So, You’re Ready To Give Up On Dating Apps

By now, the excitement is probably gone.

The profile you carefully put together a few months ago is still there, but opening the app feels different than it did at the beginning of the year. The conversations have started to blur together. Somebody disappears after asking for your favorite coffee order. Somebody else wants to text for three weeks without ever making plans. Every so often you delete the app, swear you’re done with online dating and then, a week or two later, download it again because you’re not exactly meeting eligible singles in the cereal aisle.

It’s a cycle plenty of people know well. Dating apps can feel exhausting, but they also remain one of the primary ways people meet. Walking away from them altogether might sound appealing. It just doesn’t solve the larger problem of wanting to find someone.

That’s why licensed professional counselor and relationship expert Debra Fileta doesn’t spend much time arguing about whether dating apps are good or bad. As far as she’s concerned, that’s the wrong conversation.

“The apps are not bad at all,” Fileta says. “If I was single right now, I would be on the apps. It is the most convenient way to meet people right now.”

That answer surprises people who expect a relationship expert to tell them to ditch the apps and wait for a meet-cute at church or the grocery store. Fileta isn’t especially interested in romanticizing the way people meet. What matters more, she says, is the person opening the app in the first place.

“It starts with stepping back and really taking an inventory of how healthy I am,” she says. “It’s really more about the why that you’re doing things, your underlying motivation, rather than just the what of what you’re doing.”

The way we date has changed dramatically over the last decade, and Fileta thinks our expectations have changed with it. Swipe culture has trained us to approach relationships the same way we approach just about everything else online: compare the options, narrow the field and keep looking in case something better comes along.

“The current dating focus is almost like shopping,” she says. “We go on Amazon, we’re scrolling through what I want and what I need, and we almost have a tendency to view relationships in that same way because it’s the same gesture. I’m swiping, I’m reading up, I’m clicking. It’s like a consumer approach to relationships.”

It’s an observation that’s hard to ignore once you notice it. Most dating advice is built around evaluating everyone else—spot the red flags, avoid the wrong people, learn how to identify a healthy partner. There’s wisdom in all of that, but Fileta thinks it misses half the equation.

“The equation of a healthy relationship is that when you’re healthy, you attract healthy relationships, because you’re 50 percent of the equation,” she says. “But the focus these days is so much on what I can get, rather than who am I when I’m standing alone? How healthy am I standing alone?”

That question reaches further than dating. It touches every relationship someone has, from friendships to family to marriage.

“The word relationship means how we relate to people,” Fileta says. “But a huge portion of how we relate has to do with how healthy we are. Emotionally healthy, mentally healthy, spiritually healthy. How do I relate to the world? What patterns do I bring to the world of relationships? Am I stuck in cycles of unhealthy relationships?”

Figuring that out isn’t easy, especially because most people aren’t particularly objective about themselves. That’s one reason Fileta believes healthy community matters so much.

“If you don’t have a friend who you can sit down with and say, ‘Hey, what do you think I’m struggling with? What do you think I need to work on?’ then you’re missing an important aspect of health.”

She also encourages people to treat emotional health the way they would any other skill. Nobody expects to become a great cook or musician without putting in the work, yet many assume healthy relationships should come naturally.

“This isn’t stuff you’re born knowing how to do,” she says. “You’ve got to develop and train and practice.”

For some people, that process begins with books or podcasts. For others, it means sitting across from a counselor and taking an honest look at the habits they’ve carried from one relationship into the next.

“Maybe that means a season of therapy,” Fileta says. “I would recommend a season of therapy before you start dating, just to be on top of things and just to get an idea of your past patterns and habits.”

She also recommends keeping a journal—not because it’s trendy but because it forces you to slow down long enough to notice what’s actually happening.

“There is so much power in expressive writing and facing your thoughts, putting them down on paper,” she says. “It helps you track the process of healing, it helps you track how you do relationships. We have a tendency to forget if we don’t write things down.”

That kind of self-awareness also changes the way people think about compatibility. Ask enough singles what they’re looking for and eventually the phrase “the one” will come up. Fileta understands why the idea is appealing. She just doesn’t think it’s particularly helpful.

“I think the question, in and of itself, sets you up for a lot of confusion,” she says. “You’re just out there looking for this one right relationship, and putting so much pressure, so many expectations on a relationship that, at the end of the day, isn’t going to be perfect.”

Instead of searching for one perfect person, she encourages people to look for someone whose life genuinely fits with their own.

“It’s not finding the one,” she says. “It’s finding someone who’s a good match for your life.”

She compares people to puzzle pieces. Compatibility isn’t about finding someone who shares every interest or finishes every sentence. It begins with understanding yourself well enough to recognize who belongs in your life and who doesn’t.

“In order to know whether or not someone fits your life, you’ve got to know yourself first,” she says. “I’ve got to understand my shape, I’ve got to understand my colors, because if I don’t understand who I am, everything from my lifestyle to my faith, my morals and values, my culture that I come from, my lifestyle, if I don’t understand what I bring to the table of relationships, I’m not going to know if someone’s a good fit for me or not.”

Without that foundation, she says, people often spend months—or years—trying to make the wrong relationship work simply because they don’t know what they’re actually looking for.

“What you see end up happening today is these people who are just grasping whatever random puzzle piece they could find and just trying to force fit it to their life,” she says. “But what do you end up with? Brokenness.”

There may never come a day when dating apps feel fun again. They’re awkward, unpredictable and, on more than one occasion, discouraging, but none of those things automatically make them unhealthy. According to Fileta, the more important question isn’t whether you’re still swiping. It’s whether you’ve spent as much time getting to know yourself as you’ve spent searching for someone else.