Taking a Break

Introduction

For anyone who’s had to deal with dating in the last few years, you’ve probably had a time where you’ve gotten sick of dealing with the apps, and decided to take a bit of a break from them. There can be all sorts of reasons, such as having a particularly bad experience on a date, being disappointed by a failed proto-relationship, being busy with life or work, or even just being sick and tired of the whole experience.

Taking a break is a healthy and normal thing to do, especially if you’re finding that dating is affecting your mental health. Similar to trying to solve a problem while sleep deprived, being emotionally or mentally exhausted with dating will just mean your ability to communicate and establish new friendships or connections will be impaired. You simply won’t be at your best and chances are your potential dates will recognise it too and find it off-putting.

So why did I decide to take a break?

If you’ve been following this blog, you’ll notice the last post was nearly two months ago. I took a break both from writing and dropped the amount of time I was dedicating to dating in general as a whole series of other life events got in the way.

What was interesting was that while this was happening, I didn’t have the time free to find myself actually thinking much about dating at all. I didn’t so much make a conscious choice to reduce the time and effort being put towards it, rather I just had my available free time taken up by other things and before I knew it I’d gone more than a week without so much as opening any of the apps.

In part, I think this was fairly easy because I had no active conversations with anyone running either, so I wasn’t ignoring anyone or needing to split my focus between real life interactions and online interactions.

At this point, knowing there were at least a few more weeks ahead of time-consuming things to get sorted out, I made a more conscious decision to give myself a break and found I was feeling in a somewhat better headspace as a result, likely because I had been getting a bit burnt out and jaded with my experiences back in January and February.

Why does anyone take a break?

This is a bit of a rhetorical question, because anyone who asks it will already know their own version of the answer. We take breaks from things because we’re tired. Tiredness doesn’t have to be physical, it can be emotional and mental as well, and usually as we reach the point where a break is necessary, the quality of our performances in doing whatever it is we’re trying to do tends to drop. Taking a break from something is a way to change ourselves and reassess our circumstances, and to create an opportunity to reconsider what we’re actually doing. This can be remarkably difficult to do when we’re in the middle of doing it or otherwise too busy and overloaded or overwhelmed.

With dating, the tiredness is often emotional and mental rather than physical, so it might not be particularly obvious when it has become too much until others point it out, or you notice your own behaviour has changed. To this end, it can be worth keeping a diary or other notes so you have a way to track how you’re feeling, or otherwise set aside some dedicated time to allow yourself to relax and think about life.

When is a good time to take a break?

Figuring out when to take a break is a very individual thing, so there is no hard rule on when is the best time to take one. A good method is to do some honest self-reflection, using tools such as a daily mood chart or self-reflection questionnaires to see if you’re reaching a point of emotional burn-out or whether you’re experiencing any particular types of stress. It also helps to listen to trusted friends and family around you, particularly those who are comfortable with giving honest and fearless feedback, as they might be able to provide insights that your own state of mind might be hiding from you.

If you’ve established that you’re ready to take a break, the next thing to do is to stop collecting new matches, and to finish up any conversations you might have running. Nobody likes to get ghosted, so let those that you’re currently chatting to know that you’re planning to take a break for a while. Some apps have the option to temporarily deactivate your profile as well, however depending on which app it is, this may cause you to disappear from the match list of those that you’ve matched with (which they may mistake for being unmatched).

Actually taking the break

Taking the break itself is easy. The extent to which you take a break is entirely up to you, it could be as simple as switching off notifications from the apps and not opening them as often (or at all), you could delete the apps but leave your profiles online, or if you’re aiming for a more extreme option you could even go to the extent of deleting your profile from the apps as well or do an entire digital detox. For me at least, taking a break was as simple as just not opening the apps as often, purely because my time was taken up with other things.

If you find yourself promptly undoing whatever you did to take a break or regretting your decision, it might be worth doing some more introspection to figure out why. You don’t have to stick with a break, but it is well worth trying to understand your motivations and whether you might be engaging in self-reinforcing negative behaviours. If in doubt, have a chat with a mental health professional.

Finishing the break

While some breaks are permanent, others can be temporary. If you’ve planned for your break to be temporary and want to try again, the next step is getting back into dating again. This could be online, by starting up the apps again, reactivating or recreating your various profiles, and trying to find new matches, or by reconnecting to previous matches to see if they’d like to talk or catch up again. You might instead decide to try entirely new methods, such as speed dating!

Be mindful that if you’re aiming to reconnect with past matches, there is always a chance they will have moved on, gone on a break themselves or unmatched while you were away. While it might be disappointing, it is worth giving yourself a bit of time to settle back into things again.

If you’ve taken a longer break, consider whether you want to return to the same platforms you were using previously as well. As with all things, the various dating apps do go through demographic and functionality changes over time, so you may find that things have changed while you were away.

Most of all, try not to feel too discouraged when trying again. It takes time to adapt and settle into anything you haven’t been doing for a while, so don’t expect instant results!

Conclusion

Dating can become overwhelming at times, as can life in general. When too many things all begin to happen at the same time, it is perfectly natural to prioritise things which are most important to you and deprioritise things which aren’t so important. More often than not, the most immediate and obvious tasks end up getting priority (by drawing your immediate attention to them) so the less demanding tasks such as those which require conscious effort and time get left until later.

Trying to do too much all at once leads to burn-out and poor quality outcomes, particularly when dealing with activities that are more intellectually and emotionally demanding. People in general aren’t so good at multitasking (which in reality is more like rapid context switching), and high quality dating really does require consistent and undivided effort and focus, otherwise you’ll find that your dates will believe you aren’t particularly interested in them.