Should I Be Using Dating Apps?

By Courtney Schand | Relationship Coach

Most of the men I work with have already tried dating apps, and most of them are burned out. They’re not asking whether apps work in some abstract sense. They’re asking whether they should keep doing the thing that feels exhausting, or whether there’s a better way to find what they’re actually looking for.

Here’s my honest answer: apps can absolutely be a great place to meet people who are also looking for a relationship. But most of the burnout isn’t coming from the apps themselves. It’s coming from how you’re using them, and more specifically, from what (probably) you’ve stopped focusing on while you use them.

There’s a way to see dating apps that changes the entire experience of using them. And it applies just as much to organic, in-person dating as it does to swiping.

Why You’re Burned Out (And It’s Probably Not What You Think)

There are a few things usually driving app burnout, and understanding which one you may be experiencing matters.

The first happens when you’ve unconsciously started optimizing for dating instead of the type of relationship you’re actually dating to find. Committing to getting better at the process is a genuinely good thing. And somewhere along the way, if the process becomes the whole focus, you lose sight of why you started. It stops feeling like movement toward something and starts feeling like a treadmill- lots of effort and never arriving. Because, instead of you practicing becoming the man who is capable of relating at a level that makes the type of relationship you want inevitable, you may be focusing on becoming the man who can attract any woman and essentially diffusing your focus too much, causing frustration in the process.

The second happens when you’re not frontloading enough about yourself. People (especially women) are drawn toward someone showing them who he is, not someone specifying who they need to be. So even if you’re genuinely clear on what you want- what you value, how you live, what you’re building- if you articulate it as being about her- what she should be like, what she needs to bring- rather than about you, you’re missing a chance to invite her into your world and setting up a dymanic of trying to fit into hers (I know you’ve been there and that’s not the dynamic you want most).

The third happens when the practice stays contained to the app. If you’re only practicing communicating your values and desires in a digital space, you’re not building the muscle you actually need, which is the ability to carry that same clarity into daily interactions and real conversations. That gap between digital ease and navigating in-person awkwardness is often where the real frustration lives.

The Reframe That Changes Everything

A lot of men who are burned out on apps have absorbed a story from certain corners of the internet that the game is rigged. That women only want a small percentage of men, and that the odds are fundamentally against them. That may be an observable experience, and yet that way of seeing the world, while it seems “rational,” doesn’t lead you closer to what you want to experience. It either leads toward resentment of women in general or toward the conclusion that something is deeply wrong with you.

Here’s a different way to see it. Dating apps are a practice space with an (unusually) high concentration of people who are single and looking. Which means you might meet someone you genuinely connect with. And you will definitely have opportunities to try new things and learn about yourself in real time. Dating, at its core, is partly a process of discovering what resonates with you and developing what fellow YouTuber Heidi Priebe calls “relational awareness”, the ability to sense what’s actually happening for you in a relational field.

Sharing a dating profile is a bit like marketing a business. The goal isn’t to appeal to everyone; the goal is learning to speak clearly enough that the right people recognize themselves in what you’re offering.

What Nobody Talks About In The Learning Process

Here’s something that doesn’t get discussed enough: The people who seem to have overnight success with dating. Whether it’s in person or online, the people for whom it seems “effortless” almost always have significant unseen practice behind them.

Think about businesses that appear to succeed overnight. Some people point at their brilliant marketing, but it’s usually that the founders have years of prior experience in sales, communication, and positioning, which they’ve refined through repetition long before the moment anyone else noticed. The same thing is happening in dating. People who come across as naturally charismatic or effortlessly attractive have typically practiced a lot, often in ways nobody saw. Because everyone sees the result and not the process, it’s easy to conclude that only certain fixed traits are attractive and to try to copy the outcome without accounting for the investment that produced it.

I’ve heard several experiences where it seems not everyone has equal access to ease in this space. And, even accounting for that, the reason some men seem to succeed online or in person seems to have as much to do with how they’re seeing and engaging with (or bracing) the process as it does with any inherent advantage. I see it in the transformations my clients make all the time.

The most effective way to use dating apps is as exactly that- a kind of practice ground. Not a marketplace where you either have it or you don’t, but a space to learn how to speak to the right people and understand yourself better in the process. The biggest obstacle isn’t the apps themselves. It’s the difficulty of staying emotionally engaged long enough to actually learn something, rather than bracing against the discomfort and disengaging in the way you learned to in childhood. The gold is in the discomfort when you’re willing to stay with it intentionally. This is what we teach how to do in Grounded if you want to learn how.

