Divai Brown, a 39-year-old lawyer from Harlem, has been living in Dublin for about 15 months, working on financial regulation and loving it.
“I have no immediate plans to move back to America,” Ms Brown said in a telephone interview. “Maybe in other parts of Europe, but definitely not back to the United States.”
For all the benefits of her move, dating in the country hasn’t been very easy. She points to a number of factors that have made things difficult, including the fact that she is a high-achieving black woman with a high-paying job, which has intimidated some men.
Until recently, she was on Tinder, Hinge and Bumble. She said she’d always seen Tinder as a “long shot” in terms of leading to something serious, and Bumble, which requires women to send the first message, took too much “leg work.”
“It’s like a different job,” she said. “As much as I value companionship and relationships, I don’t know that I value it to the point of burnout.”
As the days get longer and the weather warms, there are some who are opting out of dating apps — at least for now. Of nearly a dozen women interviewed, many said they rewinded the time spent swiping through dating apps in the cold winter months by prioritizing real-life encounters and focusing on having fun.
Ms. Brown recently decided to take her dating life off the apps this summer and do the things she loves, such as going to food and wine festivals or hiking. In the meantime, she said, she’s leaving her dating life to “the will of the universe.”
“I’m 39, I’ve never been married, I don’t have kids — I don’t know what the dating pool for the late 1930s to early 1940s really looks like,” she said. “I feel like if someone is interested in me, they let me know. And if they aren’t, they aren’t.”
Atoosa Moinzadeh is also riding that wave. Ms. Moinzadeh, a 30-year-old Brooklyn resident, has been using dating apps for nearly 10 years, having first downloaded Tinder in 2014. She’s “tried all the apps” including Bumble, OKCupid — even Coffee Meets Bagel for a “very short period.” Tinder and Hinge were the two she used most recently, but she deleted them both in March after her frustrations started to mount.
“It’s hard for me to get on stage where I’m actively dating someone,” Ms. Moinzadeh said in a phone interview. “I don’t have a problem getting matches, it’s more that I get to the point where I think, ‘This seems like a decent person to meet in real life.'”
Before deleting the apps, she spoke to two people, one of whom joined her on a really good date before ghosting “out of the blue.” The other admitted a month later that he just wasn’t ready for anything serious.
“I think the straw that broke the camel’s back was that as someone who doesn’t really like the idea of casual dating, I just kept meeting people who didn’t know what they wanted, didn’t really use it on purpose,” Ms. Moinzadeh She added that she had never been in a long-term relationship that resulted from online dating.
For Vinessa Burnett, an HR program manager in Dallas, her no-dating app summer actually started in January after she read an article about hope fatigue among longtime dating app users and was inspired to quit for an entire year.
“It hit me, ‘Wait, I actually downloaded Tinder in 2013,'” she said in a phone interview. “So I’ve been with it from the start and I’m still single.”
She said the piece, which was published in The New York Times, really touched her because she had felt despair and disappointment when things didn’t work out over a long period of time.
“So in an effort to curb some of the hope fatigue I was experiencing and take away some of the anxiety I’d gotten used to dating, I thought, I’m going without the app,” she said.
Since January, Mrs. Burnett, 28, joins her offline dates and has dated four men, including one she met at a networking event. Another date stemmed from a “little mistake” where she rejoined a dating app for a day before deleting it again.
She said not using the apps (most of the time) had also changed her preferences, which was a plus. She is Christian but had a nice date with someone who is Muslim. She is also 5-foot-2 and prefers tall men. “I don’t think I would have wiped these guys out,” she said. “They’re all short.”
And while Ms. Moinzadeh has had previous summers where she wasn’t on the apps, she’s considering making this into something long-term. She has a vacation planned this summer and plans to spend her free time with friends and going to concerts.
“If I meet someone who’s cool doing that, cool, and if not, I’m not really trying to be pressured to find a partner,” she said. “Because at this rate I’m trying to find someone that I authentically connect with as a fit, rather than just actively looking.”
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