How Online Dating Apps Can Lead To Burnout

“I think it’s important to keep in mind that the dynamics of mental health on hook-up apps vary greatly from individual to individual,” said Dr. Jack Turban, incoming assistant professor of psychiatry. child and adolescent at the University of California, San Francisco, which studies gender. and sexuality. He said the mental health impacts of dating apps have been understudied, but many people have used them to successfully find community and connection.

There is, however, evidence that exhaustion can be common. An April survey of 500 18- to 54-year-olds by data analytics firm Singles Reports found that almost 80% said they felt emotional exhaustion or fatigue with online dating. In 2016, Match included a question about fatigue in its annual survey of 5,000 American singles, and about half of respondents said they were exhausted from their love life.

“After a decade of fruitless research, I began to ask myself: what has all this time, all this effort, all this money really got me?” said Shani Silver, 40, podcaster and author of “A Single Revolution,” whose work focuses on changing negative societal narratives about singleness.

“When you’re constantly let down by a space that’s been 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 wonder. “What does this do to my mental health? What does this do to my well-being?,” Ms Silver said.

In the end, she decided that dating apps had taken her time, money and energy, giving her nothing in return. So on January 26, 2019, Ms Silver took down her apps (Tinder, Bumble and Hinge), a move she described as something of an epiphany that was the “culmination of a decade of misery”.

The improvement in her mood and energy level was rapid and profound. Before deleting apps, she would spend all downtime scanning; afterwards, she found that she had time throughout the day to rest. She realized that she had felt anger and resentment towards other people’s happiness, and was emotionally, mentally, and physically drained from existing in a state of constant anticipation.

“Imagine expecting to receive something good for yearssaid Ms. Silver. “Existing in this state of ‘any day now’ for an extremely prolonged period of time is incredibly unhealthy.”