You match with someone lovely, you start to imagine what could be…and then she goes quiet. And somehow, the silence becomes a verdict on you. If online dating has been quietly wearing down your confidence, this one’s for you. In this episode, I break down why the apps are so hard on good men, and it genuinely isn’t all in your head, and how to use them without losing your sense of who you are.
Links and Free Resources:
1. Free Guide: “Why You’re Not Finding Love (And The Inner Shift that Changes Everything)” → https://datingcoach.kimberlyninahill.com/findinglove/
2. Dating After Divorce? Get The Relationship You Want with Dating Mastery for Men → https://datingcoach.kimberlyninahill.com/dating-mastery-for-men/
3. Audio Masterclass: Relax and Enjoy Conversations With Women Here → https://kimberlyhill548.lpages.co/10tipsmasterclass/
Here’s the podcast-
I wanna describe a moment, and if you’ve dated online, which I’m guessing you have, then you’re gonna know this moment before I even finish. You’re scrolling one evening, and a woman’s profile stops you in your tracks. She’s beautiful, she’s lovely, and you feel that small lift in your chest that you haven’t felt in a long time.
So you send her a message, it leads to a match. You’re excited, you start talking with this woman, and without quite meaning to, you begin to imagine what it could be like with her. You’re thinking about your first coffee or dinner date, what she’s gonna be like sitting across the table from you. Maybe you’re starting to think a little bit more about where this relationship could go, and you’re already a little ways into the future with a woman you’ve never met.
And then it just stops. She goes quiet [00:01:00] Or one morning you wake up and she’s unmatched you, and you have no understanding why. There was no explanation, no goodbye. And in that silence, your mind turns, not on her, but on yourself. You are asking questions like, “What did I do wrong here? Is it me? Did I say the wrong thing?
Am I just not enough anymore?” Now, if online dating has been wearing down your confidence, I want you to stick with me because by the end of this video, you’re gonna understand why it is quite difficult to navigate. You’ll also know how to use the apps without allowing them to cost you your sense of who you are.
Now, welcome to this channel. My name is Kimberly Hill. I’m a dating and relationship coach for men. I support good-hearted men to attract deeply loving relationships and go on to maintain those [00:02:00] relationships. Now, you’ll have to stand by me a little bit today. I’m recovering from a head cold , so I’ve got some water and coffee here I might need to rely on during today’s filming.
But if you’re new to this channel, I wanna obviously welcome you here. Thanks for finding me and discovering me. I’ve also put together a free guide called Why You’re Not Finding Love, and it’s something worth picking up. It’s nine chapters. The writing in it is quite direct. And if you’ve been wondering why dating is just not working out for you or why the same patterns keep showing up, like you feel like you keep attracting the same type of women or ending up in the same type of relationship, it’s gonna show you exactly why that’s happening and what you can do about it.
Now, go ahead and grab a copy. The link to do that is in the YouTube description of today’s video. Now, if you have been following my channel for a while, maybe you’ve seen me on other forms of social media, and you’re already past the point of downloading a guide and reading about it, you really wanna do the work to improve yourself and to find the relationship you’re [00:03:00] really craving that you know you deserve, then Dating Mastery for Men is my self-paced program that is built specifically for the men that come to my channel.
It goes places that this YouTube channel and podcast does not go, and it is structured in a way to take you from understanding what’s going on to applying it in real life and seeing those changes take place for you. Really, the main outcome of Dating Mastery for Men is that you feel better about yourself, and you’re landing yourself in the relationship you truly want, and you know how to maintain that relationship.
So the link for that is in the description of this video as well. You can read more about it, read some testimonials, see if it’s right for you. Now, let’s get back to today’s video. Now, I wanna talk about how it’s not just you . Okay? So a lot of men blame themselves- while using online dating apps. But I do wanna really acknowledge why dating apps [00:04:00] are genuinely quite brutal for a lot of people.
Now, you know What you’ve been feeling or the experience you may have been having online is not all in your head, and it’s not because you’re weak or you just have some bad understanding of how to talk to women or use dating apps. Online dating is genuinely hard. It is often harder for men because you have the initial pressure of being the initiators, being the pursuers, and I don’t wanna sit here and pretend otherwise.
