Hinge: The app designed to be deleted (and re-downloaded) by me, 50 times

On dating app burnout, ghosting and the paradox of choice

I had just woken up with a furry mouth and a phantom hangover when I opened Bumble for what I thought was going to be the last time in 2024. It was 5am and Emily in Paris was still playing on the television my ex-flatmate sold to me for 50 quid about five years ago. The exposed wires and decade-old extension lead cramped into the corner of my box room were ugly in the harsh light, my eyes aching behind crusty contact lenses that I had vowed I would stop falling asleep in. Lily Collin’s looked as skinny and glamorous as ever as I reached for the remote and catapulted myself back into darkness before I grabbed for my phone. It was the 28th of December. I lazily reached for the mini Toblerone I’d left on my bedside table and sighed.

i don’t think binging this show before bed is helping my hopeless romantic brain (emily in paris, 2020)

I had made a promise that I was going to leave dating apps in 2024. A promise that I had made to myself countless times prior and had meant to varying degrees. In truth, I relished in the dopamine I received from those first ten minutes back on an app, the promise of new fingers to feel loosely laced between my own buzzing in my back pocket while I did my makeup on idle mornings. I cherished the moments spent before bed, wading my way through a sea of faces and photos, inserting myself into images of boys and their family dogs on slow Sunday afternoons at the coast, grinning with ice-cream dripping down a soft cone into the palm of my hand and sand in between my toes. Sometimes I assessed prompts, giggling at wit I didn’t yet know and probably never would, appreciating tongue-in-cheek references for more than they were. I would find myself amazed at the depth and humour that could be fished out from in between the multitudes of profiles that promised they would be able to ‘get their hoodie back after I ‘borrowed’ it’ and proudly proclaiming that ‘pizza is their second favourite thing to eat in bed’.

Apart from the fleeting rushes and heady moments filled with lust and excitement where I actually felt I had ‘met’ someone I could one day form a connection with (spoiler alert: this usually lasts 3-5 days and swiftly dies after following each other on Instagram) I was terribly, utterly, completely, devastatingly bored. In the five or so years I have been in an on-and-off relationship with dating apps, I do fear that they have done irrefutable damage to my brain. The paradox of choice has made people not only feel disposable, but treat others as disposable too. It’s a supermarket scenario where you pop in for some ketchup but there are so many options that you are frozen in the overwhelm of the illusion of choice, there are so many different brands and alternatives but really at their core they are all the same thing.

But here’s the thing: Everyone want’s to try everything before they choose just one that they stick with. Because, how can you know what you like before you’ve had a taste of all the other options that are on offer? Nobody seems to be giving anybody else a chance because everybody is in such a rush to get on to the next. It is often unlikely that relationships with ever exit the cosy confines of Instagram DM’s and into a real life setting; never given the chance to sit in a restaurant or a living room, banished only into an online ether where two peoples carefully crafted personas can bounce back and forth for a few days until someone gets bored and moves onto the next.

It’s extremely dehumanising to be on dating apps in 2025. I feel like a cog in a whirring machine in which tokens of my personality and interests have been separated from me and inserted into an algorithmic entity where they no longer belong to me. I’ve been labelled and categorised to such an extent that each time I do cave into a frenzy of insecurity (and sometimes boredom) and re-download an app, I’m met with the same people first. They think they know my type (I literally don’t have one), they think they know who will fancy me (often wrong) and they think they can orchestrate a meet-cute connection, which is physically impossible.

