Why does dating on apps feel so tiring?

“Happiness in marriage is entirely a matter of chance.” So says Charlotte Lucas in Pride and Prejudice, long before anyone had to leave a party early to answer a stranger’s “hey :)”.

Chance has had a makeover since then. It now lives in your pocket, buzzes during dinner and asks you to rank humans by their third photo. If that leaves you wrung out, pull up a chair. Here are the questions people actually ask, answered the way a friend would: briefly, honestly, with a refill.

Is it just me, or is this genuinely tiring?

Not just you. You’re in very large company. Pew Research Center found that 30% of US adults have used a dating site or app at some point, rising to 53% of those under 30. Among people who’d used one in the past year, 88% said the people they saw left them disappointed at least sometimes. And 79% said they felt excited at least sometimes.

That’s the whiplash in two numbers. Hope, letdown, hope, letdown, all before lunch.

Okay, but why does the format itself wear me down?

Because it hands you a buffet and then asks you to pick one grape.

In a well-known grocery store study, researchers Iyengar and Lepper set out a display of 24 jams and, at another time, a display of 6. The big display drew more shoppers. The small one got far more people to actually buy. Lots of options are fun to look at and weirdly hard to act on.

Now swap jam for people. About four in ten Americans told Pew these platforms offer too many choices. The jams would like a word.

Why do I get pickier the longer I scroll?

There’s research on exactly that. Across three studies, Pronk and Denissen found that people rejected more potential partners the further they went through a run of online profiles. From the first option to the last, the chance of saying yes dropped by 27% on average. Their explanation: as people kept going, they grew less satisfied with the pictures and felt less successful at dating overall.

In plain terms, the scroll turns you into a slightly grumpier judge with every card. Profile forty didn’t do anything wrong. They just showed up after thirty-nine others.

And the ghosting? The small talk that never goes anywhere?

Pew caught both flavours of misery. Among recent users, 55% said a lack of messages made them feel insecure at least sometimes, and that was 64% of men against 40% of women. Meanwhile 36% felt overwhelmed by the sheer number of messages: 54% of women, 25% of men.

So one group is shouting into silence and the other is drowning in “wyd”. Both are tired. Neither is doing it wrong.

The endless opener loop (“How’s your week?” “Good, yours?”) is draining for a simple reason. It’s a conversation with the middle cut out. You keep doing the warm-up and almost never reach the part where someone laughs at your actual joke.

Am I allowed to just stop for a while?

Yes. Please. Nobody hands out medals for consecutive days swiped.

A pause isn’t giving up, and it isn’t a statement about love. It’s more like leaving the buffet once you’re no longer hungry, just full and faintly sad. Delete the apps, or banish them from the home screen where they glare at you. Turn the alerts off and notice how much quieter an evening gets when nothing is buzzing for a verdict.

If a full break feels too dramatic, try a smaller one. Pick two evenings a week for checking messages and leave the rest alone. Or keep the app but stop opening it in bed, on the bus, in the queue for coffee. A habit with edges is a lot less chewy than one that follows you everywhere.

The people worth meeting will still exist in a month. So will you, probably with more patience.

What does meeting people slowly even look like?

Less like a pipeline, more like weather. Small, ordinary, repeated:

• Go somewhere often enough to become a regular: the café, the climbing wall, the Thursday quiz.
• Join something with a shared task, like a community garden or a running club that stops for pastries. Hands busy, talk easy.
• Say yes to the friend-of-a-friend birthday you’d normally skip.
• Ask the person beside you in the bookshop what they’re reading. Then actually listen to the answer.
• Let a conversation be just a conversation. Not everything is an audition.

None of this is fast. That’s rather the point. Slow gives you time to notice someone’s laugh, the way they hold an umbrella in the rain, whether they’re kind to the waiter. No profile has ever captured any of that.

What if my match count is basically zero?

Then the app has learned very little about you, and you’ve learned something about the app.

A match count measures how a sorting system reacted to a handful of photos on a particular night. It says nothing about whether you’re funny at breakfast, steady in a crisis, or the one friends call when the car won’t start. Remember the jam-and-scrolling research: people get stingier the deeper they go. If you landed at card fifty in someone’s evening, you met a tired thumb, not a verdict.

Doesn’t all this make love sound hopeless?

Not even slightly. Pew found that about half of users describe their experiences as positive, and plenty of lovely couples met exactly this way. Wanting love isn’t the problem. One format, used nonstop, can just turn the wanting into a chore.

Charlotte had a point about chance, but chance needs an opening. Sometimes it’s a profile. Sometimes it’s a delayed train, a borrowed pen, one slow breath before you say hello to the person who’s been in the same queue as you for ten minutes. You get to pick the version that doesn’t feel like a second job.

A small caveat, honestly offered

This is a frank chat about a common experience, drawn from survey and lab research, not personal advice. The studies describe averages, not you specifically. If dating stress starts spilling into your sleep, your mood or your days, consider telling a good friend how it’s going, or booking a chat with your GP or a counsellor.

Sources

1. Austen, J. (1813). Pride and Prejudice, chapter 6. Project Gutenberg. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1342
2. Pew Research Center (2023). “From Looking for Love to Swiping the Field: Online Dating in the U.S.” Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2023/02/02/from-looking-for-love-to-swiping-the-field-online-dating-in-the-u-s/
3. Iyengar, S. S., & Lepper, M. R. (2000). “When choice is demotivating: Can one desire too much of a good thing?” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.79.6.995
4. Pronk, T. M., & Denissen, J. J. A. (2020). “A Rejection Mind-Set: Choice Overload in Online Dating.” Social Psychological and Personality Science. https://doi.org/10.1177/1948550619866189