Now, think about what apps actually are. They are built to keep you swiping. Now, of course, the promise and the motto of many of these dating apps is, “We wanna help you find your best relationship,” but it’s your attention that they sell, and every swipe is like a small pull of a slot machine. Maybe you get a match, maybe you get nothing, [00:05:00] and that unpredictability is designed to keep you coming back, right?
There’s the plain math of it. Now, a lot of men are out there, and they’re swiping and putting a lot of effort in just to get a handful of matches, only for some of those matches to become conversations, and only for some of those conversations to lead to a date, and maybe even lead to a relationship. So you can do a lot of things right and still be met with a lot of silence.
Now, this isn’t your failure. It’s the structure that you are standing in, and the culture on there can be quietly brutal as well. Being ghosted or just having someone drop out of a conversation is normal, right? Being unmatched without a word is normal, and someone you were genuinely excited about can really just vanish in a moment, and nobody feels like they owe you a reason.
So if all of this has worn you down, well, of course it has. [00:06:00] You’d be, you know, abnormal if it hadn’t because it is affecting you on a human level. So I do wanna be honest with you here because I think you guys deserve honesty more than comfort. These apps are stacked in ways that you didn’t design, nor can you control.
So if you still choose to use them, because many of us choose to use them because we really feel they’re one of the only ways to meet people, especially as we get older. It’s harder to make connections and friends when we become an adult or come out of a long-term relationship or a marriage, and we think, “Okay, well, online dating is the way we’re supposed to meet people.”
And so you use them despite knowing the odds or how they might make you feel, and this is where I wanna spend the rest of today’s video because I wanna share some ways that you can really gain your power back if you’re choosing to use online dating apps. Now, let’s first acknowledge why the silence that you can get from a dating app really can affect you and hit you so [00:07:00] hard.
But before I do, just allow me a sip of my- Second morning coffee. Okay, so I wanna explain why this silence that you can get from a dating app hits so hard, especially when you know you’ve never met the woman that you might be talking to. Maybe it was just a handful of messages, and yet this woman potentially going quiet on you can flatten your whole evening.
For some of you, it flattens an entire week, and you wonder what’s kinda wrong with you for letting it affect you and bother you so much. But I want you to understand this: nothing is wrong with you. The moment that any of us, or the moment that you start reaching towards somebody, even if it’s somebody you’ve never met on a dating app or you’ve built, you know, a small little bit of hope around, a part of you, your heart, is truly leaning into that, and you’re bracing for [00:08:00] them to reach back to you.
Now, that is not weakness. It’s you being open to connection after everything you may have been through, and that takes its own quiet courage. So when this woman doesn’t message back or disappears, something in your body is responding as if something very real has been lost. Now, it wasn’t, but it aches as though it was.
And just knowing that, the feeling being very real for many of us, it’s not proof of your worth. It’s actually where you start to find your footing again. So something else that’s really important to understand not to do when you’re using dating apps is keeping tabs or keeping score. Now, this is a hard one for many men I work with ’cause they’re just, they’re statistically minded, they’re analytical.
It’s, it’s like you see the numbers in front of you, [00:09:00] and it’s natural to want to do this. When something hurts, your mind rushes to explain it, and you start turning online dating apps into a little bit of a scoreboard. So a reply you get from a woman is a win, right? A silence you get from her is a loss, and soon you’re kind of adding all of this up into a verdict on whether you’re still a wanted person.
You think, “Well, how many women did I swipe right on or swipe up on, and how many of those did I get back?” And so you start tallying this stuff up, stuff up. And of course, uh, you know, you’re gonna hear dating advice where someone says, “Well, just don’t take it personally.” And it’s very easy to kinda nod along to that advice, and then the next time you get on a app, y- you, you don’t feel like you can follow that advice.
It hurts you because you’re a real person and you’re having real feelings. So here it is plainly: a woman not replying to you is not information about [00:10:00] you. You have no idea if she got busy, she met somebody- She was never serious to begin with, she decided to get off the app, she fell ill, she went on a trip.
You, you have no idea. But what happens is we take these moments of silence or these blanks and we fill them with the cruelest story available to us, and that story is often that I’m not enough, or it’s me, I’m the reason why this woman is behaving this way, which is not a position you wanna find yourself in.
