Over the last few weeks, I’ve been getting increasingly negative emotions about a lot of things, and it doesn’t help that there’s a pandemic going on on top of it. I lot of it has had to do with my experiences on Hinge lately. I went into the app as usual feeling positive and keeping an open mind. Gradually, however, my spirits began to wear down because my matches were starting to become frustrating and disappointing.

At first, I was taking these experiences as reflections of me and wondering if it was something I was doing. It’s not always easy to not take someone inexplicably ghosting you after a seemingly promising conversation as a personal slight. It’s not always easy to not feel let down when a conversation goes from great to “Am I getting breadcrumbed?” It starts to make you wonder why others are easy to dispose of you (when the reality is that we shouldn’t give their actions a second thought — We have no clue what their reasonings are.)

This week, though, it really began to hit me that a lot of my matches in recent have been projecting a lot of negativity, and I’m not even sure they’re aware of it themselves. One woman who I had been talking to for a healthy bit started to bring up how she had no hope in dating and didn’t care if she was single forever, which I can’t stress enough is a huge turnoff to the person on the other side of the screen. Another woman very early on out of the gate began telling me how she’s exhausted with getting ghosted and how she hates how her body looks (she was very fit.) I could go on for another paragraph, but I won’t. There’s also just the matches who match because they want a guy to entertain their boredom.

We have a tendency to think everything with dating is awful because of our own doing, when in reality, it’s really not us. It’s often because it’s a cycle of negativity where the people we encounter along the way desire to meet someone, but they themselves are stuck in a bad pattern of thinking itself that makes it impossible for anything constructive to come out of a match. I’m also certain that quarantine fatigue is taking its toll on many as well, especially since summertime is here and many are upset that their summers won’t be so summery.

That said, I’m taking myself off Hinge. It’s not adding anything to my life right now. In the meantime, I’m going to focus more time doing things I enjoy and also explore having a healthy sex life. When you focus so much time on trying to find a relationship, you sometimes need a break from it altogether. Maybe I’ll post some pictures on the Gone Wild, and get involved with the sex relationship subs and hang out with with communities there, as the people there seem more relaxed than people on dating sites. Life’s too short to be frustrated and let others’ negativity muddy your mindset.