Hinge isn’t Rotting Your Brain, You’re Just Using it Wrong

Some might say that Hinge is to single, twenty-something women, what maggots are to decaying bodies - a cyclical, biological, and yet acutely necessary evil. Some might say that they owe it their entire relationship. Others (me), argue that perhaps, some of us are just using it wrong.

Back in the day, meeting someone on the internet was reserved for perverted old men and those who could be fooled into thinking that Katy Perry was messaging them on BBM for 20 quid. The days of drunken confessions in the girl’s bathroom, your mate wincing, followed by a collective gasp when she utters, “I met him on…. Plenty of Fish”, are gone. Now, ‘the apps’ are a very socially acceptable, relative-at-a-family-gathering-approved way of having met your other half. But if widely accepted, how realistic is meeting the LOYL online? The reality is that I actually have multiple friends who met their partners on Hinge (and many of those partners turned out to be really nice and funny - How annoying!). 

That being said, I have more friends whose greatest endeavour is to keep ‘the apps’ at arms length, notifications off, seeing them as more of a chore than anything else. “I hate it. It’s dead cycling through the same three conversations with a new stranger every few days”, says my friend Maddy when lamenting a dating app’s negatives to me over text. After going through a rough situationship break-up recently, another of my friends rang me in tears. Her first words were “The worst thing about all of this…I can’t believe I’ll have to redownload Hinge!!”. This chronic feeling of dread links to a huge problem that a lot of modern-day daters face: Digital dating fatigue. “Constantly messaging strangers on rotation, performing being your best self, and struggling to find someone you like is demoralising” Says Ruchira Sharma co-host of the Everything is Content podcast. 

Aside from online dating fatigue, one of the most prevailing diagnoses of the digital dating age is what I like to call I Can Do Better Syndrome. Our ancestors of yesteryear would have lived, worked, shagged, and died in the same farming village for their entire lives. They would have known the faces of their community intimately, and, what’s more, the population of that community would be finite, with the addition and subtraction of the odd birth and death every few years. Between the thatched roof days of then and now, a whole lot has changed. I probably see the same amount of male faces in one sitting on Hinge that the girls of my lineage would have seen in their entire lives. This surge of options in the modern-day commonly leads to I Can Do Better Syndrome, an affliction that leaves its host with pangs of dissatisfaction, because as the name suggests, they wonder if in fact there’s something better just around the corner. After all, think about all the hunks who could be hiding in your Hinge likes. 

How did we get here though? Close your eyes and let me take you back to the late 2000s… The streets are filled with multicoloured chinos, fags are £2.40 for 10, and AskBongo just texted you back with information so correct that you had to check that someone wasn’t standing in the shadows outside your bedroom. What a time to be alive!  If you were me or one of my siblings during these archaic days, you were also experiencing life with newly divorced parents. I have vague memories of my dad carting himself off on dates (with women he’d met online) at the time, but I was probably too busy being branded obese by the family WiiFit to really take much notice. “I’d heard horror stories” he says when I bring up the subject of this article to him, “I was so worried they might turn out to be a complete weirdo, that I'd only take cash… and I would make sure the car didn’t have anything valuable in it”. Despite the fact that a pristine car and untraceable payment method undoubtedly had the ironic effect of making him look like a multiple murderer, this does bring to light a stark evolution in the way we experience online dating since the early days. Then, the alarming lack of checks on inappropriate behaviour by platforms meant that most people had no other choice but to go into a first date completely blind. 

The act of meeting someone from the internet as an adult in 2025 feels far removed from the haunting accounts that seem to have permeated those using ‘the sites’ (as they were known back then). Perhaps, that is because nowadays, we are unwittingly reliant on the quiet safety features that ‘the apps’ come equipped with. ‘The sites’ didn’t really have any solid barriers to stop adults from experiencing harassment. A few weeks ago, I had a chat with my best friend’s mum and her bestie about their time online dating in the latter 2000s (pre-husbands). Back then, Hinge hadn’t even been conceived, and websites like Match.com and the aforementioned Plenty of Fish ruled the love-finding roost. “P.O.F. was the one for dick pics” laughs her mum’s friend “So I was more of a Match.com girl.” Our chat is lighthearted and we giggle at this last remark but it reminds me again of that key development in the user experience of online dating. The new-age apps, like Hinge, were thankfully created without the function to send pictures, making it that much harder for sexpests to send unsolicited shaft shots. 