You don’t want to be taking responsibility for somebody else’s behaviors, feelings, or actions. You just don’t wanna do that and you know that. And so this is where a small change can, um, a small shift can change everything for you. You can read silence on a dating app as a fact about who you are, or you can read it as that went nowhere, it tells me almost nothing.
It’s the same silence either way, [00:11:00] but it’s the version of you that lets it go The version of you that doesn’t worry about it is the more desirable version of you because you’re not gonna drag that hurt or scoreboard into your next conversation with the next woman. And of course, if you are dragging those thoughts into your conversation, you know behaviorally you’re going to show up a little differently, and women will be able to feel that too.
They’re like, “What’s going on with him? Why is he trying to rush to get to the date? Why is he, you know, asking me these, you know, kind of unusual questions?” And that might be because you’re thinking, “I have to make this thing work.” Right? And so if you change how you look at all this, if you promise yourself you’re not gonna track it like a scoreboard, then dating slowly stops feeling like a test that you’re failing, and you might even be able to use the tool more appropriately and enjoy it from time to time.
Now, [00:12:00] that leads me into saying there’s something that’s really important that even the most intelligent, highest earning, capable men will fall victim to, and that’s using the app in replacement for your own life or a social life. It becomes a bit of a social crutch. It’s an easy way to fill a lonely evening by picking up a dating app and feeling like we’re having a possible connection to somebody.
And you cannot let online dating stand in for a real life. Those that do struggle massively. Okay? So when the apps or dating apps become one of your main sources of connection, and for whatever the, the reason, right? You’ve come out of divorce, you’ve lost your social circles, you’ve gone through a bad breakup, you lost some friends in that, and you’re thinking, “Okay, I need to get myself out there,” online dating is not the first place [00:13:00] to start because what happens is your main taste of feeling wanted by somebody- is all dependent on how this algorithm is gonna show up for you today.
And then every silence lands like this referendum on your whole self-worth because nothing else in your life is holding you steady. But when your days are genuinely full, you’ve got real friends, you know, you have work that means something to you, um, you know, hobbies or interests that pull in your attention, then the apps shrink back to what they should be, which is one small channel among many, not the entire way to access a romantic life and social world.
It’s just a tool you pick up and put down, and you think, “Well, if I’m not having much success tonight on Hinge or Tinder or Match, so be it. I’m gonna go out and do something else that I enjoy,” not think, “Oh no, [00:14:00] my rest of my evening is, you know, echoes of silence.” And I do know how this sounds You’ve heard multiple times to get a life outside of dating, but if you’re anything like the men that I work with, especially after divorce, the same quiet thing may have happened to you.
You know, your world got small, as I mentioned, friendships drift, hobbies get shelved, and the loneliness that the app, um… And i- in the loneliness that you’re feeling, the apps become your answer, your whole game, and that is not the place that you want to be. So if you are choosing to use online dating apps, then what you bring in from a mindset perspective on day one is gonna make a huge difference.
And maybe this doesn’t feel very tactical for you, but I guarantee you this is what will make a massive difference in your experience and how you relate to an app and how you feel about it. And if part of you has already decided as [00:15:00] you’re signing up for Hinge or Match that you’re too old, or that you’ve missed your window in dating, or that you’re not what women want anymore, or you’re using it begrudgingly thinking, “Well, I’m just gonna get a bunch of crazy shitty women on there,” um, then you’re going to get that experience online, and you’ll read every silence through this same lens and belief that you’re bringing into online dating in the first place because apps will always hand you proof of the story you’re walking in with.
Now, your beliefs about the apps and online dating in general will color your experience out there, um, and they will create it. So when you’re suspect that you’re not enough or it’s not gonna work, um, then you’re gonna interpret everything as proof of what you already are bringing in as your strong belief.
So this is why when I do work with clients or the work in Dating [00:16:00] Mastery for Men really helps you understand where you’re at here before you start with this because when you can challenge and fix your underlying beliefs- then your experience online will drastically change. Now, I wanna talk just briefly about a few things that will actually help you.
Now, once your head and your heart are a little steadier, and you think, “Okay, I’m actually in a place in my life where I would like to use online dating as a, a tool in addition to everything else that’s going on,” the practical side will matter because using apps well is a skill, and the men that do it well aren’t luckier than you.
