Men and women have discovered a new dopamine delivery system and they are using it non-stop. Do you want to know what it is?
App dating.
Apps like: Bumble. Tinder. Hinge.
It's your daily dose of hope.
It literally gives you a daily dose of dopamine, a momentary rush of feeling like there might be somebody out there for you.
As you use your thumb to swipe and get a match, you think to yourself, maybe this person, with so few words on their profile, is going to be the next love of my life. It makes you feel hopeful, a little surge dopamine releases and travels through your body. You text back-and-forth. He's charming and he's sweet.
It becomes addicting and I'm going to explain that in a second.
But, it's all quite superficial. You never really fix or change a profile; you just rearrange pictures. Don't forget to have the bikini shot so that every man knows how great you look. Don't forget to change the pictures around every few days, hoping to get that dopamine rush with the right guy.
Sure you'll get lots of actions, you'll get texts, you'll go on a bunch of dates. You'll probably end up meeting somebody who's great. But then, because that daily shot of dopamine is so addicting, you'll probably find a way to screw that up.
You won't follow up with him and he'll get bored because he's a man that actually has high self-esteem. He's not going to play games and chase you down while you're basically just looking for your next fix.
Oh, I know about all this.
It's quite addicting to me too.
I remember when I first started playing on apps, I felt the same way; I wanted the rush too, I wanted it everyday. Why should I commit to this one when I can get another dose of dopamine the very next day, the very next moment? I think about a lot of the women that I passed up on and I've got to tell you, a lot of them were pretty damn cool. But, I was chasing air, chasing hope, and dreams.
That's the problem with modern dating as it stands today. Right now, dating is just a daily dose of dopamine and nothing more.
We're constantly searching, plucking, picking, typing, and swiping.
We go out with somebody interesting, but we don't follow through at all, or if we do follow through it's kind of half-assed.
Why?
Well, because every time we log onto our little dating app or online site we're getting another dose and our minds and bodies start to become confused. We do this even though we had fun with the guy from Friday night and actually connected deeply with him.
We have so many messages coming in that we get all mixed up. I know that guy was great last week, but what if one of these other men is better?
It becomes addicting and that's why it works, the companies that sell the apps, the companies that get paid for the tracking, they keep you coming back for more because they know how you're wired. They just keep on selling you consistent hope; they keep on selling you that rush of dopamine.
It's amazing, I'll go out with somebody and we'll connect in a real way, they'll text me and tell me what an amazing time they had. But then, I'll go back on the app to look at their profile and I can see that they've been rearranging and putting new pictures up on their app.
It's ridiculous.
Here's what we need to start doing: We need to stop getting off on that daily dopamine high and start going back to the good old fashioned days. We need to start actually connecting with other people. We can start by giving somebody a chance, like we used to do before we got the daily dose of hope from a swipe or our inbox.
You see, it used to be boy met girl, girl met boy and they didn't have 1,000 options. They didn't think there was always somebody better lurking around the corner and they gave each other an opportunity to really get to know one another.
Modern dating has many pitfalls. The daily dose of hope and dopamine from these sites is one of them. If you meet someone that you connect with, it would be fantastic if you gave each other a real opportunity to get to know one another because, in reality, you don't want to be swiping non-stop. You don't want people to be able to tell how long you've been single because the size of the blisters on your fingers from swiping too much on one of those crazy, silly dating apps.