What’s behind the burnout of those looking for relationships in apps

Andy Hong feels like he’s always meeting the same woman online: a graduate of a small New England school who enjoys skiing and playing sports.

A 28-year-old from Boston, in the United States, he says he has nothing against these types of women, but he is not necessarily interested in them. He knows that there are all kinds of people in the world that he could have a romantic relationship with.

This repetition is wearing him down, but the dating app Hinge continues to recommend people of the same standard. “[O Hinge] pleases a pattern and offers that pattern to you,” says Hong.

That experience left Hong with what he calls “decision fatigue” – and what other people call “dating app burnout”. This phenomenon is common in the world of dating apps.

People get tired of endlessly scrolling the screen in search of possible matches available in apps. Many users are frustrated with the time they spend looking online, compared to the time they spend on real dates.

“Purely from a numbers standpoint, out of every 10 hypothetical people presented by the app, you’re likely to have an established conversation with seven or eight,” says Hong. “Out of these seven or eight, you can filter one or two [para encontros presenciais].”

But these days, singles are hard pressed to step into the world of online dating – even though many know it’s a difficult and possibly disappointing pursuit.

A 2019 study showed that online dating has become a much more likely way to meet a partner than a casual encounter. But the price can still be high: A recent survey by British dating app Badoo showed that more than three-quarters of singles felt drained by the unsatisfying interactions and inappropriate pairings offered by the platforms and apps.

A survey by the Hinge app also found that a significant portion of its users (61%) felt overwhelmed by the modern dating process, and in April 2022, a US study showed that four out of five adults “felt some degree of emotional fatigue or burnout from online dating”.

Still, people continue to use dating apps to find potential partners. It seems that, despite bad experiences, these apps remain one of the easiest ways to meet people for dating in a world that is increasingly shifting to online platforms.

But when people stay on these apps to find their peers, are there ways to lighten that task?

‘Too much to research’

Dating app burnout is defined as exhaustion from prolonged use, according to Nora Padison, a licensed professional counselor at Space Between Counseling Services in Baltimore, United States.

There are some basic signs of this exhaustion: the user associates negative feelings with the act of opening dating apps; using the app and the resulting dating process makes you tired; and it looks like a “second job,” according to Padison, who runs two “modern dating support groups” for adults ages 25 to 35.

According to research by Leah LeFebvre, a professor of communication studies at the University of Alabama, more than half of the 395 Tinder users she surveyed in 2017 had deleted the app more than once.

In about 40% of cases, the deletion happened because the user had started a relationship. But 35% of respondents said they got rid of the app because they “felt unsuccessful”. That is, they “didn’t get answers, didn’t pair up, didn’t find potential partners or had negative experiences,” LeFebvre told the BBC in an email.

Some of those surveyed were simply “annoyed” or “tired” of using the app; others found it “useless”. These are all signs of dating app burnout.

“Sometimes I get burned out when I feel like I have to search literally 100 people to find someone that I think is reasonably interesting, or that I might want to talk to,” says Rosemary Guiser, a 32-year-old speech therapist in Philadelphia. “Sounds like a lot to research.”

Guiser started using apps like Bumble and Hinge when he ended a relationship in January 2022. But his first experience with dating apps was in 2013 and 2014, with OkCupid and Tinder. She says she started feeling drained from the apps almost “immediately after opening them.”

“The process of chatting with someone, planning a date and then meeting them – it’s a lot of time and work,” says Guise, adding that he doesn’t like chatting on apps because text conversations don’t give you a real view of the other person.

“You can have a great conversation, but then you meet the person and, within 10 seconds, you realize they’re not someone you want to meet,” she says – and that’s a waste of time. And it can also be a huge emotional disappointment to realize that the person who seemed to be a great match online actually doesn’t exist in real life.

Design and behavior issues

The design of dating apps can also be a source of frustration for weary users. Guiser, for example, got tired of finding paid features that would have improved his app experience, but for which he preferred not to pay.

