detox. I don’t know what form of treatment you’re currently pursuing, but if it hasn’t been helping, then it may be worth talking to your therapist about taking a different tack. There’re a number of different treatments for OCD, from talk therapy to medication. While a combination of treatments may help, one I think you may want to look into – if you haven’t already – is cognitive behavioral therapy. CBT has been found to be especially helpful in dealing with intrusive and unwanted thoughts, especially as you’re encouraged to really wrestle and pick those thoughts apart, to dig into where they come from and what they actually mean. I think that might be well worth your time to explore for a while, especially with the help of a trained mental health professional.

I think it would also help for you to work on not just your self-worth (for obvious reasons) but to allow yourself to be vulnerable and to allow the people who love and care for you to give you the support and comfort you clearly crave. I think it would help you immensely if you didn’t feel as though you had to take up so much of your mental and emotional bandwidth by projecting this image of “everything’s fine, nothing is wrong, I am the very model of a modern major millennial”. Not only does this isolate you from the people who would most want to support you, but it also means that you have less energy and mental resources to give to effective self-care, which is what you need more than anything else.

Decoupling your self-worth from your social calendar is going to be important, especially since it means you don’t even get a chance to truly appreciate how much you’ve accomplished and how far you’ve come. Your social schedule is great, but there’s a point where trying to fill the hours for the sake of filling the hours just ends up being an unhealthy coping mechanism in and of itself. Sometimes you need to take time to yourself to recover, to recoup and to do things simply because you want to do them, not because they fit on a list of “these things make me more attractive/desirable to others” or “this would look good on my dating profile”.

One last thing I would suggest is to recognize that even minor issues – like the last-minute cancellations – can hurt, especially when they play into your pre-existing issues. Individually they may not be much, but a paper cut ain’t much but it still stings. A dozen paper cuts may not be a risk to life and limb, but dozens of them are going to sting like a sonofabitch and make everything just a little bit worse. And when you’re already feeling like you’re holding on by your fingernails, even a little bit can make a big difference.

So as I said: if you’re going to take this as a detox, then actually detox. Not just from the dating apps, but from the emotional poison you’ve been letting build up while you’ve been using those apps. The apps may be the currenttrigger, but until you start to drain and clean the wound, then all that’s going to happen is that a new trigger is going to crop up and start the cycle again. The best way to avoid that is treat the core wound, not the external problems.

It’s time to treat yourself the way you deserve to be treated. And that starts by doing the hard and frequently unpleasant work of healing and conquering your internal demons. But once you do? You’re going to be a goddamn monster out there.

Good luck.

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Dear Dr. NerdLove,

Hi! I’m the person with the foreign boyfriend from the August 19th column. Here are answers to some of your requests for more information.

For whether this has always been a long-distance relationship and how long we’ve been together, the answer is…four months, two and a half of which I’ve spent in his country. We’d met at a professional conference a few years back and stayed in touch as friends. When my divorce settlement finally worked its way through the court system, I decided I’d go on a trip somewhere nice, and he offered to host. I showed up, and… bam, love.

This sounds really bad, I know.

I’d gone on the trip hoping I could clear my head and figure out what to do next with my life – I knew I wanted a career change, and I knew I wanted to move somewhere different. I’d lived in his country before (loved it) and had a basic grasp of the language, and I’d been in a long-distance relationship before that prolonged something that really should have ended, so, moving over there as fast as humanly possible seemed the thing to do. I’d been broke prior to the divorce settlement and had been couch-surfing amongst the guest rooms of anyone who would take me. I was also unemployed, having not been able to hold a job for several years due to disability.

The disability in question is post-traumatic stress disorder. Most of the stereotypes of veterans startling from loud noises, fearing crowds, and needing to sit with their back to a wall so they can do threat surveillance will also apply to me. Luckily, my boyfriend is Mr. Tiny Village Country Life, so we already share the same basic preference for quiet places not around people, and apartments in tiny villages connected by train are also the ones that are the cheapest and most available. So most of our arguments boil down to him asking my opinion of a place, me offering a threat assessment (b/c PTSD), him getting frustrated I’m not giving him relatable information, and me feeling like he’s invalidating my disability. Or, I want the place with less foot traffic and he wants the place that’s closer to a grocery store. You know.

