A quick note before I start: I've decided to share my thoughts and stories here because my first post got a lot of discussion, more attention than it got in my native-language community. It feels like this is where I run into more people who share my interests, ideas, and confusions, so I'm planning to post the stuff I've written in the past here too.

（The original content is written in my mother language and translated by AI.）

Using dating apps is something that drains me, because rationally I'm deeply resistant to them, even repulsed. But it's like those nights when I can't resist ordering pizza, fried chicken, or a burger at 1am. When it comes to raw desire, I still lose.

Still, I want to share my experience with dating apps this past year. I signed up and deleted my Hinge account three separate times. The first time lasted two weeks, the second time one week, and the third time, which was the most recent, lasted the longest at three weeks. On that third try, I gave myself a whole mental prep talk and hoped to approach it scientifically, treating the app like an experiment. But in the end, I still burned out completely and deleted my account.

Now that some time has passed, I've finally landed on a good metaphor for why dating apps drain me so much. That powerless, regretful feeling reminds me exactly of college, lying in my dorm bed after hitting an all-you-can-eat buffet with my roommates, staring at the ceiling and questioning my whole existence. After maybe three or four buffet trips, the desire for all-you-can-eat was completely gone for me, and that was when I was around 20 with a solid appetite.

I always joke with friends that my sex drive is like my appetite now: bird stomach, full after two bites. But if I don't eat, I still get hungry. So when that ceiling-staring, what-am-I-doing-with-my-life feeling washed over me again, I think I finally understood the mechanics of dating apps, and how those mechanics turn people into what we'd call "not normal."

Picture walking into a buffet. Everything is free; eat whatever you want. You see all these dishes that look delicious, so you grab a little of this, a little of that, and your plate fills up fast. But you take one bite of this, one bite of that, and pretty soon you're full. Now here's the thing: a lot of that food is stuff you'd never actually eat in normal life. You only grabbed it because it happened to be there at the buffet. Tie that back to dating apps. We swipe past all kinds of people, but honestly, most of them we'd never want a long-term relationship with. They just seem within reach, seem free, so we send the like anyway, we show up to the date anyway.

But none of these people are the ones we actually want, and our stomach is only so big (an adult only has so much time, energy, and emotional bandwidth). So what does that create? By the time the food we truly love finally shows up, we might already be too full to eat. Or there's another possibility: the genuinely good stuff, even at a buffet, is rationed, and the line for it is always long enough to make you want to give up.

And that isn't even the worst part. The worst part is that trust between people has been sliding downhill these past few years, which means even the stuff you'd normally not bother with requires standing in a huge line or putting in a ton of effort to get. Like burning down the house to roast a pig.

And once I realized that, I flipped the table. I'm done playing.