Forever Alone | Bonus Chapter: Hinge & Hysteria (Part 1)
In which I don my coaching hat—beribboned bonnet? jaunty fascinator?—and dole out opinions, advice, and general musings on how (and whether) to use dating apps without losing your mind.
I published Forever Alone: One Introverted Millennial’s Half-Agonizing, Half-Hopeful Journey Through Singledom in 2021 as a 7-part podcast miniseries. I’m re-publishing it here on Substack for the first time in written form! Start reading from the beginning here.
Hello again, friends. I’ve returned, but not yet for Season 2. Instead, I’m here with something special.
One of the best parts about releasing Season 1 was getting to hear your feedback. I can’t tell you how gratifying it felt to hear so many of you say, “Yes, this is my story, too.” I’m so glad I was able to give voice to an experience that’s inherently solitary and lonely; and maybe, in doing that, help us feel less alone, because we know there are plenty of people walking alongside us.
Most of what I shared in Season 1 was very thorough. I said exactly what I needed to say, and have nothing left to add. But there’s one thing I wasn’t able to go into enough depth about, because I had too much to say and my opinions weren’t essential to the story—and that’s what I’m here to dig into now.
So, in this bonus episode I’m going to share my exhaustive thoughts about … dating apps: How (and whether) to use them, the toll they can take on our mental health, strategies I’ve found to make them more tolerable, and when it might be time to quit.
This is me stepping out of storyteller mode and donning my coach hat—maybe a beribboned bonnet or jaunty fascinator?—in the hope that we can reframe the narrative a bit around something so many of us find awful. Let’s proceed, shall we?
I’m not sure when it became almost … fashionable for dating to be terrible. Should we blame it on Sex and the City? I mean, Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte, and Miranda did almost glamorize the notion of dating as a revolving door of disappointment. Even the serious relationships aren’t exactly healthy—uhh Carrie and Mr. Big, case in point. But it’s all good, because it’s played for laughs, and our friends are our soulmates anyway, right?
Wherever it comes from, it’s assumed that dating is dramatic and confusing and exhausting. You’re expected to have plenty of horror stories about people you’ve met and dates you’ve been on, because dating is a numbers game. “You’ve got to kiss a lot of frogs to find a prince.”
There’s also a slightly insulting assumption that we have to tolerate the horrors of dating because it’s the only way to figure out what you want—as if having bad discernment is par for the course.
I’ve got to call bullshit on all of this.
Let’s get this out of the way, first: You don’t have to date, ever, if you don’t want to. You’re allowed to just go about your life and meet people organically. It might be 2021, but I still know plenty of people who’ve met significant others somewhere other than a dating app—through friends, at work, even on Instagram. What I said in Chapter 7 still very much applies:
I’m pretty convinced that meeting the right person is mostly a matter of right place, right time. And if you’re supposed to rendezvous with someone, the powers of the Universe can make that happen somewhere other than Hinge or Bumble or, god forbid, Tinder.
I once heard someone share that, after she’d met her husband, she learned that they’d lived in the exact same apartment. She had moved out, and he had been the next renter moving in. They’d just missed each other. And they still met later on! The Scottish have a saying about this (you didn’t think I’d have a whole bonus episode and not mention Scotland in some way, did you?): “Whit’s fur ye’ll no go by ye.” Translation:
“What’s for you isn’t going to pass you by.” You can’t miss your bus! If you do, it’ll come around again in 10 minutes, just hold on.
But the fear that it’s very possible to miss your bus—that what’s for you might just pass you right on by—propels a lot of us into dating when we don’t want to. Which, for the record, might be why the very act of dating, and therefore dating apps in general, get a bad rep: On average, they’re a place full of scared, resentful people who are only there because they feel obligated. And at best, you’ve got people who might not be scared or angry, but don’t really know why they’re there or what they want. Altogether, it sounds like a GREAT place to meet the love of your life, right??
Listen, if the act of dating fills you with dread, grief, anger, resentment, fear, anxiety, or depression, then you have my full permission not to do it. Call me crazy, but I don’t think the way to bring love and contentment and joy and fulfillment and connection into your life is by way of suffering and slogging and pushing through your disgust. One of the basic laws of the Universe is that like energy attracts like energy. So, if you’re a beacon of malaise and suffering, you’re just going to be a match for more of the same. Which is why, ironically, forcing yourself to date can actually get you further away from the relationship you want.
