WHY WE ALL HAVE TINDER BURNOUT

Fed up with swiping and drained by dating apps, author explains why she’s gone back to finding love IRL (that’s in real life, for the non-cyber savvy) Lucy Vine

One writer reveals her reasons for seeking love in eral lief

Irecently downloaded Tinder again. I hadn’t been on it for about a year, but in a moment of boredom, sitting at my desk on a Wednesday afternoon, I fell back into bad habits.

Swiping through several depressingly familiar faces – a friend’s ex-husband, someone I went to school with, all the same men who were on it the year before – I felt a wave of misery. Sighing, I changed my bio to ‘Looking for someone to talk to about how much I hate Tinder’ and logged off.

In the past five years of being single, I’ve been on about 100 dates through apps such as Tinder, Hinge, Happn and Bumble. If that sounds like a lot, trust me, it has felt like more. But that’s the thing with dating apps – you have to commit to them. You have to give them your full attention and treat it like a job, because if you leave it more than 12 hours all your matches have already moved on to the next person.

When Tinder launched in 2012 that was fine – because it was fun. I could squeeze in four or five dates and return to my phone at the end of the week to plan more. It felt exciting – an endless treasure trove of potential soulmates. By 2014, there were one billion swipes producing 12 million matches every day.

But, slowly, it started feeling like a duty – and worse, like the only option for meeting someone. It became an exhausting, omnipotent reminder that I should be doing something about my singleness. If I confided about struggling to find a date, my friends in relationships would tell me how easy it was to meet people now, thanks to Tinder. One told me I had no excuse for being single. They didn’t understand that the app’s casual nature meant that while it was easy to get a date, it was even easier to get dumped. It also meant that being stood up, ignored or ghosted (withdrawing all communication without explanation) became the norm. I lost count of how many times men disappeared, often mid- conversation, after weeks of talking.

And I ghosted men, too. One person I matched with during my brief foray back on the app sent me a message, and when I replied he called me a ‘Tinder unicorn’ – something that’s so rare it’s practically mythical – simply because I had responded. I felt awful, because I nearly hadn’t – and I ignored that message. I started hearing the same stories over and over from single friends; Tinder is a ghost town full of abandoned profiles and, even if you manage to get a match, you probably won’t get a message.

Many of my friends had even more bizarre experiences when their dates did show up. A work colleague, Lindsay, had a guy leave ten minutes into dinner because he could ‘never date a vegetarian’. Andrea arrived to find her date had brought a friend and if she ‘wasn’t up for a threesome’ then they were off out without her (she wasn’t up for

Tinder became an exhausting reminder that I should be doing something about my singleness