'The dating app mistakes I've been making for 8 years'

Put a pin in those perfect preference

From fussy filters to swiping out of loneliness, these are the biggest blunders I made and what I’ve discovered since ditching the dating apps in 2025.

As the eternal optimist who unfailingly believed The One was 'only one swipe away', dating apps were part of my daily routine for eight arduous years. Until I went cold turkey and dumped their asses before New Year’s Eve. 

Fed up with pitiful profiles and one-word responses from unremarkable men – along with an unheard of spate of meeting real people in real life – I hit delete on Tinder, Bumble and Hinge well before midnight, determined to try a different approach in 2025. 

It’s been two weeks since then and nothing is now as it seems. So here’s what I’ve learnt since breaking up with dating apps, and why I won’t rule out downloading them again. 

#1. I was being too picky 

The most frustrating realisation of all is that I wasted close to a decade looking for some perfect partner who would perfectly fit into my box of perfect preferences. 

They had to be within the right age range (which often hovered just a few years above mine), they had to live within a set of suburbs, they had to have the ‘right’ career and level of education, and don’t even get me started on height, or the fact that they had to have a ‘right’ name. 

Which all now seems entirely ridiculous after meeting seven men in seven weeks. Because when I look at their credentials, only two would have ever made it through my crazy criteria. Three were younger than me (one even much younger), three were in jobs I didn’t fancy, and one even had my dad’s name. But none of that stuff stopped me from being interested in them, or picturing a future together. 

After eight years of swiping, it was heartbreaking to think that I may have missed out on meeting the love of my life simply because I’d been too busy downgrading my pool of potentials. 

People have had enough with dating online. Image: Getty

“I think sometimes dating apps are built on vanity metrics in terms of what someone looks like or what they do for a career,” dating and relationship coach Beck Thompson tells Body+Soul. Instead, she says we should be focusing on what a person’s values are and what’s important to them. 

“Then it's about breaking that down into what are your deal breakers and what things do you have to have in a relationship,” Thompson says. “Like can they not smoke? Do they have to want children? Do they have to exercise? Is travel really important to them? Like, what are your deal breakers, and what are the things that you would compromise on?

"You can't just have all deal breakers and not be willing to move any, but in the same token you can't just give up everything you are to meet someone. So I think it's important to set criteria around what you're looking for, but I think you also need to be open about it.”

Dating apps can be a pretty lonely place to be. Image: Getty

#2. I was using dating apps for the wrong reasons 

It wasn’t until the second week of January, when New Year celebrations had well and truly wound down and any lasting hangover had worn off, that I made the biggest discovery: that beyond being bored and using dating apps to fill time, I relentlessly opened Hinge, Bumble and even Tinder when I was feeling lonely. 

Which, as a 35-year-old woman who lives by herself, works from home, and dreams of having someone to do life with, is a lot of the time. So I would turn to the apps and swipe as if it was my full-time job, putting in the long hours and having to hit 10, 20 or 30 profiles before bed like I was working to some kind of quota. All because doing so felt like I was taking my future happiness into my own hands, and hurrying the universe alone. 

But Thompson says there's a big problem with that. “If you're dating out of wanting to cure loneliness, you often accept behaviour that you shouldn't or you put up with stuff that is not okay,” she explains. “But so often it's a short-term fix or a surface-level fix, and it doesn't actually fix the loneliness. So I would do some work around what the loneliness is about and what you're actually trying to seek there. But I don't think it's the right way to use dating apps. I don't think they’re used intentionally enough at all.”

If you're dating out of wanting to cure loneliness, you often accept behaviour that you shouldn't or you put up with stuff that is not okay. Image: iStock

Without access to a portal of potential partners, I’m now forced to sit with my loneliness and, to be honest, it’s one of the hardest things I’ve had to do.

Dating apps always felt like a link to the outside world that didn’t require me to get dressed, get to a bar, and get drunk to find a mate. And that’s why I’m not going to swear them off for good. Because I think if we can put the effort in, present the very best version of ourselves to perspectives, and absolutely loosen our chokehold on perfect preferences, then we might just have more luck. 

But until then, for the first time in a very long time, I’m going to face this loneliness head-on instead of filling it with an online man’s attention. Because I am enough on my own. 

Originally published as 'The dating app mistakes I've been making for 8 years'