I’ve been on dating apps since the middle of January, I only downloaded them as a way of figuring out where my head was at in terms of who I’m attracted to after never really being 100% sure – I’d been in a long-term relationship with a woman and had fancied men before but spent a long time drifting between labels because I couldn’t seem to find a place where I fitted comfortably. I didn’t really anticipate to still be endlessly scrolling on them seven months later because another man I’d spent a month speaking to started to lessen his replies to me until he became nothing but another viewer of my Instagram story.
I try not to be hurt by it because I know that this is just what happens: you start messaging backwards and forwards, you might even promise to meet up – or if you don’t then you just continue messaging until one of you gets bored and it fizzles out because you lose interest in finding out anything else other than how their day was by way of a message sent at 11pm on a Wednesday evening. Despite knowing that this is exactly how the vicious cycle of using dating apps works, it’s hard to not feel the tiniest bit deflated when you do eventually get ghosted because you made the stupid assumption that this time it might be different.
It feels slightly hypocritical to be writing about how much I hate modern dating culture and the fact ghosting is a thing when I myself am guilty of it too but let’s be real, who isn’t? I think we’ve all been in a position where someone just doesn’t do it for you anymore or they’ve made you uncomfortable with unwanted sexual advances after what was at first, a seemingly normal conversation. Sometimes, as human beings I don’t think we’re left with much choice but to just disappear – that doesn’t excuse the fact ghosting is still an incredibly shitty thing to do though. I don’t really understand what happened to just being honest with people when you can’t be bothered anymore, nor do I understand the people that think ghosting helps protect the feelings of the other person when normally it just makes you feel worse than if someone were to straight up say that they didn’t want to keep it up with you.
I seem to always go for the same sort of man every time I end up in one of these weird talking stages: brunettes that look like they could be a member of experimental rock group Black Country, New Road or like they’ve stepped directly out of a Sally Rooney novel. They’ve nearly always done a creative degree or made working in a high street retail chain seem like the most attractive thing in the world. There was a boy who spent ages telling me about all his favourite films and another that showed me poetry he’d written – they both seemed sweet until the inevitable happened and once again I found myself listening to Julia Jacklin’s 2019 album Crushing and wondering where I’d gone wrong this time.
I don’t like modern dating culture or this idea that there’ll always be somebody there to one up you. I wish it was easier than constantly being made to feel like that one toy you would get for Christmas as a kid just to play with it for a few days only to then forget about its existence once you grew bored of it. It’s for sure a first world problem and I know full well I don’t need to be romantically involved with somebody to be happy because there’s more to life than that but sometimes it would just be nice to have someone stick around for longer than a month at a time.