For getting a job and then moving – from the research I’ve done so far, it seems like the necessary order of operations will be moving, then getting a job. With my career gap the only success I’ve had moving to the interview stage has come from in-person networking, which obviously I can’t do from afar. Most jobs also want you to speak the language at a high intermediate level, and the language classes offered in my home region only go up to a low intermediate level. I can legally stay 90 out of every 180 days in his country on just a tourist visa, but that leaves me couch surfing in my home country among various mentally ill or misogynist relatives, plus it’s too short a duration in any one place to really make a social network or build up friends. I can make friendly acquaintances, but I have to leave before I can put the time in to make it something more. I have the money now to rent an apartment in my own country…but for the reasons described above, that would probably mean giving up on being able to move to my boyfriend’s.

For what the real issue is: we did, thanks to your advice, sit down and have a talk about this. It seems to boil down to, we have different ideas of what security looks like. For me, it’s having a place of my own or with someone I’m not going to need to up and run from (see: couch-surfing with misogynist and mentally ill relatives). For him, he recently got out of a toxic relationship (I totally believe it – his friends’ eyes get glassy at the mention of her name), and security means not stretching himself out of true for another person. Totally reasonable! I’ve decided to apply for Master’s programs in his country, in cities nearby but not in his city, and if something comes through on the job/housing front in the meantime, I can roll with it – unless you have other ideas?

Thanks, by the way, for pointing out that forgetting commitments isn’t necessarily a moral failing. I hadn’t had any experience (that I knew of) with people like this! But thinking back over things, he has a pattern of forgetting literally anything, without regard to how much he’s interested in it, how enjoyable the activity is, and how much he cares about the people involved. He forgot to bring things to his own beloved sister’s wedding. He forgot his own long COVID doctor’s appointments. From now on, I’m just going to assume that he has a leaky memory just like I can’t walk up hills without sweating like a hippo. People are different, it’s a thing, it happens.

Thanks again, doc!

I Hate Apartments

Thanks for writing back with more information; that definitely helps clear up a few questions that I had.

I will say, however, that I don’t think this manifestly changes the advice I gave. While I understand your reasoning and the challenges you’re facing, I think that trying to move to a foreign country by finessing the paperwork around a tourist visa is going to put up so many roadblocks and hassles that it’s going to make trying to overcome them an exercise in frustration without a commensurate level of reward at the end. If anything, I think it would make trying to actually get a job even harder than it would be; what are you going to do if you reach a third round of interviews while you’re having to return home until you’re eligible for another tourist visa? And that’s before we get into questions about whether that country has laws about seeking employment on a non-employment visa…

There’s also the fact that, quite frankly, I think four months is far too early to be considering moving in together, especially in a foreign country. While every couple is different, the fact of the matter is that at four months – especially when only two of them have been in the same physical space – you barely know each other, and certainly not as a couple. You don’t speak the same “language” yet – as we’ve seen from your conflicts over finding an appropriate living situation – nor have you had the time together to really find your footing as a team, rather than two people who happen to be sharing a bed.

While I think seeing about pursuing an advanced degree in his country is a viable option, I do think that the best option you may have is one you like least: getting your own place and rebuilding your career in your home country. While I understand that this would mean putting your dream on immigrating on hold, it would only be on hold, not canceled or postponed indefinitely. Think of it as laying the groundwork for future success – not only with your resume and erasing that employment gap, but also managing your PTSD so that it isn’t as dominating a presence in your life. I suspect that once you smooth those particular rough patches, you’ll find it a lot easier to achieve your goals – from employment, to acquiring the necessary fluency, and to a mutually satisfactory living situation. And it will be far easier to accomplish all of them if you’re not feeling like you’re having to stay one step ahead of the gendarmerie. In the meantime, you two can work on communication and expectations and figuring out how to mesh well with one another, so that you both aren’t driving each other to frustration by not speaking the same metaphorical language.

Yes, it won’t be on the time table you would prefer, and I totally understand how frustrating that can be. But I suspect that being willing to press pause and lay the foundations now will make it all a much smoother, less maddening process overall and give your relationship a much stronger chance of making it through the chaos.

Good luck.

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This post was previously published on Doctornerdlove.com and is republished on Medium.

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