The message that stopped me
Years ago, I was on a dating app, in the middle of what had been a reasonably promising text conversation with a woman I’d matched with. We were fifteen or twenty messages deep — the kind of exchange where you’re not yet sure if it’s going anywhere, but you’re genuinely enjoying the back-and-forth.
Then she sent: “Oh my god, you should see what I’ve just been sent.”
She copy-pasted a message from another man on the same app. She’d politely declined his suggestion of meeting for a coffee, and in response he’d unloaded — “you fucking cock-teasing fucking bitch” — a paragraph of the kind of abuse you hope you’ll never see addressed to anyone, let alone a stranger who’d only just said no thanks.
I was gobsmacked. I remember that feeling with unusual clarity — the slow lift of the stomach, the heat in the face, the unsettling sense that something I thought I understood about the space I was in had just been corrected for me in real time. I typed something back — I don’t remember exactly what, something inadequate about being sorry she had to deal with that.
She wrote one line I’ve never forgotten.
“It happens regularly.”
The response that felt like a moral compass (and partly was)
I didn’t make a deliberate decision to leave the app that night, but I did leave it within the week. I stayed off dating apps for a few years. If someone had asked me why, I’d have mumbled something about being busy, or not being ready, or not enjoying the experience. The truth was simpler and harder to articulate: I no longer wanted to be in a space where that behaviour happened, because being there felt like proximity to it, and proximity felt uncomfortably close to complicity.
It felt — and I can only put it honestly — like a place with lovely women and pigs of men, and I didn’t want to be part of that ratio.
At the time I thought the response was irrational. I didn’t send those messages. I hadn’t done anything wrong. Why was I the one punishing myself with years of absence?
It turns out the response has a name. Psychologists call it moral dissociation, or shame by association, and it’s one of the better-documented responses to witnessing in-group behaviour that violates your values. Humans are tribal — we don’t process “men sent that message” as an abstract statement, we process it as someone who counts as us did that, and a dissociation reflex fires. Some people respond by confronting; many respond by withdrawing, because proximity to the behaviour starts to feel like tacit endorsement. It’s the same machinery that makes someone leave a political party when its members do something they can’t stomach.
So it wasn’t irrational. It was a moral compass working. That part of it, I still respect.
The conclusion I drew from it, though, was wrong — and it took me years to see why.
What was happening on the other side
I need to stop here for a section, because the most honest thing I can say about my reaction is that it was largely about me. About my feelings. About what I could bear to be around. That’s a real thing and worth naming. But it’s not the most important thing.
The most important thing is what was happening to her.
The research on this isn’t ambiguous. Survey after survey — Pew, the UK Online Dating Association, multiple academic studies — finds that women on dating apps receive dramatically more hostility and harassment than men do. Not slightly more. Dramatically more. Unsolicited explicit images, abuse after polite rejection, stalking behaviour across platforms, in-app pressure that modulates into threats when resisted. A survey by Pew found that roughly six in ten women under thirty had received explicit images they hadn’t asked for; a majority had been called offensive names; a substantial minority had been threatened physically. The numbers for men are a fraction of that at every category of abuse.
A decent man’s experience on the apps and a woman’s experience on the apps are not the same product. They’re barely the same species of product.
What that means for men who were on the platforms at the same time as that woman sending me the screenshot: we were having a mostly clean experience that was, without our seeing it, being subsidised by her having a hostile one. The absence of abuse in our inbox did not reflect the character of the space we were in. It reflected the asymmetric pattern of who the abuse was directed at. We thought we were in one place. We were in another.
That’s the first thing the years off taught me: I had no idea what was actually happening on the other side of that screen. And nothing about being “a man who would never behave that way” protected me from being catastrophically uninformed about the space I was standing in.
The collective action problem
Here’s where it gets interesting. There’s a second thing the years off taught me, and it’s uncomfortable.
When men who’d never dream of sending a message like that leave in disgust, the platform gets worse. Not metaphorically worse — mathematically worse. The ratio of bad-faith actors to good-faith ones tilts further toward the worst behaviour. The pool of men women encounter skews toward the men who didn’t feel moral discomfort. And women’s experience, downstream, gets more of what drove the first wave out.
That’s a classic collective action problem. Every individual withdrawal is morally understandable. The collective effect is that everyone remaining is worse off, and the ones most harmed are the ones you were trying to express solidarity with by leaving.
I’d quietly, self-righteously, assumed that my absence was a contribution. It wasn’t. It was a small structural transfer — my moral comfort, paid for by a slightly worse ratio in her inbox.
That’s a hard thing to sit with, because it exposes the limits of the first response. Moral withdrawal feels ethical. It often is — not participating in something you find repellent is a clean choice. But it only works as a political or social lever when the thing you’re withdrawing from cares that you left. Dating apps don’t care. The abuser who made that woman show me a screenshot didn’t notice my departure. The only thing that happened is that his ratio in the pool got better.
What I actually did
I didn’t return to the apps for years. I doubt I’d have come back to them at all if I hadn’t ended up, for other reasons, spending a long time thinking about modern dating from the outside — the research, the psychology, the structural dynamics, the patterns people describe over and over without anyone quite naming. Somewhere in that process, I ended up building what I wished had existed when I left — an attempt at a more thoughtful container for the parts of dating that the apps handle badly or not at all.
Doing that work is what eventually brought me back. Not because I stopped being uncomfortable. Because I finally understood that the discomfort was the wrong thing to optimise for.
What I’d say to someone at the moment I quit
If I could go back to that night and say something to myself, it wouldn’t be cheer up, it’s not that bad. It is that bad. What she showed me was real, and what she said — it happens regularly — was almost certainly an understatement.
What I’d say instead is something more like this:
The feeling you have right now is correct. Don’t numb it, don’t argue with it. But don’t turn it into an exit strategy either. Your absence from this space doesn’t do what you think it does. It doesn’t punish the men who sent those messages. It doesn’t make the platform pause and reflect. The only thing it does is shift the ratio slightly in the direction you wanted to punish. The woman you were just talking to will keep receiving those screenshots; she’ll just have a marginally thinner field of non-abusive men to talk to in between them.
You don’t have a duty to stay. Withdrawal is a valid response. But if you’re going to withdraw, do it knowing what that choice actually costs, not under the impression that it’s a clean act of solidarity. And if you do stay — or come back — do it knowing that the most useful thing you can do is be unremarkable. Show up. Be kind. Respond to a no thanks with a no worries, take care and mean it. Refuse to match the energy of the worst messages by being visible evidence of the opposite energy.
Not as a rescuer. Not as a hero. Just as a counter-data-point, slowly accruing in the experience of the people you talk to, and in the ratio of who they have to deal with when you’re around.
The honest close
I don’t think most men who quit the apps for a reason like mine were wrong to quit. What they felt was real. What they saw was real. I still think about that screenshot sometimes.
What I’ve come to believe is that the response after the shame is the part that matters most, and that for me, the response I chose was the one that was easier on my feelings and worse for the problem I thought I was objecting to.
If you’re reading this and any of it resonates — the shame, the shrinking away, the conclusion that the dating apps aren’t for you because of what other men on them are doing — I won’t tell you what to do. I’ll just tell you that the feeling deserves more than being used as a reason to leave. It deserves to be a reason to come back differently.
Don’t quit in disgust. Return in defiance of it.
This article is part of “The Modern Dating Landscape” series — unpacking how today’s tools, norms, and power dynamics shape the experience of dating, and what the research says about using them better.