Dating is doing something to our heads. A recent meta-analysis found that dating app users report worse mental health than people who don’t use them at all: more depression, more anxiety, more loneliness.
After a recent Self Space event with Emma-Louise Boynton, author of Pleasure: The Reclamation of My Body, our conversation about disconnection from our own bodies and desires got me thinking about just how uncertain modern dating can feel, and what that means for anyone trying to find real connection: with others, of course, but most importantly, with ourselves.
There’s a point in almost every dating story where the question quietly changes, from “do I like them?” to “do they like me?” From that moment, the relationship can stop being a process of discovery and start being a performance.
We begin editing ourselves before we’ve even been asked to: replying a little sooner than we’d like, waiting a little longer than feels comfortable, explaining ourselves one more time. We stop gathering information about them and start gathering evidence about ourselves. Maybe we aren’t enough. Old patterns resurface. The relationship slowly becomes a referendum on our worth rather than an exploration of our compatibility, and our centre of gravity shifts from us to them.
We’re often told that dating is about compromise, and of course, relationships need flexibility. But many of us have confused flexibility with self-abandonment. There’s a real difference between adapting to someone and disappearing for them.
One builds intimacy. The other builds resentment, insecurity, and a quiet sense that we’re no longer fully ourselves. Perhaps that’s because many of us were never taught what a healthy connection actually feels like. We learnt excitement and uncertainty. We learnt to read between the lines. Some of us even learnt that earning love felt more familiar than simply receiving it.
Some of the most damaging relationship experiences don’t look chaotic from the outside. There isn’t any shouting or betrayal. There’s simply enough inconsistency and emotional absence that your nervous system slowly stops relaxing, and you become hypervigilant without ever being able to point to one catastrophic event.
One of the biggest myths about relationships is that we build them alone. You know the typical story of “find the right person, heal yourself enough, and everything falls into place”. But healthy relationships have never been solo projects. They’re collaborations, and the emotional climate between two people emerges in the space they build together, not from one person’s attachment style or communication skills alone.
This is why boundaries are so revealing. We often think they push people away. In reality, they uncover what was already there. A boundary doesn’t create someone’s inability to meet us, it reveals it, and whatever happens next isn’t proof the boundary was wrong. It’s proof that it stopped us abandoning ourselves.
Some of the boundaries that matter most aren’t the ones we announce. They’re the ones we quietly hold for ourselves: allowing silence to become information rather than rushing to explain it away, not inventing certainty where someone else is creating ambiguity, and staying clear on our own emotional availability rather than hiding behind someone else’s.
Healthy relationships also ask us to tolerate something surprisingly difficult: being known. Not the carefully edited version, but the real one, the one who disappoints, changes their mind, and says no. For many of us, that level of visibility is more frightening than rejection, because rejection simply says “this wasn’t for me”. Being truly seen asks us to risk finding out whether we can stay ourselves and still be loved, or not.
Maybe this is why modern dating feels so exhausting. Not because there aren’t enough good people, but because so much energy goes into managing uncertainty instead of paying attention to our own experience. The more useful question is rarely “do they like me?” It’s simpler than that: how do I feel after spending time with this person? Do I feel more like myself, or less?
Perhaps better dating isn’t about finding emotionally perfect people. It’s about becoming a better collaborator, someone who understands that relationships are built between people, not inside one person, and that repair matters more than perfection. The healthiest relationships don’t ask us to earn our place within them.
They help us keep our centre of gravity exactly where it belongs: with ourselves.