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In fact, it’s so bad out there that many women are choosing to sit out the game of dating altogether.

On both TikTok and Instagram, “Why I Quit Dating” videos pop up with increasing frequency, often garnering hundreds of thousands of views and likes, the comments filled with women saying they’ve given it up too, for six months, a year, forever.

In one video, a woman in tears asks, “Is anyone else just tired of dating?” She recounts a realization she had while crying in her car for 20 minutes. “I’m so tired of pointless conversations and meaningless interactions with people that go nowhere.” Along with some insensitive clichés from the happily coupled up (“It’ll happen when you least expect it!”), the nearly 300 comments echo her feelings. “It’s emotionally exhausting,” “I’m a lost cause…46 and divorced, I’m definitely over it,” “I think I’m just on dating apps to collect traumas instead of [the] right person.”

The specific reasons these women give are as diverse as they are: The woman who quit Hinge because her confidence was plummeting, due to the questionable calibre of men the algorithm was matching her with (675K views); the woman in her early 30s who realized she was over-investing in men who’d never see her as more as a minor character in their own story (79K views); the single parent tired of being disappointed by men who aren’t who they pretend to be at first (80K views); the woman who’s throwing in the towel because current dating culture—seeing more than one person at a time, the ubiquity of ghosting, the endless game-playing—is incompatible with how she wants to live her life (429K views).

“It’s a bit of a dumpster fire,” says Jane Laboucane, a Canadian author who chronicles her time in the romantic trenches in a new book, . Her stories are wild and often funny in hindsight: The distinguished lawyer who casually attempted to initiate a foursome on their second date; the celebrity chef who confessed his love of stealing things; the dragged-out situationship with a businessman who once drank so much he soiled himself in the Ritz lobby.

Laboucane, who at this point says she too has “essentially” quit dating, likens her decade-long search for a partner via dating apps to gambling, like sitting at a slot machine and compulsively pulling a lever, hoping you’ll win this time.

“It’s an exhausting, fruitless endeavour,” says Laboucane, pointing to the swiping as well as starting and sustaining a conversation, trying to figure out who’s a catfish, and assessing who’s just flaky. “Unlike other areas of your life, when it comes to dating, effort does not equal outcome. In fact, you can be punished for your efforts.”

Laboucane, who has sworn off the apps, would prefer to meet someone organically, offline. But she says the same devices that host the apps are making those old-fashioned meet cutes obsolete. “When you’re out places, most people are on their phones constantly, whereas before you’d walk into a coffee shop and people were making eye contact, looking around,” she says. “Now it seems like you don’t even have the opportunity to meet somebody because they’re so focused on their phones, probably swiping on Bumble or Tinder.”

While there are plenty of online dating success stories, Laboucane believes the apps “encourage bad behaviour,” and that technology more broadly is a “net negative” in the search for a special someone.

“It encourages people to look for the next best thing, instead of working with the person who is in front of you, who you might have a connection with and could be a good partner,” she says. “If you’re annoyed with someone, instead of communicating that and having a difficult conversation, resentment builds—and then you just fire up Tinder.”

Laboucane says that she doesn’t know a single person who has used these apps who hasn’t had a “terrible” experience of some sort. “Even if you’d had great conversations on text or the phone, you should just keep your expectations in the gutter,” she says. “If you go in with hope, you’ll probably end up leaving hopeless.”

The perception that dating apps contribute to so much that is wrong with dating today is something the apps themselves are aware of. Recently, Bumble changed its community guidelines in an effort to tackle some of the biggest scourges: Bots and spam accounts; “revenge culture,” which manifests in sharing private information or photos without a person’s consent; and even flaking on dates, which is now classified as an offense under its anti-bullying guidelines. The new “no show” policy is intended to combat the phenomenon of ghosting, something one in two Gen Z users surveyed said had happened to them.

“As a platform committed to helping make the internet a safer, kinder place, it is important that our Community Guidelines reinforce that and hold our members accountable,” said a Bumble spokesperson. For several years, Bumble has used machine learning to filter out behaviour like harassment; over 8.2 million Bumble and sister app Badoo accounts were blocked in 2023 alone. It’s also trying to combat swipe fatigue by launching a new feature that analyzes your preferences and past matches to generate four curated profiles, sent to you each day.

The most heartbreaking part of this trend is that most women who quit dating aren’t doing so because they’ve had an epiphany that they can live a fulfilling single life. It’s a protective maneuver, a retreat. For many, it’s a profound loss and source of sadness.

“Dating is a microcosm of hope, joy, dreams, fear, desire and insecurity that we have as humans,” says dating coach Lily Womble. “It’s not this frivolous thing. It’s actually a very tender, important microcosm of our wellbeing.”

Womble is the founder of , which works with clients to create a more joyful approach to finding love. Part of the problem, she believes, is that dating culture hasn’t caught up with the ways society has progressed, such as the shrinking economic imperative for women to marry, and thus settle for a less than ideal partner.

“It can be a very difficult experience [for women] to see this sea of men who are not able to emotionally meet them because of how the patriarchy has failed us all, especially men with toxic masculinity culture,” Womble says. “I think that women don’t have to settle as much, and men need to catch up more.”

One client recently told Womble that she had an internalized belief that it was pathetic to want a relationship, and also pathetic not to already have one. This is a common double-bind that creates cognitive dissonance for women who feel whole being single but also really want a partner. “These things feel at odds,” she says, “which then leads to so much stress that they end up quitting.”

The solution? Give yourself permission to “want what you want,” says Womble, without apology or self-judgment. “Wanting what you want in its fullness will draw it nearer to you,” she says. It’s less about waiting for the universe to drop a partner in your lap, and more about allowing your desires to take up space in your life without feeling behind or wrong somehow for not having achieved them yet.

It might also mean abandoning the rigid checklist—this height, that level of education—which can build a wall no one can climb over, or in the opposite direction, resisting “soft settling,” where “is nice and has a job” are all you’re asking for.

Instead of quitting altogether, Womble suggests doing a “dating detox” for at least a month (and don’t re-download the apps in a fit of loneliness one Friday night). “It’s a proactive, intentional effort to allow your nervous system to reset,” she says. “Get out of the casino.”

Then, detox from “bad dating advice,” like rostering or playing the numbers game, “which doesn’t work and leads to you not trusting yourself.”

Finally, detox from “dating worry,” which means compassionately acknowledging those deep fears you have about dying alone, and writing them down to remind yourself they’re fears, not facts.

“I think that people are over-identifying with the feeling of hopelessness,” says Womble. “If your last two relationships were crappy, your brain is going to try to protect you from that happening again. It’s going to decide it’s going to happen again and again, which perpetuates hopelessness because your brain is trying to gather evidence that you’re right in order to be safe and secure.”

You can override that spiral, Womble says, by opening yourself up to the vulnerability of hope, and actively looking for proof that what you want exists. She had a video go viral on TikTok a few weeks ago, in which she issued a challenge to collect positive evidence that you will find love, be it as small as a flirty exchange with your barista or bumping into a hottie leaving therapy.

“You don’t have to be actively dating to build hope in your life,” says Womble. “Your desire is evidence that it exists. And I’m believing it for you until you can believe it for yourself.”