What Shifts When Men Actually Do This

I’ve been working with only men for the last few years. I’ve seen them at different stages of the process- from preparing to date to actively dating and in relationships. There’s a pattern I noticed with several men who had committed to getting better at the process of dating, thinking that less anxiety in the initial stages would help them find the right relationship. And they were not wrong, bracing less for social anxiety does make the experience of dating more fun. But the problem was, they were deep men who weren’t using depth as a core requirement and therefore had lost sight of the actual type of relationship they were dating to find. Each time, we worked on his presence and his ability to center himself, so the anxiety running underneath the surface could relax. And each time, they stopped noticing the gripping feeling when someone wasn’t a fit. I remember a story one man shared about feeling good about himself as he stepped away instead of reeling for weeks afterward.

Another man was using the apps but not quite finding what he wanted. He was frontloading some of the correct things- what worked and didn’t work for him- but he lacked the deeper clarity needed to actually embody what he was looking for and show up as the reciprocal for it in the world. Getting that clarity changed what he was putting out and what started coming back.

I’ve also worked with men who weren’t using apps at all but struggled with confidence in dating. They really wanted to do what was right for themselves and the women they were interested in, but because they weren’t clear on what they were specifically offering or looking for, the process felt more like guess-and-check with long gaps in between. Once they got clear on what they wanted, their confidence became more natural. And because the focus shifted from whether she liked him personally to whether she wanted the specific experience he was offering. It felt less personal and created less anxiousness for him to hold the whole process.

Across all of these men, the same pattern showed up: they had to move through the fear of losing the wrong people before they were willing to frontload what they actually want. This is the step most people step over because it requires genuinely owning your desires rather than keeping them vague to avoid the risk of being turned down for having them.

What Actually Determines Success, Apps or Not

Whether you use apps, go fully organic, or do both, the same thing determines whether it works: your ability to feel centered, in your inner experience and in your life, and to approach dating as inviting someone in rather than waiting to be accepted into her world.

When you’re genuinely clear on the type and quality of relationship you want to build and what naturally suits you, you can stop scanning for external signs that you’re doing it right. You can rely on internal cues that you’re moving in the right direction and trust that the right connections become more likely, not because you engineered them, but because you’re embodying your values consistently enough that people who resonate with them start finding you.

This shift puts you back in charge of your experience instead of anxiety being in charge of it. And it naturally reads as more confident and less desperate, which is exactly the quality that draws in genuinely compatible people rather than ones who are simply available.

The thing most men I work with don’t initially realize is that they’re meant to be providing the life and space that people want to be part of, not trying to fit into someone else’s. Because of their natural intensity and emotional depth, they’re genuinely attractive. But they’ve been trying to slot into other people’s lives as though they were meant to follow, rather than standing in their own and letting the right people find their way to them.

The analogy I often use is the sun. The sun doesn’t orbit the Earth. It has enough gravitational pull that the Earth finds its own proper distance around it. These men are the same. They’re natural leaders who’ve been trying to orbit other people’s lives, and the anxiety they feel is often a sign that they’re out of their natural order, with the people around them accommodating rather than being genuinely drawn in. When these men step into building their own life with real clarity about what that looks like, they become naturally magnetic. Not because they changed who they are, but because they finally started standing in it. This is what we do in our Style of Partnership work, Grounded is the best place to start if that’s something you want to learn to do.

The Bottom Line

If you’re asking if you should be using dating apps and you can see them as a practice ground rather than a verdict (about you) machine, absolutely. I suggest using them to practice frontloading who you actually are and to build the clarity and self-knowledge that comes from staying present through discomfort. Because when you develop this type of relational awareness, you’ll be able to apply it to every area of your life.

But don’t let the practice stay contained to a screen. Bring that clarity and presence into your daily life, your conversations, and to the people you already know. Because the goal was never to win at an app, it was to become someone who doesn’t need to.

Ready to Build That Clarity?

If you’re ready to get clear on what you’re actually offering and looking for, so you can show up with genuine presence whether you’re on an app or across a table, Break the Ice is a great starting point. You can find it at courtneyschand.com/break-the-ice.

And if you’re ready to do the deeper work of learning to stay present through the discomfort and build a style of living that naturally draws in the right people, Grounded: The Embodiment Experience For Men is where that happens. If you’re not quite sure, you can always book a Discovery Call to see if we’re a fit!

Courtney Schand is a certified relationship coach who works with men to develop authentic masculine presence, emotional intelligence, and deeper relationship skills. She co-hosts the For the Love of Men Podcast and she and her partner, Andrew, offer coaching through 1:1, group, and self-paced resources.