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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 08 2018, @03:41AM (8 children)
If you're lonely and desperate you may decide to ignore certain aspects of reality and go ahead and spend time with online dating sites.
But if you care enough about yourself you will choose not to ignore the reality that online dating is a terrible way to meet people.
Spending time in the real world is a far better way to meet people. As a bonus, you're not sitting in front of a computer screen
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Nuke on Saturday September 08 2018, @10:22AM (4 children)
Then tell us your secret because it never worked for me. And while you are at it, tell us where to find your "real world".
When I was single I could tick all the boxes that women are in theory supposed to like (and can now) - well-off, fit, good job, sane, educated, courteous, intelligent, kind, not even bad looking, although not especially charming. But in every social situation that I was ever in, the men outnumbered the girls of my age by at least 4-to-1 and as much as 10-to-1, and there would always be more charming men than me there. So I never got any chance to show those "tick boxes", and it did not help that I tended to be among Alpha males. So I was cold-shouldered. The only exception was to go to a public dance venue where there were possibly more girls than guys, but every girl I tried approaching there either ignored me, or told me to get lost, or told me to fuck off. I suppose if I had tried for ever and approached the ugliest girls I might have found someone that way, but it would have been a "huge waste of time".
Instead I joined a dating club (pre-online) and my first ever GF (at the age of 24) was, believe it or not, a busty jaw-dropping red-head who had been a Bunny Girl at the London Playboy club (that dates it) - albeit she left after one day. She had a nice personality too, but was like a girl from the "East-Enders" soap opera, quite dim, and (the deal-breaker) admitted to being sexually frigid despite every appearance. Anyway I met a number of nice girls through the dating club after that and married one. I discovered that working class girls (the ones that were never in those "Alpha" circles) really liked me, and they tend to make an effort to be more sexy too because sometimes it is all they have going for them.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by bzipitidoo on Saturday September 08 2018, @02:26PM (1 child)
> well-off, fit, good job, sane, educated, courteous, intelligent, kind,
Society and science still don't have that right. There is social pressure in those directions, and both men and women will claim to want those qualities, but many really want something else. As for scientists, they've been squeamish about trying to study such squishy, subjective trash as love. However, that attitude has changed and we are at last seeing good research on what makes us tick in the area of love and mate selection.
My two aunties are smart, but they didn't want smart men. They wanted average, even a bit below average intelligence, so they could be the intellectually dominant ones in their marriages. Their men chafed and rebelled a bit under that, and sometimes slipped their leashes. The younger auntie was also a competitor, and unrealized by me when I was a youngster, kept track of the ways her kids were better than me and my brother Her husband, my uncle, showed us what namby-pamby, weakling, girlie boys we were because we sucked at sports and at chopping wood for the fireplace, and didn't even want to go hunting or fishing.
The older auntie got deep into religion, and she went all "holier than thou" on everyone. Naturally she determined that we were all going to Hell-- me, my sublings, and all my cousins. Constantly prayed for our salvation. Didn't matter if you went to church every Sunday, you just weren't good enough, not for her. I was an especially bad boy because not only did I play Dungeons and Dragons, I actually brought that Satanic stuff into her house! She told everyone that Gorbachev's birth mark was the Mark of Evil, and during the collapse of the Soviet Union predicted-- no, prophesied-- that Gorby would emerge as the absolute dictator of the Soviet Union, which would then invade Israel, and start Armageddon and the End of the World. That was just one of many zany, nonsensical things she latched onto, and you might be wondering, how can I say she is smart if she ate up crap like that? But she was top of her high school class. No, she's not insane either, certainly not in the clinical sense. Watching her in action is like watching Major Kong employing his considerable ingenuity and resourcefulness at enabling the dropping of the A-bomb in Dr. Strangelove.
