What to Do When You Are Bored of the Apps

It creeps in slowly. You open the app out of habit, swipe for a bit, feel nothing much, and close it. A match arrives and you leave it a day before answering, not because you are busy but because you already know roughly how it will go.

Most men read that feeling as proof that dating apps are miserable. It is usually a much smaller and more fixable thing than that.

Think about what you are actually bored of. It is not women, and it is not the idea of meeting somebody.

It is the same opening line, sent to the fortieth person. The same two questions about her job and her weekend. The same four exchanges that go nowhere and then stop. You have run this conversation eight times this year and you know the whole script before you type the first line.

Anybody would be bored of that. It is not a sign that you are done with dating. It is a sign that you have one conversation and you have been reusing it.

The other half of it is that the app has quietly become something you do rather than something you use.

You open it in a queue. You open it in bed. You open it in a gap between two meetings, swipe eleven times, and close it having achieved nothing and answered nobody. Nothing was decided and nothing was asked.

An hour of that a week, broken into ninety second pieces, is the most tiring possible way to run a dating app. It gives you all of the fatigue and none of the result. Then the fatigue gets blamed on the apps, when the apps were never really being used.

If you only do one thing, do this one.

Stop asking questions that are work to answer. "How was your weekend" and "what do you do for fun" produce the flat exchange you are bored of, because they are the same questions every man sends and they make her write a small essay for a stranger.

Guess at something instead. "You look like a person with strong opinions about coffee. Am I wrong?" Or take one specific detail out of her photos and say something about it that is not a compliment.

She only has to tell you that you are right or that you are wrong, which is easy, and both of those answers actually give you somewhere to go. More to the point for you, it will not be the conversation you have already had eight times, because you made it up about her.

Second thing. Bring forward the point where you suggest a day.

Most boredom lives in the middle stretch of a conversation, after the opening has gone fine and before anybody has proposed anything. That is the part that drags, and it is the part you can simply skip.

A few good exchanges is enough. "This is going to go in circles until we get a drink. Thursday or Saturday?" That either produces a real evening or it ends it cleanly, and both of those are better than another week of small talk you are not enjoying.

Three apps that each get a third of your attention is three sources of the same dull feeling.

Pick the one that has produced the most real conversations for you and put the others away. Then give that one two proper sittings a week, at a time when you are awake, with the phone not doing anything else. Twenty focused minutes twice a week will do more than an hour of ninety second visits, and it feels like a completely different activity.

Sometimes it is not a technique problem. Something else in your life is heavy, and the apps are just where you are noticing it.

If that is the case, take two weeks off and take them properly. Delete the app from your phone rather than leaving it there to open absent mindedly. A real break is restful. A half break, where you keep checking and keep feeling flat, is the worst of both.

Come back when you actually want to meet somebody rather than when you feel you should be doing something about it.

Here is the version that a change of opener will not touch.

For a lot of men, none of this is really about being tired of the conversation. It is that running the apps well is a daily job. Reading who came in, answering while it is still warm, keeping two or three going properly, asking for a specific evening at the right moment. Done well, that is fifteen or twenty minutes a day, every day, for as long as you are on there.

Nobody signs up for that, and almost nobody sustains it. What you are calling boredom is often just the feeling of a task you have quietly given up on while still opening it every night.

That is the case the Online Dating Concierge exists for. Our team rebuilds your photos and your whole profile, then runs the apps for you day to day: reading the interest, carrying the conversations worth carrying, and asking for the evening at the point where asking works. What arrives in your week is a date with a time and a place on it, not a screen you have to feel something about. Your first date within a week, or we keep working, and after that the target is 2-3 dates each week.

If what you are bored of is the swiping and the small talk rather than the woman across the table, it is worth noticing that those are two separate things and only one of them has to be yours.