They’re just doing a few things differently. So here’s a couple areas to start. First, when you sign up on a dating profile, you also have to consider your settings. Your age range, your distance needs to reflect the women you’re actually open to, not a fantasy, and not a fear of playing it safe. So [00:17:00] some of us can go on there with such, uh, specific settings that it’s already putting us at a dis- disadvantage.
If you’re too narrow, you’re fishing in a puddle, right? And if it’s too wide, you’re not really choosing anybody. You’re thinking, “Well, what do I deserve? I, I need to look at the whole gamut of everything.” Now, secondly, your profile. Of course, you need to spend time considering your profile. If you slap it up in a couple of minutes using old photos, what are you gonna expect when dating apps, you know, initially work on photography, right?
So you need a few clear, recent photos where you do look like yourself, not from 10 years ago, not a big group photo, or you completely disguising yourself with a hat and sunglasses. You know, need to show your actual life, something you’re doing, somewhere you love to be. You’re not selling yourself. You’re giving the right woman something true to lean into in your life, and I talk more deeply about how to set up a genuinely good profile in Dating Mastery for men [00:18:00] as well.
Now, third, you need to also understand your swiping habits. Every single person, including myself, has fallen victim to fast, mindless swiping, where we just treat people as disposable. We feel like it’s one of a thousand faces that we might see today. But I really encourage you to slow down, read people’s bios, and swipe like the person is a real person, like you were doing this in real life.
If you had a lineup of 100 women, would you feel a- it’s appropriate to just be like, “No, no, no, no, no, no, no,” right? So you need to slow down a little bit, and fewer matches is not a bad thing. Fewer matches might mean that you’re actually focusing more on quality. Now, fourth, I wanna talk about this one. It’s something that- You know, it’s, it’s more so trying to understand how modern dating works and what conversational skills you need to [00:19:00] have.
I don’t want you to live in these online dating chats. Now, the po- the whole point of the app is, of course, to connect with somebody just enough that there’s interest there to get out and meet somebody. When there is a genuine spark, you wanna move towards asking them out, not get too panicked or worry because what happens is your conversation will fizzle into weeks of fragmented small talk, and then by the time you get around to asking her out, you know, the feeling of being interested in you has, uh, has waned, and it often will lead to silence or getting a no from women.
So If the talking and texting stage is where you panic the most or kind of where you lose women, or this is not a strength of yours, it’s something worth spending a little time understanding. I have a audio master class that you can, you can read or listen to. It’s about forty-two minutes. It’s ten tips for talking and texting with women to just [00:20:00] demystify the differences in men and women and how we communicate.
It’s also stuff that I have in the Dating Mastery for Men course. But the point is, it’s important to understand are you strong in this area, or can you get matches, but then you’re just not quite sure how to sustain text-based conversation, which is of course not a skill that everybody has, but it’s important to learn and understand for online dating.
And finally, I just wanna give you guys permission to take breaks. Apps like Hinge have a pause function. If apps are honestly just grinding you down, step away from them. You don’t owe these apps anything. You don’t owe anybody on there anything, and it’s not quitting. It’s protecting your own self-worth.
Sometimes we need to get off the apps in order to show up in other areas of oth- our lives, and you need to stop keeping score using the apps. You are welcome to take a break at any point in time. That doesn’t mean you’re never gonna meet anybody. And so I just wanna say, if you’re taking something from today’s video, let it be this.[00:21:00]
Yes, many of you are gonna wanna use the apps, and yes, they do work for a lot of people, and real lasting love can begin on apps, and it does all the time. But it– but do not allow apps to dictate your sense of self-worth, and if you’re finding that you’re going in that direction, and I don’t… It doesn’t matter.
I’m talking to men in their forties, fifties, sixties, intelligent men who, you know, have fallen victim to what these apps can create in terms of emotional feelings. Keep your real life bigger than your online dating life. Refuse to keep score, and hold on to this, especially on the quiet nights. Your worth was settled long before you ever opened up those dating apps, and no silence from no woman on any screen has the power to revise it.
So I hope this was a helpful video for many of you today that, you know, just haven’t been having the best experience on dating apps. And if something has landed for you today, please share this video with someone else that needs to hear it. [00:22:00] Of course, you’re welcome to go check out my free guide, and thanks for your time and attention today.
Ciao.
