Feeling Discouraged by Dating Apps? How to Break the Dating App Trap

The dating app trap

You feel hope, so you download a dating app. Then you get frustrated, either from one terrible experience or an accumulation of them. You feel dating app burnout, so you delete the apps. Weeks, months, sometimes years go by. Loneliness kicks in and you might describe your love life as non-existent. Then you see, hear or experience something that gives you renewed hope, and you download the apps again. And the same cycle continues.

This is what I call the dating app trap, and if you want marriage one day, you need to know how to break it.

Why it happens: unrealistic expectations

One of the many reasons is that there isn't a realistic expectation of what to expect on the apps. You have an unconscious expectation of how things should go. When reality doesn't match it, you feel frustration. That resistance builds up again and again until you burn out.

Expectation 1: the match-to-date ratio

A realistic match-to-date ratio for women is about 10%. If you have 10 matches, you should ideally be going on at least one date. That means 90% of matches go nowhere: he says "hey" and you don't reply, someone over-sexualizes you, or someone seems interested and then just stops replying.

When I was a personal trainer, I'd tell new people at my boot camp: "You're going to be sore tomorrow, and even more sore the day after. Nothing's wrong. Keep coming back." Without that expectation, they'd think something was wrong and never come back. Knowing 90% of matches won't work out lets you think, "Nothing is wrong here. This is what to expect."

Expectation 2: the 80/20 rule of dates

Say you have 100 matches and go on 10 dates. Expect around 80% of those to stay a first date, or a second date where you're not too sure. The other 20%, two of those ten, you'll probably go on three, seven, maybe ten dates with and get really excited. For a lot of women, that's the man you get into a committed relationship with. For others, you find out at date ten it isn't a fit, and you start again.

It's a lot. And it's the price that is required for you to one day wake up next to your future husband.

You also need a strategy

If you're getting less than a 10% match-to-date ratio, something is off. If you're going on dates with 80% of your matches, you're probably saying yes to everybody. 10% is the minimum, and 30% can be really good. Common blind spots we see:

• Using the free version instead of the paid version of the app
• Photos pulled from your camera roll with no real intention behind them
• Prompts written by AI with no real thought put into them
• Replying too slowly: the chance of a conversation continuing drops dramatically after 24 hours with no reply
• Weak openers, or conversations that are way too formal
• Not asking great questions
• Getting great dates, then sabotaging them because of patterns from the past you haven't worked through

I've coached so many women who come to us with resistance to dating apps, and usually it comes down to one or two of these. Fix the blind spot and the apps start working for you.

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