Your Guide to Battling Online Dating Fatigue

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Online dating comes with its own set of side effects.

If there was any doubt that online dating is officially mainstream, the rise of the phenomena called “online dating fatigue” should eliminate all doubt. This venue for meeting people has now been around long enough to have its own set of problems. Are you suffering from online dating fatigue? If so, what can you do about it?

A wise adage says that happiness is defined by expectation. When I first joined CatholicMatch, my expectation was that a world of perfect matches would be opened up to me. They would fulfill my dreams and I would be the Prince Charming they were waiting for. I’m only slightly exaggerating, and suffice it to say, that didn’t quite work out.

What did work out was this: I had some phone conversations and a date within the first year, in addition to all the electronic correspondence. I found some things out about myself and about dating. I had gone from being isolated to having at least the remnants of a community bubbling up around me.

A part of managing expectations is recognizing that going online isn’t going to give a non-stop rush of excitement. As online dating fatigue has grown into a thing, the Conventional Wisdom says that if logging in to look through profiles starts to feel like a job, then it’s time to take a break.

I disagree strongly with conventional wisdom on this.

Pursuing your spouse is sort of like a job. It’s the discernment process for a vocation. Candidates for the priesthood don’t get a crazy rush of adrenaline every time they attend Mass in the seminary. They have to push through a lot of drudge to get to their eventual ordination. Marriage is no less a sacrament than Holy Orders, and we shouldn’t expect the pursuit of it to be one long emotional high.

The difference, of course, is that seminarians have a spiritual director they can turn to when the emotions dry up. Laypeople doing online dating are unlikely to be as fortunate. While spiritual discernment can’t be covered in a single article and everyone is different, there is one basic principle that can apply to everyone—God puts all of us through our paces in a time of testing.

The dryness—that sense of dating or looking online feeling like a job—can actually be a sign that we are on the right path. Working through it is the way we get stronger, in the same way an athlete working out gets stronger by pushing through the fatigue.

That doesn’t mean the Conventional Wisdom is entirely wrong, and it’s important to discern the difference between emotions. Dryness and online dating fatigue is different than a sense of dread or having your stomach constantly churn. That’s less likely to be from God and may be a sign that you need to examine how you’re approaching your vocational discernment.

1. Reconsider your strategy.

One way to begin would be by checking your strategies in how you use online dating. Or if you’ve even thought about it strategically. If you write a message to someone, how often do you check your inbox for a reply?

I recall frequently going back to check—especially when I was bored at work—and each time there was no reply, it felt like a little interior cut. Of course that was silly and I even knew it at the time. But the lack of a reply felt like a rejection. I was happier in those rarer times when I could limit myself to checking for replies once or twice a day.

2. Keep your social media usage in check.

It’s also important to look at online dating in the context of your overall social media life. Social Media Anxiety Disorder (SMAD) is something else that’s now officially a thing. If you spend a lot of time on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or Pinterest—in short, a lot of time in the virtual world—you’re probably not feeling too great about yourself.

We all put our best feet forward online. Furthermore, the flood of information that comes to us via our social streams can make us feel like we can’t keep up with everyone else’s rich and full lives.

Never mind that the activity we absorbed came from ten different people in our Facebook network—the brain processes them all and tells us that we have to keep up with all of it even though we’re just one person. Social media has rewired our brains to give us bad information and we bring that to our online dating pursuits.

Most people are at least generally aware of these problems, and you’ll see it in the sometimes herky-jerky decisions that are made to suddenly delete an online dating profile and “take a break.” Now there are times when a break is necessary. But more often, what’s needed is a pruning.

3. Take an objective approach.

Take one week and use a journal to monitor your social activity. Start with what you do in your online dating profile. How often do you check your inbox? What percentage of profiles viewed do you find genuinely interesting? Of those, how many do you actually write to? Get objective data rather than comparing everyone else’s social media life to your own real life.

There’s a saying that no one is as happy as they look on Facebook, as angry as they sound on Twitter or as employed as they appear to be on LinkedIn. The same logic applies to an online dating profile. You might not be able to compete with the image another person appears to project. But here’s the good news—they can’t compete with the image you project either.

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