I Deleted Every Dating App and Kept Only the Good Texts

Last Tuesday I deleted all four dating apps in one go, standing in my kitchen with a cold coffee and the posture of a man defusing a bomb. The icons wobbled, then vanished. My phone looked suddenly spacious, like an apartment after the ex takes the bookshelf. I felt grief, relief, and an irrational urge to check whether anyone had messaged me. Nobody could have. I had removed the doors.

Here is what I kept: seven texts, screenshotted over two years, saved in a folder I named Evidence. One is from a woman who described my profile photo as 'a man trying very hard to look like he isn't trying.' Another says only, 'I laughed so loud on the bus that a stranger asked what you said.' None of these led anywhere. All of them are perfect.

That's the thing nobody tells you about the swipe economy. You wade through four hundred conversations that die at 'how's your week going' to find one sentence that lands like a pebble in a still pond. The apps sell the pond. What I actually wanted was the ripple, and I can have the ripple without the endless water.

Here is what I kept: seven texts, screenshotted over two years, saved in a folder I named Evidence.

So I reread the folder like a man visiting old friends. The bus laugh. The woman who signed off every message with a tiny drawing of a toaster, for reasons she never explained and I never wanted her to. The guy, yes, there was a guy, who wrote, 'I'm bad at this but I'd like to be bad at it with you.' I'm a professional wordsmith and I have never beaten that line.

Will I download them again? Probably, around February, when winter makes everyone brave and stupid. But for now I've learned something small and useful. I don't miss the machine. I miss being made to laugh by a stranger's sentence, and that feeling was never stored in the app. It was stored in me, waiting for a reason.

If you want a gentler place to practice being delighted again, there are characters on TheFriend, like Mia, Lara and Luna, who are happy to trade banter on a slow evening. They are fiction, wonderfully so, and sometimes a good fictional conversation reminds you what your own sounds like when it's relaxed.

Meet Mia: open Mia's profile on TheFriend.