The Intermittent Fasting Approach To Online Dating After Divorce

Executive functioning skills seem to be at an all time low. Get more out of your online dating experience with a few simple tweaks.

Online dating can be intimidating the first time you try it. Photo by Tim Wildsmith on Unsplash

Online dating can be fun, but also a bit overwhelming. I know I did not like it at all.

I don’t know if that is because of the big gap between my last time single and the next (20 years) or because of the difference between dating as a teenager and dating as an adult. No matter what, it felt like online shopping and it was hard to get used to it.

My life coach suggested that I look at it like sampling. A tasting menu if you will. This is what got my thoughts rolling on thinking of it like a new diet.

On this new diet I could choose small plate items and not worry about the full course meal. The app was a tapas bar menu. The men were appetizers.

Now I know how this sounds. It sounds impersonal and narcissistic and not a good way to build relationships. That’s what I thought as well. I was skeptical, I told her she was nuts and I didn’t want to do it and she told me to trust her now and believe her later. The experiment was not meant for long term, it was meant to teach a lesson to me.

What was the lesson?

The big takeaway I had from treating the dating app like a sampler pack was in learning how to re-engage with the dating scene as an adult.

It allowed me to dip a toe into the waters without having to think about the big picture. No longer did I think about a relationship or long term dating potential. It had changed it to be about listening, speaking, socializing and meeting new people.

It took the pressure off since falling in love and marriage were no longer the point of finding a match. It was more fun and easy that way. It also made it more easy to cut and run if a potential match showed pink or red flags. It forced me to look at them as I would a friendship first and a partner later. If I couldn’t be friends with them, I for sure wouldn’t want them as a partner.

How does this relate to fasting?

The way it was done was the same as intermittent fasting is in a food diet.

I was given a window of time during the day to engage with my dating profile and any responses it got. I was also restricted on how to interact with the profile. I could only use the computer between 8AM-9AM and again from 4PM- 5PM. Any other times were off limits. There was no app on my phone and no sneaking peaks during the off hours.

It was very limited access to the dating world. It forces you to really look at the potential partner matches on a level other than romantic.

Dating apps are addictive

Like with any social media outlet, the dating apps are meant to be rewarding and a bit stressful. This way you use them more. The pings or vibrates of your phone when you get a message train you to be on the ready. The ease of scrolling and swiping make it a fast process with little reasoning and all feeling on the topic. It seems to offline your rational brain and lead you to make decisions based off of your limbic system.

But we need our frontal lobes to be online when we are making big life decisions. When the brain and the heart work together we can make a well rounded decision for ourselves.

When you take out the addictive components from the apps, you don’t let it become a dopamine producing agent. When you don’t have that “hit” of dopamine, you can have a clearer head in the decision making process.

What was the outcome?

It did not take long to find a great partner using this method. I have been with him for nearly 3 years now and will be getting married soon. When we met it was focused on casual conversation and getting to know each other without any pressure of falling in love. The speed of everything was slowed down so a true connection could be formed.

The biggest connection I made was with myself.

The fasting approach to dating led me in the right direction because it pushed away all the outside interference. It took away the high stakes of the dating game and turned it into something fun.