The first thing she looks for in a potential partner, for example, is his political convictions. But she says that, in the Bumble app, you have to pay to filter people based on these characteristics. And because she doesn’t pay, she’s “forced to research dozens and dozens of people I wouldn’t want to see again.”

It’s also a pain to browse multiple dating apps at once, but many people use more than one app because they think it increases their chance of finding a match.

Jumping from one interface to another can cause problems. “I get used to the interface of one app, then I go to the other and then it’s like, ‘oops, I just deleted someone I wanted to like’ or ‘I just liked someone, but I just wanted to see the pictures,'” says Guiser. .

And there is the challenge of interacting with peers. This part of the process opens up a whole new set of discouraging experiences, as many have a tendency to behave disrespectfully during online dating.

A 2016 survey by dating platform Plenty of Fish, for example, found that out of 800 millennial respondents, 80% were ghosted (their peers disappeared without a trace) in the process.

With the screen to mediate interactions between people, it’s easier for someone to miss seeing the person they’re communicating with as a human being – they almost become characters in an online dating game. This makes it easier not to treat them humanely.

Women in particular face the most harassment on dating apps. Among female users under the age of 35, 44% reported being called by offensive names, while 19% faced threats of physical harm on dating sites and apps, according to a survey by the American think tank. Pew Research Center.

Australian researcher and author specializing in digital wellness Joanne Orlando believes that “people play online more and more often” – that is, not all people who use dating apps are there sincerely to find a match.

But even those who are sincere can be cruel to other users, either intentionally or because it is difficult to treat everyone with equal and appropriate levels of humanity. Repeated negative treatment online can contribute to people’s sense of negativity and burnout towards these apps.

Stay or leave?

But regardless of burnout, many people, like Andy Hong, remain on apps.

“Can you compare a little [os aplicativos de relacionamento] with Amazon or Facebook”, according to Nora Padison, “because they are so accessible that they ended up making it standard” to use dating apps instead of meeting people in other ways – even for users who don’t like the platforms. And the covid pandemic -19, she said, also got people used to online interactions and made many feel the need to select their peers before meeting them in real life.

It is also not so easy to meet romantic partners in physical spaces, especially for those who are not the type to go to bars. Padison suggests looking for group activities so you can meet people with common interests, but that doesn’t always work. Hong, for example, says he attended a community garden, but “I’m the youngest person there, decades apart… that’s not how I’m going to meet someone.”

Instead, he’s coming up with ways to more effectively use dating apps. “I’ll look for it by marking it in red”, he says – the idea is to learn how to quickly select aspects in a person’s profile that indicate whether or not they are the right choice for him.

But that can also be tiring. “In this eternal judgment, you’re running away from traps and it’s mentally draining,” he says.

App dating expert Bumble Carolina West suggests dealing with dating apps more objectively. “Most people on Bumble report that they now first discuss with their partners what they want,” she says.

West recommends that users limit themselves to connecting with two or three potential peers at a time, focusing on quality rather than quantity. Bumble also has a feature that allows exhausted users to interrupt their activities so they can take a break, alerting peers that they are “on rest”.

For some people, a break from finding a relationship is just what they need. Padison says he’s guided some clients facing dating app burnout to delete all of them and use the time to work on themselves.

Rosemary Guiser has stopped using dating apps because she is seeing someone. It’s not an exclusive relationship and she could continue to look for other partners in the apps. But she liked the opportunity to take a break.

After all, when using the apps, Guiser got caught up in a toxic train of thought of “I’ll never meet anyone if I don’t use these apps very blatantly.” This ended up making her feel bad about herself and the experience.

She needed to learn survival strategies to keep dating experiences from getting her down, like asking herself certain questions to make sure she felt good before swiping (swiping a suitor’s photo to like or not).

“Am I enjoying this? Or am I doing it just because I’m lonely and feeling sad?” were some of the questions. “I was trying to figure out if I was scrolling pessimistically, looking at people and just getting discouraged.”

Unfortunately, this pessimism was more frequent than the positive experiences in the apps. That’s when Guiser learned to hang up the phone.

This text was published here