stopped looking for four months and it was the best thing i did

not asking anything, just putting this here because these boards are full of people grinding away and nobody ever posts about stopping.

in march i deleted both my profiles. no drama, no bad experience, i was just tired. i had been at it more or less continuously for two years and the whole thing had turned into a chore i did in the evenings while half watching television.

kept going to the munch. that was the only thing i did not stop.

four months of nothing. and what happened is that i started enjoying the scene again, because i was in a room with people rather than assessing a room of possibilities. two of the people i now consider actual friends are people i had known by sight for a year and never spoken to properly because i had filed them as not relevant.

put a profile back up a fortnight ago. wrote a much better one, because i had something to say by then.

anyway. if anyone is reading this at eleven at night feeling like it is a second job, it is allowed to just stop for a while.

Keeping the munches while dropping the profiles is the version that works, and I think it is the whole reason yours went well. People who stop everything at once usually find it very hard to start again, because the community half is what makes the dating half feel ordinary rather than enormous. You paused the part that was tiring and kept the part that was feeding you.