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from the post-traumatic-swipe-disorder dept.
Are 'swipe left' dating apps bad for our mental health?
Dating apps have taken the world by storm, but has the trend for swiping right or left to like or reject potential matches contributed to many people's unhappiness and low self-esteem?
Following the end of her last relationship, Kirsty Finlayson, 28, did what many people do - she turned to dating apps to find love. But the incessant swiping and the stream of small-talk conversations that soon fizzle out left her feeling dejected. "Dating apps have definitely increased my anxiety," admits Kirsty, a solicitor who lives in London. "It fuels the idea of a disposable society where people can match, date once, and not give it much effort," she says. "I find it difficult to distinguish between those who are just using it as a way of passing time on their commute or ego-boosting and those who actually are looking for something serious."
[...] Despite the huge popularity of dating apps - and the millions of success stories worldwide - many users report that some apps make them feel low and experience self doubt. [...] Such experiences echo the results of a study two years ago by the University of North Texas, which found that male Tinder users reported lower levels of satisfaction with their faces and bodies and lower levels of self worth than those not on the dating app.
Trent Petrie, professor of psychology at the University of North Texas and co-author of the research, says: "With a focus on appearance and social comparisons, individuals can become overly sensitised to how they look and appear to others and ultimately begin to believe that they fall short of what is expected of them in terms of appearance and attractiveness. "We would expect them to report higher levels of distress, such as sadness and depression, and feel more pressures to be attractive and thin."
Earlier this year a poll of 200,000 iPhone users by non-profit organisation Time Well Spent found that dating app Grindr topped a list of apps that made people feel most unhappy, with 77% of users admitting it made them feel miserable. Tinder was in ninth place.
(Score: 2) by Nuke on Friday September 14 2018, @03:12PM
This thread is getting a bit old now, but anyway ...
As usual with this sort of advice - not pretending to be who you are not etc - starts with the assumption that you are already having a conversation with each other eg across a table, on bar stools, or even standing talking somewhere; in fact you have already met them at that point. Surprise, I did not have so much of a problem from that situation. It is getting to that point that is the problem. Believe it or not I never had a conversation (>15 seconds) with a girl of my age until I was 23 (except to a bar hostess once). As I said, in any social situation where I might have had a conversation (ie > 15 seconds) there were always guys outnumbering girls by 4-to-1 or more, and another guy would very soon butt in, and they were always louder and more charming (superficially anyway) than I am. So the girls never had any time (or inclination) to find out what I was like, and I did not have time (or inclination) to pretend anything
It was not until joined dating organisations that I had any conversations >15 seconds with girls of my age, because on such a date we were in a kind of captive situation, at least for an hour or two. The irony is that having met and been given the chance to converse with them, women have actually tended to like me.
As for meeting people in general activities - never happened to me. I was never introduced to any girl either - outside work I was considered to be "brainy" and brainy people are supposed to be uninterested in romance. I have been in plenty of activities clubs (athletics, special interests, etc) but the only females there were other members' wives/partners and usually over 50, and wherever I have worked has been a man's world. I'd now be a middle-aged single incel if I had not joined dating clubs. Other people might be content to sit back and let it happen ("It just happens" they say - BS), but I wasn't.