by A pottery class produces what two years of swiping did not, and the apps stay off the phone for now
I Deleted the Apps for a Month and Accidentally Had the Best Dating Month I’ve Had In Years
Following, in part, the group chat intervention I wrote about a few weeks back, I made an impulsive decision one Sunday evening to delete every dating app from my phone entirely, no plan beyond a vague sense that I needed to interrupt whatever pattern my friends had so lovingly identified, and no real expectation that anything particular would come of it beyond, at minimum, a month of considerably fewer notifications and considerably more actual free time in the evenings.
The First Week, Which Was Genuinely Uncomfortable
I want to be honest that the first week was worse than I expected, a genuine, specific restlessness at not having the low-level background hum of new matches to check, a strange grief for a habit I hadn’t fully registered as a habit until it was gone. I caught myself, twice, reaching for where the app used to be on my home screen entirely automatically, muscle memory outpacing conscious decision, which told me something slightly uncomfortable about how much of my actual attention that small icon had been quietly absorbing.
What Happened Once the Restlessness Passed
By the second week, something genuinely shifted. I said yes to considerably more things, actual things, a friend’s work drinks I would normally have skipped, a pottery class one of my flatmates had been nagging me to try for months, a spontaneous weekend trip a university friend organised with about four days’ notice that I would ordinarily have hesitated over given how it might disrupt whatever conversations were mid-thread on the apps. Freed from that particular background obligation, I simply had more actual bandwidth for the rest of my life, which is not a groundbreaking observation, plenty of people have written this exact column before me, but experiencing it firsthand rather than reading about it landed considerably harder than I expected.
The Genuinely Unexpected Bit
Here is the part I did not see coming at all: at the pottery class, entirely unrelated to any dating intention whatsoever, I met someone. Properly met, in the old-fashioned, slightly clumsy way, both of us terrible at centring clay, laughing about it, exchanging numbers afterward with the specific, unhurried ease of two people who weren’t performing a first date but simply enjoying an actual shared afternoon. It has been, so far, three weeks of something that feels considerably more grounded than most of what the apps produced across the previous two years combined, and I genuinely do not think that is a coincidence.
What I Actually Think Happened Here
I do not want to overstate this into some tidy universal lesson, because I know plenty of people who have met genuinely wonderful partners through exactly the apps I deleted, and I don’t think the technology itself is the villain of this story. What I think actually happened, for me specifically, is that removing the apps forced me back into the kind of unstructured, low-stakes social situations where I’ve apparently always connected with people most naturally, situations I had, without fully noticing, been substituting with the more efficient but considerably more anxious rhythm of app-based dating.
What the Wider Coverage Says About This Trend
I mentioned all this to a friend who sent me a genuinely interesting piece over at The London Prat about a broader, apparently growing trend of Londoners deliberately deleting dating apps for defined periods, citing exactly the kind of app fatigue and background anxiety I’d been experiencing without quite having language for it, alongside genuinely useful data suggesting a meaningful proportion of people who take extended app breaks report improved wellbeing regardless of whether they meet anyone during the break itself, which reframed the whole month for me slightly, from a dating experiment into something closer to a genuine wellbeing one that happened to also involve meeting someone.
Where I’ve Landed, A Month Later
The apps are staying off my phone for now, not as a permanent rule but as an ongoing experiment I’m genuinely enjoying the results of. Whatever happens with the pottery class connection, good or otherwise, I think this particular month has taught me something about where I actually meet people well, and it has very little to do with a swipe.
I told my flatmate, and separately the friend group who staged the whole intervention that started this recent run of self-examination, about the pottery class, and both reactions landed in roughly the same place: quiet, genuine relief, the sort you only really notice in someone else once it’s expressed, as though they’d all been holding their breath on my behalf longer than I realised. I don’t know yet where the pottery class thing goes. I know I like who I’ve been this month considerably more than who I was scrolling on the bus most evenings for the two years before it, and that alone feels like it was worth the uncomfortable first week of muscle-memory reaching for an icon that wasn’t there anymore.
More of my ongoing chronicles live at my author page, and the piece that helped me understand the whole month properly is over at The London Prat.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
