Originally published in March 2021
A logical place to begin would be to point out that something so difficult, frustrating, and exhausting that it requires “taking a break” with the same frequency that we pay our quarterly income taxes is something we maybe don’t need in our lives in the first place. However, I know that the actively dating collective isn’t ready for that yet, so I’ll humor you by assuming you won’t delete your dating apps. I mean I did, two years ago, and I’ve lived a happy and fulfilling life since, but make your own choices. Further logic would also suggest that since this thing that’s so difficult, frustrating, and exhausting that it requires “taking a break” is actually optional, we’re choosing to put something harmful in our own lives. Further still, we’re addicted to it. I want to talk about the mental health toll of dating apps, because all these screenshots we keep sending each other isn’t helping shit.
For anyone who hasn’t introduced dating apps into their lives, a brief synopsis of what a single woman definitely—not maybe—definitely encounters on dating apps that she did not solicit: verbal abuse, degrading messages, sexually explicit messages, attacks on character, overt lies about marital status or literally anything, requests for free sex work, body shaming, racism, threats, and we haven’t even talked about photos yet. Keep in mind at this point, she also hasn’t even met anyone in person. Dating apps are where manners go to die and consequences are as real as the Easter Bunny. But we might find love, right?
Dating apps are not the happy couple strolling through the park during Magic Hour that marketing teams love to make cute videos about as evidence of “success.” Do people meet on dating apps? Sure. There are literally millions of people using them and with those numbers and normal human sexual desires some of them will like each other enough to stop using something that sucks. Even a broken clock is accidentally right twice a day. Dating apps are not fun, they are not a safe or kind space, they are a cesspool of behavior that’s rude at best and abusive at worst. If most of the messages I see posted in the groups for single women that I’m a part of were seen by the senders’ bosses, an overwhelming number of single men in this country would be out of work.
The repeated verbal, emotional, mental, and sexual abuse of women is insulated from the public eye under the cozy blanket of dating app anonymity. Imagine if before he could send you a message, he had to tweet it first.
Whatever you think is happening, that’s what was happening ten years ago. The behavior has only gotten bolder over time, because it knows it can. Bad manners learn from unpunished bad manners, and they intensify. Online dating experiences aren’t cute “horror stories” or things you can make fun of guys for on Instagram. It is foul human behavior, it is self-worth-diminishing abuse, and it’s being ignored, allowed, and given a place to breed.
Why am I writing about this? Why am I telling single women things we’re already keenly aware of? Because even though we know it happens, we keep going back and letting it happen to us more. We are ignoring how bad it gets, and how bad it feels. We’re ignoring a problem arising out of the fact that behavior like this has been allowed to fester for years now.
What do you think years of online dating hell does to the mental health of a single woman? What do you think happens to her self worth, her pride, her self-image, and her confidence? What do you think a woman thinks about herself and her life after five years of insults, degradation, and cruelty from men who were presented to her by a dating app as “options?” And all we can ever think to tell her is “take a break.”
A break. Take a break from men calling you names, insulting your appearance, presuming you’re there to sexually satisfy them for free, and heaven forbid you directly reject them, then you become a digital punching bag upon which they can deposit their fragility in the form of any kind of cruelty toward women that you can imagine.
But take a break. When the apps get to be “too much,” just take a break! Take a break and come back when you’re ready to be abused some more. Why the fuck are we doing this?
We do this because we live in a society that thinks being verbally and sexually degraded and abused in a dating app is fine if it’s a possible way out of being single.
I swear to you, being single isn’t worse than what they’re doing to you on dating apps. I understand that seeing single as something positive is a tough mental leap for a lot of people, and I don’t fault you—that’s exactly what society has groomed you to believe, so that it can make money off of you via the dating industry, among other industries like the diet industry that wants to divert your attention from thriving in your life and onto an obsession over being “hot” so boys will like you. I get it. So I won’t ask you to see single as a good thing if you don’t want to. But I will ask you to see it as better than what you’re enduring on dating apps. Because it is. And even without dating apps, you’re allowed to fall in love.
You’ve all seen messages on dating apps that shock and appall you. (And if you haven’t, ask a single woman, and watch how fast she can find one on her phone.) My concern is that years upon years of these interactions is having a detrimental effect on our mental health. And at no point is the dating industry taking responsibility for creating a space for single women’s mental health to be harmed. At no point are they offering resources to address the harm caused in the spaces they operate. Your membership fee doesn’t come with a therapist, and it should.
If you were in a bar, and a man was standing in the middle of it asking every woman in the room to suck his dick, and when they say no telling them what fucking worthless sluts they were and that he hopes they die of cancer, the owner of the bar would kick him out. The owner of the bar would take responsibility for the space he operates and earns money from in order to make sure that his customers didn’t have to endure this kind of verbal harm. Because imagine if he didn’t, and the man was allowed to stand next to you all night verbally assaulting you. How do you think you’d feel by midnight?
What have the apps given you beyond a block button that you can only use one at a time, after the harm has been done? Doesn’t the fact that the harm is still happening at volume suggest to us that the block button isn’t fucking working? There will always, always be more women he can say the same shit to, even if you’ve blocked him all you want. There are too many bad manners to block one at a time, and for the money you’re paying your dating apps, that shouldn’t be your responsibility. Even if you’re using them for free, the money they’re making off you via ads should preclude you from the responsibility of constantly being your own bouncer.
How much harm do you think you’ve absorbed over years of online dating? I did it for ten. It was a lot. In order to process and heal from abusive and degrading messages on dating apps, single women need a lot more than a break. But even after decades now of online dating, we don’t have better advice for her than “take a break,” which is why I stand on any soapbox the internet will give me to try to tell us that taking a break is not our only option.
You can delete your dating apps without “choosing” singlehood forever. You can delete your dating apps and meet someone at a laundromat tomorrow. You can delete your dating apps and start dating your coworker’s brother two months from now. You can delete your dating apps and divert that time to a project you’ve always wanted to complete. You can delete your dating apps and finally see everything amazing about single life that they’ve been hiding from you so that you’ll keep paying your membership fees as if you can buy your way out of being single. You’re paying with your money, your time, and your mental health. What are you getting in return?
Being single is nothing to be ashamed of. Honestly, if you would let yourself experience even a little bit of the freedom, confidence, worthiness, and fun of single life, you’d be ashamed you online dated for so long. (But don’t be ashamed, self-forgiveness is a powerful tool in healing from online dating.) It isn’t enough to take a break, if after the break you go right back to the thing that was so harmful you needed to take a break from it. That’s called a pattern, a harmful one. This isn’t a quick breather after using the elliptical, this is supposedly your search for one of the best things ever: love. Do you honestly believe it’s supposed to hurt this much?
Dating apps aren’t just making us tired, or frustrated, or sad, or ashamed, or lonely. They are making us insane. I am worried about the toll. I am worried about what years and years of online dating harm is doing to single women. I worry that dating apps are creating a new genre of necessary mental healthcare and I also worry we’re not getting it—or that we can only get it if we can afford it despite the fact that we’ve already paid the dating apps that fueled our need for mental health care of this kind in the first place.
If you are a single woman, you have a choice. You can keep enduring it, keep screenshotting, keep texting your friends and taking to online groups to bitch and analyze every time it happens. Or you can walk away from something that’s bringing nothing good into your life, and discover how you could spend your time, money, and headspace instead.
