Single and Stressed: How To Keep Online Dating Low Pressure!

If you’re stressed about being single and trying to find someone to date, you’re not alone. While I can’t offer you a foolproof method to get that boyfriend or girlfriend, I can offer you some strategies to lower the pressure of online dating.

There are three very basic, practical steps you can take to root out singleness stress once and for all. (It’s important that you go through these steps in order, by the way.)

1. You should be pursuing other things in your spare time.

Painting with a broad brush, this applies to most people who are feeling stressed and pressured about finding romance online. Fill your free time with: 

An active social life!

It makes online dating less of a must-get-to-marriage, and more of an open-minded way to meet people. Online dating isn’t a marriage discernment tool, after all. It’s only a way to meet other people who share your faith. So, you should treat it as just another social activity, and not as your road to marriage.

Make online dating only one of several things you do in your social life! Be a part of groups or clubs in your real life, go to happy hour with your girlfriends, take your dog to the park, attend family parties, and hang out with the new people in church.

Staying involved in normal, platonic social activities will keep you grounded and provide human community we all long for, community which isn’t just found in dating. This will naturally help you see dating as just another way to meet people, putting less pressure on your CatholicMatches!

Hobbies and passion projects!

We know that where your time goes, your attention and emotions follow. Thus, putting all your spare time into online dating makes it feel way more intense than necessary. Another way to gain proper perspective in online dating is to fill your free time with hobbies. Then, you can use this metric to gauge how much time you should really spend on CatholicMatch.

Try allocating your time online as if it were a new activity you picked up—let’s say, if you were tackling a new book series, you might read thirty minutes a day. Or if you were learning to dance, you might practice for a few hours every weekend.

Online dating should be treated with the same timeframe in mind! Make it one of several things you do in your spare time. Put it on rotation in between your normal hobbies and activities. With your attention and time balanced among several pursuits, your romantic stress levels will lower accordingly.

Becoming someone you would want to date!

Joining online dating will not magically make you Mr. or Mrs. Right, nor guarantee your future spouse will be attracted to you. So reframe your online dating perspective into becoming someone awesome, not just looking for someone awesome. It turns your focus from hunting for a love life, into loving the life you have. This is a powerful perspective shift.

After all, whether you’re in a relationship or not, you have a life to live and it’s worth loving it! There are so many ways to change your daily life for the better, right now. I don’t have room to offer a whole litany of ideas for you, but odds are high you already can think of a few things to change right off the top of your head. Go ahead and start on them!

Becoming someone you’d want to date is a surefire way to be happier, more content, and under less romantic pressure. It’s also extremely attractive! Who doesn’t love hearing someone talk about their passion projects or share their excitement over some new skill?

2. You should take a look at your stress management skills.

If properly balancing your spare time between social life, hobbies, and dating doesn’t lower your dating stress levels, you might need to zoom out and look at the bigger picture. How do you handle stress in your day-to-day life? Work stress, family stress, dating stress, political stress, etc. are all variations on a theme. How do you cope, and is it healthy and sustainable?

Many of the most popular and helpful coping skills include exercise and working out, walking outside, limiting screen time or social media interaction, connecting with supportive friends and family, being creative, and praying consistently. Perhaps you never learned how to properly manage stress, or you’ve gotten lax on caring for yourself, or maybe what worked for you in the past just isn’t cutting it anymore. It may be time to do a practical evaluation of managing your emotions in a better way.

After all, finding a date or a relationship won’t automatically lower your stress levels—life will always be stressful in one way or another, especially in marriage. Learning to manage stress well is a fantastic skill for your future.

3. You should take some time to consider WHY dating and singleness is so stressful for you.

Let’s say you have properly balanced your spare time and you’re good at managing other stressors, but you still feel pressured, stressed, and downright panicked about your dating life. You might be dealing with a very specific issue here that can’t be addressed through practical lifestyle changes.

What exactly this issue might be could be any number of things: maybe you come from a broken family, or Catholicism is new to you, or you haven’t moved on from your divorce, or you have children to consider, or you have a disability . . . the list goes on and on. If this is you, this is the point where you’ll want to start enrolling the help of a trusted friend or family member, your spiritual director, or a licensed therapist.

Filling your free time with a balance between a real social life, your hobbies, and online dating won’t address whatever root cause you might have. But remember what I said in the introduction, where it’s important to do those two things first? You can’t really pinpoint a deeper issue if you HAVEN’T done those things first. Getting to the root of the main issue will probably require you to do those things anyway, and they will definitely help you work through addressing a deeply rooted stressor.

It can be all too easy to let the uncertainty of dating usurp the excitement it should bring. Take a step back, take a deep breath, and evaluate how you can make dating fun again!