Looks like the cliche-spouting adults of my childhood were wrong. I may be feeling older these days, but am certainly none the wiser. However, in the past few years I’ve started to recognize certain patterns in my life that I hadn’t picked up on before. Do I do anything to affect or change these patterns? Absolutely not. But I do recognize them! That’s a barely perceptible first step on the road to personal growth, right?

Nowhere has this been more evident than in my online dating life, which I’ve realized more and more is extremely cyclical. After taking dutiful and controlled measurements of my habits, message rates, dick pic ratios, overall mood and vital signs over the past few months, I can definitively break down my online dating pattern into five distinct phases:

Phase One: Excited Optimism

You’re just starting out on a certain app, and are filled with all the excitement and naivete of a newborn fawn. Maybe you’re just building your profile for the first time. Maybe you’re sheepishly reactivating the one you’d resolved to delete for good just a few weeks or months ago. Either way, you are floored by the world of possibilities at your fingertips. There are so many infinite options out there; there’s no way you won’t find someone with whom you get along well!….Scratch that, you’re setting the bar too low. With all the infinite options out there, there’s no way you won’t find someone with whom you share both an electric physical and emotional chemistry: a soulmate for both your heart and your genitals. And so you start swiping and sending out concise yet charming opening messages with all the intense singularity of purpose of a deranged serial killer. The online dating world is your aphrodisiacal oyster!

Phase Two: Overwhelmed Exasperation

…until it isn’t. It’s tough to tell when exactly you enter Phase Two. Maybe it happens the tenth time you log onto OkCupid only to find 50 new messages, none from guys you’ve messaged yourself and all some play on the inoffensive but deeply boring classic “Hey how’s it going”, with the occasional horrifying threat or ballsy solicitation for demeaning sex acts peppered throughout to keep you on your toes. Maybe it happens the moment you get home from the fourth bad date you’ve been on in as many weeks, trying your hardest to erase from your consciousness the awkward nothingness between you and this now hazy memory of a human male as you suddenly relish the vast emptiness of your queen bed. Maybe it happens the day after that date, when you log onto your account and are greeted with 15 more “Hey how’s it going”s and one “Hey how’s it going? Say, can I lick Nutella off your bare ass?” It takes real effort to keep up your online dating life during this phase. It begins to feel like a job, which you grow to resent.

Phase Three: Desperate Grasping at Straws

…BUT you haven’t given up yet, thinking to yourself that you just haven’t delved deep enough into the dark mass that is the modern dating app to find a guy who inspires even a remote stirring in your loins. You start to wonder if the problem really is you, if your standards are too high, whether you’re subconsciously sabotaging your own chances at forming meaningful connections with members of the opposite sex by counting people out too quickly. You resolve to be more open and less dismissive of your potential suitors on the whole in the hopes that you might kiss a boring frog after a mediocre first date only to discover he’s a prince with a rich interior life and high levels of self-confidence. And so the pendulum swings back to action. During this phase you’ll pretty much reward any sign of proactivity from a guy by agreeing to go out with him, even as you vexingly grow less proactive in reaching out to guys you find interesting yourself. You’re unsure whether this is an odd form of self-preservation or whether it’s a sign that you get burnt out too easily on the rituals of online dating or whether it’s both. You marvel at all the people out there who dutifully keep up with sending out non-horrible messages on a regular basis. They’re the true unsung heroes of the digital age.

Episode IV: A New Hope

Your confidence and excitement levels grow lower and lower until one day seemingly out of nowhere, you strike up a conversation with a guy that goes beyond the usual bullshit platitudes followed by a half-hearted invitation to grab drinks. You find yourself talking to him more and more every day about both the most banal and deepest topics of conversation. It doesn’t feel like a chore to respond to his messages. Rather, you anxiously look forward to them, that rush of dopamine at the notification signal filling you with a warm, unhealthy glow. Soon you graduate to texting constantly: something you don’t even feel comfortable doing with your close friends and family. You vow not to tell anyone about this still as yet unspoken for gentleman for fear that you might jinx the whole thing – but then again you just can’t contain your excitement. And so you spread the seed of your oncoming humiliation far and wide amidst your social circle, compulsively imagining little glimpses of a rose-tinted future in spite of yourself.

