Six months ago, I made the decision to delete my dating apps, which I had been using on and off for a decade, indefinitely. Nothing dramatic or terrible had happened. In fact, it was for him that I deleted Hinge and Bumble, my then- dating apps of choice, at the beginning of the year. As so often happens with early romances, we fizzled out, rather than imploded. The shared memories that no longer had a home. When we stopped seeing one another, I felt, immediately, the familiar urge to download the apps again โ like I had done time and time again, on and off, for the past decade since Tinder launched in But I resisted it โ and instead I chose to process the disappointment I was feeling in losing the thing-that-could-have-been-a-thing.
I felt better after a week or two. Stop listening to TikTok! Some of you have never dated an anxious person, and it shows. What I realised was that there was an opportunity cost to all the Sundays I spent swiping; the non-starter dates where I spent my Thursday evening; the month or two I spent dating someone exclusively.
I was missing out, regularly, on a Big Life: travelling; reading; learning; nurturing relationships of all kinds. At first, I decided to channel my dating app hiatus into focusing on real-life romantic connections, and that was a rewarding exercise. Nothing ultimately went anywhere, but I felt like there was a greater level of mutual respect, and communication, because the foundation of our relationships to one another were built on more than pixels.
The reason I was able to do this, I think, was because I was no longer in the practice of spending hours swiping alone waiting for a match or not. I spent an evening flirting with an event photographer, then a man I met unexpectedly during a hour airport stopover โ without even trying to analyse whether these connections were more than friendly from their side.
Eventually, I decided to take a mindful break from dating as a whole. Which leads me to my next pointโฆ. Without that immediate, pressing sense of the Next Romantic Prospect, my mind is more likely to stray towards the people I most love, and feel excited by โ how they are, or our future plans together. We asked an expert to answer key questions about how to handle loving a narcissist.
