Some perspective as a guy who ghosts on the app unintentionally and without any, like, directed particular decision towards the women I ghost.

To start, understand the online dating ecology is just unfair, to everyone regardless of gender or any other attribute. Read this, it’s part of OkCupids data transparency policy. The gist is attractive people in the top nth percentile are the focus of right swipes and end up inundated to the point that, as I’ll explain, after a certain point the urge to just ghost everybody for a couple days becomes really compelling; everyone else is left behind in a relative drought, with either very sparse matches for men, or matches women deem below themselves (see linked resource), and both end up ghosted by the matches they want as those match partners are overwhelmed. The ecology is the worst case of a Pareto distribution. I get a lot of matches for a dude, here’s the mechanics/dynamics of this from my perspective where the ghosting isn’t a reflection on any individual but the experience of being in the system.

I decide I want some new matches, so I swipe for a day or two, however, I don’t know how many swipes will lead to matches as a guy, which or how many matches will send a message, and there’s a delay between swiping and response as a guy so I don’t have a sense of when enough is enough, so it’s not until later I get any feedback, at which point the delay factors in and I am now likely to get inundated. I average like 3-10 matches a day pending swiping frequency, 5-8 is common though, bearing in mind I still probably have matches from previous rounds of swiping I might pick up the convo with again. When you break down that math, if I spend even five minutes on each match, that’s 25-50 minutes a day. Taking out 8 hours a day for sleep and 10 hours for work, lunch, and commuting, that’s 6 hours for meals, self-care, chores, everything else - those 5 minutes multiplied across 5-10 women each day comes out to ~1/12th to 1/6th of all my free time on a weekday, bearing in mind I’m responding with all the genius and creativity that can be channeled in 5 minutes, so not a lot. It becomes a chore to respond to all of them, they pile up, and like many a chore that falls behind, after a point, it gets back-burnered. Recognizing there’s a person waiting to hear back doesn’t change the calculus that I am tired, that I don’t want to be funny and charming and answer the same questions night after night to a bunch of strangers. But unlike chores that fall behind, I can always just swipe again and a new batch of matches arrive to repeat the cycle.

My two cents.