If, however, you’re happier just living your life and pursuing things that make you feel lit up and content … well, then you become a beacon for more of that. In other words, it’s not really about what you’re doing—dating, not dating—it’s about how you’re doing it; the energy you’re broadcasting.
So, what’s for you isn’t going to pass you by, and you don’t have to grit your teeth and bear something terrible in order to receive something joyful. That ain’t how it works. And … I also don’t think dating has to be as awful as everyone makes it out to be.
I’ve heard a lot of people (mostly women) complain about dating over the years, and it usually boils down to much of the same:
“I’ve been on so many dates, mostly bad ones. I’m exhausted!”
“Men are terrible. I can’t believe the shit you have to put up with on dating apps.”
“It’s so time consuming. I don’t have the bandwidth to keep doing this!”
And here’s the thing. If you think dating is about going out with scores of people; if you’re interacting with a slew of the worst representatives of humanity; if you’re spending hours and hours on what feels like a dreadful assignment … well then, yeah … of course you’re going to have massive resistance to it, and of course it gets labeled as terrible and horrible and the bane of our existence.
But there’s another way!
I was recently coaching one of my clients, Lauren, around whether or not she wanted to keep using the apps. She had every concern and complaint I just listed.
I dug in a little further and asked her to walk me through her experience. She said, “Well, I’m usually talking to like, 5-to-7 men at a time on a single app. Before the pandemic I went on maybe 2 or 3 first dates a week.”
My eyes bugged out. I mean, no wonder she was exhausted. And no wonder she was torn—theoretically, she liked the idea of being on the apps, because it’s one more avenue through which she could meet the right person. But eating the enormous shit sandwich that comes with that was unappetizing, to say the least.
As I’m wont to do, I got blunt with her: “Lauren, if you’re talking to that many men at once, and going out on that many dates, you’re not being nearly discerning enough. We can cut out 80% of what you’ve been doing, and you will get better results, I promise.”
Lauren’s biggest hurdle was that she, like so many of us, genuinely believed that dating is a matter of quantity. She said, “I guess I’ve always thought that I had to talk to 48 crappy dudes in order to find the 2 that are actually intriguing.”
But why do we think that? What do the 48 losers have to do with the 2 guys who have potential? How are they relevant to each other at all? Dating, and dating apps, aren’t a single file line. First, Dave steps up. And you can’t get to Tom, who’s behind Dave, until you’ve decided how you feel about Dave. And you can’t get to Alex, who’s behind Tom, until you’ve decided how you feel about Dave and Tom. What?! No. That’s not how it works!!
Giving the time of day to guys you aren’t interested in is not a toll you’re required to pay in order to find and attract men that you are interested in. There is ZERO correlation between the two.
But if you’ve been living as if there is a correlation then, like Lauren, you’re going to lower your standards and waste a LOT of time on men you already know you have no interest in, thinking you’re somehow putting in the work—as if you’re paying a twisted toll to get to the right person.
So, as I obviously asked Lauren, “What if you stopped paying that toll?”
Lauren was wary but excited to try something new, especially if it could get her 80% of her time and energy back.
So, the next thing I did was introduce her to the 9-or-10 rule, which is something I first learned about in Greg McKeown’s book Essentialism. I use it all the time with my clients, around everything—often job searching—but it comes in incredibly handy with dating apps, too.
It’s easy. We’ve got a scale from 0-10. A 9 or 10 out of 10 is a “hell, yes!” You’ve all experienced this a million times, in small ways. It’s perusing a menu when you’re out to eat and seeing something that looks so good you instantly close the menu, because that’s exactly what you want. It’s seeing a job pop up on your search that looks almost too good to be true, and you’re scrambling to apply, because you absolutely can’t let it pass you by. We don’t have to think about 9’s or 10’s. We just feel and know. It was how my teenage self felt about Luke, back in high school.
9’s and 10’s are simple, because they’re clear. We know it when we see it. 6’s, and everything below, are also pretty clear, in the opposite way. We know we aren’t interested—that it’s not at all appetizing or exciting—so we can easily dismiss those things. A 6 or below is the very hot guy I recently saw on Hinge who had chosen the prompt, “Which is more important to you?” and then answered it with, “I binge watch TV shows.” I … I mean … what? Sir, not only did your answer not include a choice between “this” or “that,” which the structure of the question demanded you do, but “I binge watch TV shows” wouldn’t have even made sense as one of the choices. I don’t care how hot you are, if you’re that dumb, I don’t need to think about what to do with you.
