Love in the digital age is a perplexing thing. A left swipe here, a “ghosting” there, and suddenly the landscape of romance looks more like a video game leaderboard than a courting ritual. Why get swept off your feet and wooed when you can get a delayed text, a non-response, or even get blocked instead? Many young adults find themselves navigating this world in which desire, rejection, and self-worth are constantly quantified and displayed in tiny rectangles on a screen. While these apps (“designed to be deleted”, as Hinge purports) promise endless opportunities for connection, they also expose daters to rapid-fire evaluations that can tire out even the most resilient users.
In my recently completed dissertation, I examined how belief systems (specifically irrational and rational beliefs, as defined in REBT) relate to burnout, rejection sensitivity, and ghosting. Ghosting can be defined as the unexplained and one-sided ending of communication between two people. The findings for irrational beliefs were consistent: the more individuals endorsed irrational beliefs, the more distress they experienced across all domains. Rigid, extreme thinking was linked to greater emotional exhaustion/burnout, stronger reactions to perceived rejection, and more distress around being ghosted.
These beliefs tend to follow a predictable pattern. Preferences quietly become demands (“I must be liked”), disappointments escalate into catastrophes (“this is awful”), and singular interactions transform into sweeping conclusions (“this always happens to me” or “I must be unloveable”). In a dating environment defined by ambiguity, these beliefs readily fill in the gaps, often with the most negative interpretation available.
This process is especially relevant to rejection sensitivity. When individuals hold rigid expectations about being accepted, even neutral or unclear interactions can be interpreted as rejection, reinforcing a cycle of anticipation, hypervigilance, and emotional reactivity. Notably, more rational beliefs were associated with lower rejection sensitivity, suggesting that flexible thinking can buffer how intensely these experiences are felt, even if it does not prevent them entirely.
From an REBT perspective, the implication is clear: it is not only what happens on these platforms, but how those experiences are evaluated that drives emotional outcomes. While dating apps may remain unpredictable, targeting core irrational beliefs (particularly demandingness, catastrophizing, and self-downing) might reduce emotional reactivity and interrupt cycles of distress. Online dating can be frustrating, ambiguous, and occasionally ego-bruising, but that doesn’t mean it’s hopeless. Keep your standards high, drop the demands, and stay in the game.