I'm 31, was with someone for four years, we broke up last spring, took a few months off, started using the apps again around september. I don't really know how to explain this without sounding out of touch but the texting thing feels completely different than I remember.
I don't mean the apps themselves, I mean the register. How much to say, when to be funny, when to be direct, how fast to escalate from small talk to suggesting something real. It's like I used to speak this language and forgot it somewhere in a long relationship where none of that mattered anymore.
My last few matches have been fine like, pleasant. And then they just stop, they just sort of trail off into nothing and I sit there trying to figure out what I did wrong or if I did anything wrong or if she was just talking to twelve other people at the same time and picked someone else, which is also possible
A friend suggested I try one of those AI suggestion apps to get a feel for what modern texting actually sounds like before I try to do it on my own. Which I thought was a depressing suggestion bt I tried it anyway.
I want to be clear I wasn't using it to send AI texts, more like I'd look at what it suggested and then write something in that direction but in my own words. It helped me recalibrate more than anything. The suggestions have a kind of pacing to them that I'd lost or maybe never had.
I still don't know if I'm doing this right. I've got a date next week with someone I matched with in January so maybe something is working or maybe she's just low on options, hard to say
Anyone else feel like they came back to this after a long relationship and had to basically relearn it from scratch?