The real problem we run into, which you heard me spiraling about in Chapter 7, are the 7’s and 8’s—the ones who aren’t instant no’s … but aren’t a hell yes, either. Whereas 9’s and 10’s don’t require any thinking, just feeling and knowing, 7’s and 8’s get us up in our head. We rationalize and justify, and sometimes make excuses. On a dating app it sounds like, “Well, there’s nothing wrong with him,” or, “His profile isn’t that articulate, but maybe he’s not that good of a writer, and maybe he’s better in person? Not everyone is as good at expressing themselves as me!” Or, “Maybe if I got to know him better, I’d find him more attractive?”
One of Lauren’s most common complaints about the 5-to-7 men she’d been chatting with at any given time on Hinge or Bumble was that they were bad conversationalists. They didn’t know how to have a real exchange. They’d answer her questions, but never follow up with a question about her, or deepen the conversation with a new observation or interesting thought. And then, to add insult to injury, she’d often say yes to a date with a lot of these men, hoping they’d somehow be different when she met them in person.
“And were they?” I asked her. “No,” she said, “They were exactly what I expected after the initial conversation.”
I asked her, of all the men she’d had unsatisfying exchanges with on the apps, how many of them did she suspect would be bad conversationalists, just from seeing their profile? “Almost all of them,” she said.
Lauren is a teacher. She’s smart and sharp. Of course she wants someone she can have witty, sparkling conversations with. (As an aside, my friend Amy recently declared that she wishes all straight men knew that conversation is foreplay. She could NOT be more correct). Anyway, I told Lauren, “You should not have to play teacher with the men you meet on these apps. If freakin’ Mike chooses, ‘What’s your best travel story?’ as his prompt, and then answers it with, ‘Italy,’—just that; just the one word!—it is not your job to treat him like a third grader: ‘Tell me more about Italy, Mike. What are some things you saw? Can you use more descriptive, visual language?’ For the love of God, Mike and his one-word answer is not going to secretly become a witty conversationalist once you match with him. You’re going to get exactly what he’s currently selling.”
That’s the thing. It’s actually pretty obvious when someone’s a 7 or 8, because they’re inherently underwhelming. There’s nothing that pulls us toward them. But we don’t trust ourselves to say no. We don’t think our reasons are good enough, so we rationalize or overlook things we shouldn’t. We think that because there’s no overt reason not to engage, that means we should give it a shot.
But the main tenant of the 9 or 10 Rule is, “If it’s not a hell yes, it’s a hell no.” It sets us free to release anything that doesn’t light us up, or have the potential to light us up.
Because keep in mind, I’m not suggesting that it’s possible to take one look at someone’s profile and know they’re your soulmate. When I matched with Will I thought he was a solid 9, but after some time I learned he wasn’t my person. A 9 or 10 in a dating context just means, “Wow, I’m really intrigued by this person. I absolutely want to talk to them. I’d be really bummed if I didn’t get the chance to know them better.”
Every once in a while, I’d encounter someone on Hinge who was a bit of an enigma; who wasn’t the immediate yes of a 9 or 10, but who also wasn’t an immediate no. They could go either way, so I needed more info to get clear on whether they had the potential to be a 9 or 10. That’s a fine line, of course. Sometimes I wasn’t sure whether I actually needed more information to get clear, or whether I secretly already knew they were a 7 … but my brain was trying to rationalize them into being a 9 or 10.
I decided to treat those more enigmatic cases like an experiment. I’d reach out to test my own discernment and see what happened. And, for what it’s worth, every time I engaged with someone who hadn’t been a clear 9 or 10 from the start—and really, any time I engaged with a 7 knowing they were a 7 when I started, but trying to convince myself otherwise—I was never surprised by the outcome. Whether or not I could have articulated it at the time, once I reached out or started chatting with a guy, there always proved to be a reason why I felt unsure about him at the outset. And every time I got confirmation that I’d been right to trust my gut, it helped sharpen my discernment and allowed me to trust myself more next time.
This was Part 1 of Hinge & Hysteria, the special Bonus Chapter of Forever Alone. Read on for Hinge & Hysteria: Part 2!