Your Dating Profile is Fine. It’s the Way You’re Managing Your Apps That Isn’t Working

Like many single women who are searching for long-term partners, I had set up carefully-curated Hinge and Match.com profiles, and I doggedly scrolled and swiped, messaged and liked, all of it adding up to absolutely nothing except lost time and compromised mental health.

I kept thinking, we’ve got to be missing something. This isn’t working, and it’s not just me — it doesn’t seem to be working for anyone. Not only were the dating apps not producing suitable matches, but using them was ruining my quality of life.

I kept falling into a cycle that looked like this; maybe it’s familiar to you:

• Decide I want to meet someone and join an app;
• Get initially overwhelmed by all the attention, even though 90% of it ranged from terrifying to stupid;
• Endure a lot of abuse and aggression from men;
• Go out on some terrible dates;
• Become obsessed with the app precisely because it was not providing good matches, which, paradoxically, encouraged me to spend more time on it trying to make it work — time looking and swiping and eventually hitting figurative “rock bottom” that is in reality not a bottom at all because of the infinite scroll;