Reducing whole people with multifaceted lives, pasts and futures to five photos and three prompts is an extremely insane concept when you really unpack it. Of course, it has to be done in order for dating apps to function and I’m not dismissing any of the good and healthy relationships that have come from them. But the disposable way in which we view people within the apps is in turn transcending into the way we treat them outside of the apps, too. Ghosting and stonewalling are now extremely common occurrences as people feel they ‘don’t owe anyone anything’. Sincerity is scarce and seen as ‘cringe’ (if you’re not masking your presence on the app with a thin veil of irony then you are seen as desperate. Newsflash: we’re all on the same app). It’s all too easy to go on a date with someone, spend hours of your life getting to know them, sometimes have sex with them, and then never speak to them again in your entire life. I’ve been guilty of it too, and that is genuinely not a person I want to be or who I believe I really am at my core. But because of this feigned (and sometimes genuine) nonchalance everybody in Gen Z feels they have to possess, it’s easy to also think ‘they won’t care, anyway’. Of course this has always been possible, one-night stands have always existed, but how freely accessible and easy to orchestrate they have become is quite frightening. Sometimes it genuinely feels like nobody gives a shit about anyone anymore.

@ratsandlillies.art on instagram

But of course, here were are in 2025 and I’m still on the apps. Dating apps have genuinely been designed to become addictive, just like every other form of social media. The scrolling and tapping paired with the rush we get when we have a match do things to our brains that make it hard to stop. But I think the apps will be gone for good within a few weeks, because I am genuinely so burnt out and bored. And I think a lot of other people in their twenties feel the same way.

On the 28th, when I woke up heady and confused in my single bed, I’d matched with someone. I’d opened the app intending to delete it, having one of my many ‘enough is enough’ moments. But he’d replied to one of my prompts and after a day of back and forth texting I’d found myself once again grinning at my phone like a teenage girl in the early hours of the following morning. It’s hard to be vulnerable in the current dating climate and even harder to be sincere. But since I was one tap away from deleting the app when I’d seen his short and sweet slide-in I decided to be as unapologetically myself as I could muster; not shying away from broaching topics I wouldn’t usually dare to touch on with a relative stranger. We met up and I let myself laugh loudly, drops of my coffee pooling neatly on my saucer from where I’d clumsily stirred in my two sugars. I spoke authentically and as myself, sometimes too loudly, and when we kissed I let myself fall into him unreservedly. Lost in the lustre between sweet words on soft pillows I once again got carried away (See: Is my overactive imagination ruining my life?) and after he dropped me home I felt a buzz I hadn’t felt in a long time. It wasn’t until the morning after that the reality hit and I realised what I had done - laid myself bare for another person in a way I hadn’t in the best part of a year, told stories that highlighted my vulnerability and given a small part of myself away. A deep-set fear set in as soon as I woke up and the anxiety nestled itself deeply in the pit of my stomach for the following 24 hours as his replies became fewer and farer between.

I’m trying not to regret being myself, and I don’t want to regret letting myself get lost in the real and raw emotions I felt in the moments I spent with this relative stranger, but it’s quite hard not to. I think it’s important to allow myself to feel though, instead of just intellectualising my emotions, which I am so often guilty of. I know my anxious attachment style is being triggered and I know part traumas are the reason why. I know me and this man technically owe each other nothing, and I also know life sometimes gets in the way. Or sometimes, people just don’t fancy you, and that’s okay. But instead of brushing this off as a one night thing, burying my feelings underneath a layers of ‘it’s okay, it was only one date’ and ‘I don’t care, on to the next’ that I would usually frequent my friends with after a soft ghost, this time I’ve allowed myself to feel a little bit sad - and that’s okay. In a world where dating and romance has been so digitised, robotic almost, it’s been sort of cathartic to let a bit of humanity seep through.

Being ghosted is never fun, but sometimes I do wonder if the alternative is better. Would I want to receive that, ‘I had fun, but you’re not for me’ text? Would I want to be presented with solid evidence rather than the creative licence being left in my own hands? I honestly don’t know the answer.

But what I do know is that the cutthroat, algorithmic and digitised way in which we date right now is exhausting. And it’s okay to take a break from it all, which is what I think I will do - I can get my fix from Emily in Paris in the meantime.

If you’re in a similar situation, remember to be kind to yourselves - as I am reminding myself tonight.

All my love,

Char x