I found my aunties and their life choices very discouraging and depressing. If smart women didn't want smart men, then it seemed I might never find a woman i like and who liked me. Average high schools girls sure as heck didn't want the smart guy, they wanted a combo of Prince Charming and Fabio, or at least the captain of the football team. Smart guys were disgusting nerds, regularly slandered as socially inept, and with some justification though not near as bad as the "in" crowd liked to make out. Women also love, love, love dancing. For most men, dancing is something you have to learn and retain long enough to help win a woman's heart, after which you can forget it. A pregnancy tends to shut down the dancing. People can be a real mess of contradictory thinking.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Nuke on Saturday September 08 2018, @07:42PM
There are a number of disconnects between what women say they want and what they really (perhaps subconsciously) want. Looks, for example - you often hear women claiming that men's looks dont matter to them; but they do matter, but not how you might assume. For example, they don't like nerdy looks (that's not particularly me BTW) even if they are actually handsome (Clark Kent, Hugh Grant) and do like bad-boy looks (not me either) even if they are actually ugly (Pete Postlethwaite - remember the bad guy in The Lost World: Jurassic Park). The girls who might have liked the more gentle sort of guy are likely to try lesbianism instead these days. There are exceptions to everything of course.
I have a Chinese friend and he is constantly being approached by women being friendly (never did to me in my life), because they assume he is lost, lonely and confused. It is just the appearance of it - the very thing women claim does not matter. But he is nothing of the sort and finds it funny.
Women are also said to like money, but then go for men who clearly do not have much, perhaps because they can then feel superior. In my case most never even bothered to find out how much I had. Nerds tend to be better and more stable wage earners but that does not make women like them. As women can (must) earn as much as men these days perhaps they are not so worried about a good wage-earning partner any more, although there will always be the top-end gold diggers. Also, Western women have become spoiled with an excess of men in social circles. Consider how many girls become single mothers in the west; unless they can afford to employ a lot of baby-sitting they have to retire from society and dating, while OTOH the Jocks who are the fathers are back in the dating scene the very next day. Add a predominance of male immigration and you have the social sex imbalance.
I found that working class girls with less than dazzling intellects were the ones I was most likely to get on well with - they were not trying to compete with me. Also immigrant girls who were just lonely and looking for stability in a world that was less friendly than they had expected. I always avoided "strong", career minded or opinionated girls.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 09 2018, @02:32AM (1 child)
"Then tell us your secret because it never worked for me. And while you are at it, tell us where to find your "real world".
.
.
.
My "secret" is no secret at all. It's important to be yourself and not pretend to be a person you are not. We all want to project a good image but where doing so
goes wrong is when you act like you are a person you are not. In the end this is a winning strategy though it may not seem so at first. The reason it is a winning
strategy is that if you are genuine, then a person who is attracted to you will be attracted to you for who you are, and that is the best foundation for a relationship between two adults.
*
RE : Where to find the real world - anywhere but bars or clubs pretty much describes it. Go do things you enjoy and you may meet a person who also enjoys
doing those things. This is closely related to the "secret", above. Do what you enjoy doing and be who you really are. You may not attract all the girls ( or guys )
but you may attract the right ones.
*
Lastly, finding a person you can relate well to on multiple levels is not an easy problem to solve. Too many people expect that it should be easy and they become frustrated or disappointed when it is not easy. The bottom line is this : LIFE itself is hard. Relationships are part of life, so they are hard too.
*
Never give up. Learn how to enjoy life without having a companion and you will be FAR more attractive to a potential companion when you cross paths with that person. I could go on, but I have other things I'd rather do so that's all I have for now.
(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.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 08 2018, @03:51PM
I don't think this is the right site for you...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 08 2018, @11:25PM (1 child)
Ok, and if you're in Seattle or one of those other places where nobody interacts, then what? I rarely meet women that are single in person, let alone ones that aren't complete bitches, feminists or princesses.
People here rarely talk to each other in public, so the moment you start she's probably already shooting you down. Never seen it work for anybody here.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 09 2018, @02:36AM
"Ok, and if you're in Seattle or one of those other places where nobody interacts, then what?"
.
You need to find new places to hang out.
People interact with people virtually everywhere on earth.
I've spent time in Seattle. There are a lot of hipster idiots there, but there are also places where more genuine people hang out.
You need to seek and find those places where the hipsters are not and where people who are less pretentious are.