How Leaving Online Dating Sites Has Made My World a Better Place

It took me two and a half years of riding the roller coaster that is being on online dating sites to realize that it was time to get off. That maybe I should not have been on it so long.

Somehow this roller coaster has mostly been downs and without a lot of inclines. Although this roller coaster has been never-ending I never once stepped off of it. From time to time it slowed down to pick up passengers only to let them off quickly thereafter, but in two and a half years I personally never disembarked. Instead, that stomach-in-your-throat, scream-‘til-it-hurts feeling prevailed. Until one day I decided that it was time to take a real break from online dating sites and apps.

On this day I decided to take a month-long hiatus from these sites which has turned into a five month hiatus (and counting…).

It sounded selfish at the beginning, but I truly believe that it was the only way I was going to be wholly attractive to a catch-worthy guy is by being wholly catch-worthy myself. This was meant to be a month of self-reflection and improvement filled with yoga, salsa, Spanish, volunteering, being with friends and family, reading new books, and writing. I had plans to throw in a little Twitter, listen to podcasts, and read travel blogs and follow Instagrams for when I needed to be mindless.

To get the attention we all crave

I planned to keep up more with friends and family, including calling my grandparents. And in these past months, I have done these things and more. The more I have analyzed this decision, the more I have  realized that I made the absolute right choice. Never again shall a free dating app be brought up in my phone’s App Store.

Nearly every single man I have met online and I were misaligned. Not because we were incompatible (because sometimes let’s face it, we were), but because we were inherently very different people wanting very different things. I am an old soul, an old-fashioned girl who wants to get married and have a family. I have wanted it from the time I was 20. There is no need to mess about and date many men when I just want one. The guys I meet online are not the same. They are OK with modern dating, defined, I have recently discovered, to mean dating multiple people at the same time. To let our roller coasters run concurrently for a brief moment in time while two or four or eight other girls’ coasters tagged along. That isn’t me. And it never will be.

And while it took me a while to get off the tracks, I am glad that I did.

While I did so with a little trepidation that maybe I was making a big mistake and my one true love was in fact waiting for me on Tinder. Although probably not, because a man who wants to date three girls at the same time, is not the man for me.

In the end, being on online dating sites has been an interesting ride but I am glad to be off of them and am more excited to see how it all turns out.