Finally after a few weeks (an eternity in online dating time) of scintillating, near-constant textual back-and-forth, you decide to meet up in person. He’s even better-looking than his profile let on, and well-dressed to boot. Fuck, you’re officially vulnerable now. You swallow your anxiety and allow yourself to relax. Conversation flows effortlessly. Whereas with other guys you can feel yourself on the date, never growing invested enough to forget the social construction of the situation, that’s not the case here. You disappear into him, into the moment, until five minutes later you look at your phone to find two and a half hours have passed. You share a long kiss at the end of the night and feel something for the first time in ages. Too many times in your life have you kissed guys only to feel nothing at all. You float over the lights and people of Los Angeles in the backseat of your Lyft ride home, your face flush with red wine, basking in this renewed sense of possibility. But this excitement is tinged with something else, something slightly unsettling. What could it be? Fear? Things have been so blase for so long that this all seems too good to be true. Stop being so pessimistic, you tell yourself. Just enjoy this moment for what it is.

When he doesn’t text the next day you assume he feels like he has to play some sort of game to keep you interested. It’s working. You try your hardest to hold out and not text first, even though the slow pace of your job is well-suited to checking your phone every five minutes. When he doesn’t text within the next few days you assume he’s just busy, or really committed to the game. When you finally give in and painstakingly craft an innocuous message to him exactly a week after your date (it felt so easy before, why do there seem to be so many stakes now?), and he doesn’t text back within a few minutes, a few hours, a few days…well that fledgling hope within you starts to curdle. You double down and double text, pathetically inquiring about if and when he’d like to “hang out” again.

Every time you glance at your blank phone screen it appears blacker than the universe pre-Big Bang. Nope, no pop of light from those ten digits that have become so familiar to you by now. You’ve made it a rule in the past to not save any contact from a dating app until you know what exactly that person is going to be to you, if anything. Looks like that rule turned out to be a blessing in this case, sparing you the embarrassment of immortalizing yet another ghost with the last name “Tinder” or “OKC” in your contact list (aka: the museum of failed hookups). Feelings of frustration and impotence start to boil up inside you: the signature emotional cocktail of the ghostee. You were so close!, you lament to yourself. So close to…something. You desperately want him to reach out only to admit what a colossal prick he’s been, and nothing more. But you must come to terms with the fact that you won’t even be given that luxury.

You wonder how you ever let yourself get in over your head so quickly. You start to feel insane, questioning how you could have so drastically misread the situation. Is this ghosting karmic payback for all the nice-but-boring guys you’ve spurned in the past? Perhaps this is the type of treatment you deserve deep down. As this toxic negativity fills your mind, you begin repeating such emotionless mantras as: Keep your distance to keep yourself safe. Expect nothing and you’ll never be disappointed. Apathy is power. Suddenly you can’t bring yourself to even log into your account. That seemingly infinite list of new messages from faceless guys feels like a far more impenetrable wall than the hypothetical one Trump wants Mexico to pay for. You pull back, and withdraw into yourself. You have officially entered Phase Five.

Phase Five: Nihilistic Resignation

The world is shit. Nothing means anything. There’s no one on any app you’d like to spend the day with, let alone hook up with. Maybe you’ll have better luck in the real world – but for now you just need to focus on yourself: a fact that may be inherently true but in this case translates to “I give up on this whole online dating thing”. Your new mantra becomes: “Only when you’re truly happy by yourself will you attract the type of partner you desire.” You wish like hell you actually believed it.

Wait two to four weeks. Don’t meet anyone at all in the public realm apart from a few intriguing Lyft drivers and the guy who sells you bagels. Generally avoid bars because they suck and you have to wake up early tomorrow anyway. As time goes on and your baser urges grow stronger, an insidious idea begins to take root in your mind: Hey, maybe I was too hasty in throwing in the Tinder towel. I mean, think about it. There’s a whole world of eligible bachelors at my fingertips and I’m just ignoring it! Maybe I’ll just give it one more chance, just one more. There are so many options out there, there’s no way I won’t find someone who’s a good fit for me.

And so it begins again. You willingly reenter this crazy and chaotic world knowing full well the mountains of shit that await you, all in the hope that things will turn out differently this time around. Sure, so far they haven’t, but that doesn’t mean they never will, right?…Right?

That’s the funny thing about hope: it’s a persistent little fucker. Much like the hardy cockroach, hope could outlast a nuclear apocalypse. You thought it was dead but it was really just lying dormant, the sneaky bastard. Now, I am currently writing this post from deep within the bowels of Phase Five, which may be souring my viewpoint. But I can say beyond a shadow of a doubt that I will always try and try again, even in the face of so much failure, because I still have hope that there are exciting, interesting, and challenging romantic and platonic possibilities out there in this City of Smog-Choked Angels. I will try just about anything, for the story if nothing else. And boy oh boy, do I have a whole mess of those.