My friend and I sat at the kitchen table and traded sighs. After using dating apps for a grand total of one month, we were tired. Jaded. We didn’t want to hear/send another pickup line for the rest of our lives. Although it seems pretty obvious that one would get tired from talking to a bunch of people on dating apps, I would like to needlessly formalize what we intuitively know, which is basically most of psychology. Just kidding. Love you, psychology ❤.
We tend to take ghosting personally, as if the act is a reflection of the person’s character. Cold-hearted wenches, we declare! But if we look at the practice under the context of Dunbar’s number, we see that ghosting is a necessity and actually quite sympathizable.
More or less, Dunbar’s number defines a threshold for the number of relationships one can maintain. That number is around 150 but can fluctuate greatly based on the person. These people can be situated in different social orbits around you, with your closest friends being limited to around five and expanding from there. This system of social orbits and limitations is meant to keep your cognitive resources in check, so your soul doesn’t end up getting sucked from your body.
Dating apps take this delicate system and violently stuff it like it’s a Thanksgiving turkey. I would like to argue that in no other case is there such a rapid artificial injection into our social orbits. And many of these people penetrate social layers in which they have no business being in, given the length of time we know them. Blinded by some notion of intimacy, we might confide in someone on the second date or text them more than we do our friends. So given that we are blatantly abusing the social system that helps maintain our cognitive sanity, it makes sense that dating apps render us exhausted.
The main point is don’t take ghosting personally. We are taking Dunbar’s number and giving it a good beating with the hundreds of matches we experience over dating apps. So let’s all try to be a little more understanding. After all, the alternative is certain internal combustion.
