So, I gave up dating apps for Lent. That’s a whole 40 days of Hinge, Breeze, Feeld, etc., free. I’d just been ghosted for the third time since my break-up, and for the first time in 2026, from a Hinge match after five really good dates, and I decided enough was enough. For the rest of Q1 at least.
It felt entirely cathartic, vindicating and freeing to remove them. Feelings which lasted a good 96 hours or so, before one evening I’d exhausted all of my social media apps, hadn’t had a notification (AKA a serotonin microdose) in a few hours, and went to check my Hinge likes. Although, of course, I couldn’t.
This was, for sure, the biggest difficulty with deleting the apps, which I realised I’d come to rely on as a kind of emergency dopamine reserve on my phone. What’s a girl to do when she’s got no texts, no DMs, no likes, and also can’t go and hunt out validation and interaction from anxious-avoidant strangers on dating apps?
As the days turned into weeks, what had started as a way to reclaim my power over my love life and self-worth became a slippery slope into a strange kind of hopelessness. It was still the depths of winter, my social life had come to a natural ebb, and I was feeling pretty lonely. I began to realise just how much I’d been plugging the gaps on lonely evenings or boring weekends with the synthetic connection I found in my Hinge matches and Feeld pings.
Courtesy of Robyn Eugene
I had moments where I thought, “Lent, shment,” and almost redownloaded Hinge. It was only the fact that I’d told all my friends and set myself this silly little challenge that stopped me.
On the other hand, the negative reinforcement from not having these apps on my phone was blissful. You know those moments where you’re feeling really single. Not “out with your hot friends, baddest girl in the world” single. But despairingly, boringly, “I am the only person in the world not in love” single.
But then you remember the countless stories from friends, colleagues, acquaintances about how they met their soulmate online. So you muster the tiniest flicker of hope that tonight will be the night you join the club of the lucky-in-love. You’ll open an app and, after just two swipes (it’s always just two swipes), you find the love of your life, talk deep into the night, meet the following weekend, and then every weekend after until suddenly you’re walking down the aisle and telling people “we actually met on Hinge”.
