😰What is FOMO?

Why an endless queue produces it

Dating apps present people the way a shop presents stock: a supply that appears to have no bottom. Your mind reads that as abundance, and abundance changes how you value whatever is in front of you. If there is always another profile, the person you are talking to stops feeling like a decision and starts feeling like a placeholder — good for now, pending something better that has not turned up yet.

The comparison is rigged, too. You are weighing a real person, with a slow reply and a joke that did not land, against a stranger's best twelve photographs. Nobody survives that on equal footing. The feeling is not information about the person you are talking to; it is a side effect of the queue standing behind them.

How you recognise it

• You check the app during the date, or on the way home from it.
• Three conversations, none of them real. You are holding several people at a shallow depth instead of one at a serious one.
• Plans stay provisional. You leave Saturday open in case something better appears.
• Small things end it. A reply that took four hours gets read as proof, because there are forty other options.

What to do about it

Make the choice smaller and more concrete. Pick one or two people and give them a fortnight of proper attention — short enough to feel safe, long enough to tell you something real. Meet in person early, because an actual hour with someone almost always beats an imagined better option. And when the urge to go back to the queue arrives mid-conversation, treat it as a mood passing through, not a verdict you have just reached.

It helps to notice what the feeling has actually predicted so far, which is nothing. The endless queue was there last month too, and the month before, and it never delivered the better option it kept promising. Instead of asking whether someone is the best available, try a question you can answer: do you like who you are around them?

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