Online Dating Has Made Me Undateable

I love being single but I hate dating. In fact, I enjoy being single only when I’m not dating or looking for sex. I’m lucky though. I’m naturally one of those introverted-extroverts who love being on their own. I crave spending days alone, I like going to events where I know no one and I frequently travel solo. But that doesn’t mean that sometimes the dating doesn’t make me feel very alone.

Recently, I realised that I would like to be in a relationship again, or at least to maybe see someone for a bit. I craved romantic intimacy, but being completely candid, I craved respect, which is not something I’ve experienced while dating on the apps. No amount of therapy, ride-or-die friends, exercise or hobbies can prepare you for the self-esteem plummeting experience of online dating. It doesn’t matter if you think you’re genuinely a catch, online dating will scrape the barrel to make sure that every single one of us is endowed with a plentiful supply of unsolicited dick pics, insults, sleaze, ghosting and unprecedented blocking for no apparent reason.

No one is safe. It doesn’t even seem superficial. The prettiest, thinnest, cleverest, most charismatic people I know have all been subject to the same barrage of exhausting disrespect. It’s enough to leave the sanest, most secure person feeling paranoid and utterly defeated. But like most technology, online dating has diminished humankind’s capacity to partake in the previous non-virtual version–all while facilitating the redundancy of meeting people in real life altogether. So, I guess we’re stuck with it.

Those who are lucky enough to not endure years of online dating will question my part to play in all of this. It happens the moment I open up about having ‘bad luck’ dating. I understand why people in relationships seek to blame single people for being unattached. Because if I’m not the problem, we’re faced with a far bigger one: technology has made us all capable of being pretty shitty to one another, and a lot of the ‘good’ guys and girls we know have treated people on dating apps pretty badly.

In order to try and limit my own bad encounters, I’ve found myself moderating my own profile and behaviour. Because, as some of my taken friends have suggested, maybe I should check what I’m doing to attract the ‘wrong’ guys. Now, my profile says I am looking for a relationship. I block guys who make creepy ‘jokes’. I don’t say yes to men whose profiles suggest they’re only looking for a good time. I usually talk to guys for a week before meeting so that the sleazy ones can reveal themselves before I waste my time. I have even second guessed whether a top that I’m wearing in one of my pictures shows that I have big breasts and therefore might be inviting guys to say gross things. Honestly, I don’t have the emotional stamina to hear one more sleazy comment disguised as “banter”. I’m tired.

About a month ago, I had been talking to a man who seemed super sweet. He did charity work, he’d travelled solo and he worked in mental health. Great. No way he could be awful, surely. Then, like everyone else, he eventually started commenting on my body. I didn’t respond. A few hours later, I received a sexually explicit message from an unknown number who called me by name and referenced my breasts in the same way that this man had done. Apparently, this guy was giving my number out to his friends. I didn’t respond to that either. Then, at 11:30am the following morning, I received a picture of him naked and erect in front of a mirror. I told him how disrespectful it was and he called me “annoying and fat” and blocked me.

I was utterly defeated once again. My housemate, who has been in a relationship with a wonderful man for ten years exasperated, “How do you keep up hope?! How do you just keep doing this again and again? I’d just give up.” I couldn’t respond. I have given up a number of times and now I’m also exhausted from that. I’m exactly what I seem to be: jaded.

So, “take a break”, right? Last year I took a long period of time off the apps after a date assaulted me. During the pandemic, I took another four months off from dating because it seemed like a great excuse to just focus on myself, my art and my health. The first person I spoke to after this break was our friend, unsolicited-dick-pic-guy. Then, the first guy I went on a date with somehow skipped the bill, came before he’d even put his dick in me and blocked me five minutes after he texted offering to cook me dinner to make up for it.

What about “meeting people in person”? The apps have changed the real world, making this far less possible than it seems. But finally, this year, I found myself with a crush on a friend. However, by this point, the apps had left me anxious and insecure about dating in general. If you met me in person, you’d probably be surprised. I seem forthright, confident and bubbly. And I am those things. My insecurity is specifically triggered from dating. Because with every break I take from the online apps, the crushing let down after deciding to be optimistic again gives you a shorter and shorter fuse.

I’ve been flirting with this friend of mine for about six months. We recently hung out for nine hours and had sex for the first time. I’m not 100% sure what I want. Do I just want good sex with someone who respects me? Is it something more? I’m OK to just figure that out along the way. Yet even though we established a solid friendship, even though he was respectful and even though we have enough connections in common that means he can’t logistically ghost me, I find myself filled with residual panic from online dating. It’s not even related to me liking him, though I do. It’s the fucking trauma that’s been building and building for years. It’s the lessons that have been repeatedly enforced: people only want you for sex, men won’t respect you after sex, people will take you out and then ghost you, and every text is just 140 characters away from being rejected again with no explanation.

But I know that I’m not alone. I have an incredible group of friends who share their dating lives with me and I’m aware that these are not only my experiences. They are the lives and trauma of an entire generation. I don’t know when I became so anxious about dating and I don’t know how to stop feeling this way. I don’t know how to convince my beautiful, intelligent, kind friends that they deserve better because I know that regardless of whether it’s personal, being treated badly just makes you feel bad.

If you experience poor treatment over an extended period of time with little to no evidence that you could be treated to the contrary, it slowly changes you. It’s subtle at first. You start deleting and re-downloading dating apps sporadically. Suddenly, dating stories don’t feel like funny anecdotes anymore. Then, you stop sharing stories altogether, because it feels like at some point, it becomes ‘too many’ to share. Then, months down the track, you find yourself sure that you can spot the extremely subtle signs of someone pulling back and that you can predict to the day when you’ll be ghosted. Then, you find yourself lying in bed wondering how you came to be ‘that person’. Because despite the fact that you feel like this can’t be your fault, dating has made you undateable.

So here I am, once again left to myself to ask, will this person do what almost every single date has done to me for the last two and a half years? And I suppose, even though we met in real life, that answer is still always 140 characters away.

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Previously published on medium

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Photo credit: istockphoto