So, the unsung heroes of our digital dating age: The gorgeous and ever-developing safety features. On top of the missing photo-sending function, Hinge for example, has various safeguarding elements, including a robust reporting process and an in-app survey, “We Met”, which allows you to report bad behaviour post first date. Tinder has a function named “Are You Sure” which detects potentially harmful messages before they are sent, and prompts the sender with an in-app notification asking them if they’d like to reword it, which is then matched by a similar notification by the receiver which is called “Does This Bother You”. I will say, the names for these functions are lacking some serious creative flare, but their value is undeniable. Don’t get me wrong, I'm sure some creeps slip through the cracks but I can happily say that in all my time of being on Hinge, I’ve never received a message that was truly disturbing (I did once receive a like that said “small arses matter too!!” in response to a full length picture of me, which undid about six months of work at the gym, but nevermind). 

When defending something, I won’t act like arguing that “erm guys, it used to be worse!” does much in the way of persuasion. So let’s actually talk about some of the benefits of modern dating that we often look over, because they seem so everyday. Never before have we been able to refine our search so acutely to what we are or aren't looking for. Don’t like boys in ill-fitting ripped skinny jeans? Don’t like Surrey girls who live in Clapham? Don’t like men who eye-rollingly describe their job as being a “creative”? You can sift through Hinge, being as specific as you like, and eliminate those who immediately give you the ick, saving you from a lot of wasted pints at the pub. On top of this, online dating gives us the potential to meet people we would have otherwise, unequivocally, never have crossed paths with (for better or worse). The amount of choice (the very cause of I Can Do Better Syndrome) we have is actually a great thing, when framed correctly. 

The hypertransparency nurtured by social media does little for building intimacy with someone you’ve met online. One thing that I've started doing recently to combat this, is holding off adding the guys I date on social media. As a chronic online stalker, at first I hated the feeling of not being able to virtually check up on someone I was getting to know. If I post online, he won’t be around to pop me that reassuring insta story like to tide me over between dates. On top of this, I won’t be able to peruse the sordid digi-cam pictures from his mental lad’s trip to Bangkok in 2021 or see what his secondary school girlfriend looked like, both of which mean I won’t be able to create a sense of false familiarity. I can't use his online persona to fill the gaps of learnt knowledge I get from our in-person chats. Adding to this, I now appreciate that there is clear separation between the person I am within my connections IRL, and the portrayal of myself that I show to the internet. Arguably (as long as you are checking they are real first and meeting in a public place) a comprehensive background check of their LinkedIn can actually hinder chat on a date. Ultimately, this has been one of the most impactful changes I've made to the way that I date in the last few years. 

It seems ‘the apps’ are well aware of the sweeping bouts of dating fatigue that plague users, and more importantly give some stunning advice about how to fight them. Bumble’s blog, The Buzz, has an entire article dedicated to dealing with the symptoms. It lists several combative measures, including setting boundaries with yourself about time spent swiping, and looking inward at the specific parts of dating that you find draining, and changing your actions accordingly. The real (and probably annoying to hear) answer to dating fatigue is introspection, being able to see what actually bothers you about the dating scene and adjust the way you date. Don’t like the constant repetitive conversations with strangers? Change your prompts or say something unusual to start the conversation with the next one. Find yourself going on the same boring three-glasses-of-Merlot date every few weeks? Go bowling or go on a coffee date (these sound awful to me, but we’re all different!). “Sometimes it’s not the experience itself that’s the root of the issue, but rather what we make of the experience” writes Wendy Rose Gould for The Buzz. 

All this to say, yes, you might have been ghosted by that total fitty, and maybe that fella said he was really into you and now thinks he can find someone better, but the fact is that most of these problems predate the mere idea of online dating. Cavewomen probably got breadcrumbed by their favourite suitor and people’s love letters were getting aired long before the telephone was invented. Maybe the hangups we have about online dating are sometimes about dating itself, not the means of connection. And, for those hangups that are real and valid outcomes of the digital dating age, we have the power to combat them. If only we would open our eyes to the relative dating utopia that we live in. Never before have we been so protected by the platforms we date on. Never before have we had so many options, or been able to refine our matches to exactly what we’re looking for. It’s just the way that we view these elements, and how we adapt our actions that need a bit of work. After all, according to a YouGov study the most common way for an 18-24 year old to meet a partner is through online dating. ‘The apps’ are here for the long run, so you might as well get looking - your next reality altering situationship is just a swipe away.