How soon is too soon to date again after a break-up?

Moving on too quickly is not unlike when the monarch dies and we have to get our heads around a new title the very next day

Wearily, I’ve downloaded the dating apps again. Apps, plural, because these days it’s not enough to be on just one dating app. You have to be on two or three. Spread betting, let’s call it.
A few months ago, a single girlfriend grumbled about dating apps but added that she felt she had to be on them because everyone else was, and I made sympathetic noises while thinking, “Phew! Thank goodness I’m through all that nonsense!” Whoops. Pride comes before a fall.
She was probably right, though. How else are you supposed to meet anyone these days? In real life? Please, it’s not the 1920s. No, the process now is you download whichever dating app you hate the least, pick various photos of yourself from four or five years ago, try to think of something funny and alluring to say about yourself and off you go. Click, click, click. No, no, absolutely not, OK maybe, no and so on.
“It’s a numbers game!” people say, implying that you need to scroll through plenty of frogs before you find your prince. Which is a bleak, statistician’s view of romance but there’s probably something in it.
I’ve been on a couple of dates thanks to downloading these apps, too. Because that’s the other thing people say. “Get back out there!” they tell you, so I thought I should. Then there’s yet another way in which you’re “supposed” to proceed now: date various people at once. Don’t panic, you’re not leaping into bed with all of them.
Instead, perhaps a coffee date with someone, and only if you’re not entirely repulsed do you go on a further date. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket, in other words. You need several baskets and several eggs. One friend recently told me she’d been on 10 dates in a month. We’ve become more American about the process, efficient and ruthless. No time to waste.
I had a perfectly nice time on my dates, too, chatting to intelligent, interesting, funny men. And yet I couldn’t help but sit there feeling quite strange, like a child on her first day at school, unsure about the right questions to ask and vaguely wondering when I could go home again.
How soon is too soon to date again after a break-up? Technically, thanks to the apps, it’s easier and quicker than ever. You could break up on one day and skip into a bar the next twirling a carnation in your mouth, if you liked. Some maybe do.
Men, women often counsel each other in these situations, often move on faster than we do. Women grieve by themselves while men abhor a vacuum, they say, which cannot be true in all cases but has been in my experience. One reads about celebrity break-ups (well, you might not, because this is The Telegraph, but occasionally I do), and seconds later those celebrities seem to be with someone else. I admire the fortitude. I’m just not sure it’s for me.
I’ve spent entire years wallowing after previous break-ups, even when I’ve done the breaking up. To do otherwise would have felt sudden, not unlike when the monarch dies and we all have to get our heads around a new title the very next day. Hang on, there was one person here and now it’s another. Can I go through a bit of mourning first?
One can probably mourn for too long, and by “one” I really mean me. A few years ago, after yet another heartbreak, I decided, defensively, that I wanted to be single and independent for a while. I didn’t need another half. I would be all the things that women are told they can be, these days, and I would write and travel and be by myself. I had a ball in the end, actually. But this time, I’ve softened a bit and realised I do want to be with someone. Being with someone was wonderful. That quiet certainty of trusting and knowing that I had someone by my side was wonderful. Ending every day discussing big or small things was magic. So I would like that again, I’m just not sure of the right time frame.
I don’t want to be that person who uses dating apps like a game, mindlessly scrolling and matching, without any real intention of meeting up. It’s understandable; one becomes inured to scrolling through banks of faces and reading similar answers to the desperate questions that certain apps force you to ask.
It hardly feels real, and starting conversations with someone – “Hey” – somehow so much effort. But it’s bad manners, I believe, to use these apps simply to pass the time on the train or for an ego boost when you fancy one. If people are making themselves vulnerable with that first, tentative “Hey”, isn’t it unkind to ignore them?
(Although I’ll admit the scrolling can also be fascinating. The other day, on Raya, the dating app that’s sometimes dubbed the “celebrity” app because you have to have a certain following on social media to join, I spied a well-known British actor’s profile. “I didn’t know he was single?” I said, flashing my phone under the nose of a friend who works in film. “Me either,” she said, eyes flaring in surprise.)
And yet. If I want to find that wonderfulness again, I need to persist. “Give it five months,” my wise friend Jason counselled recently. Is that the right mourning period? Do I cast off my black bombazine in the spring? Maybe trying to be too prescriptive about this process is impossible. Each to their own, and all that. And look, I still could be invited to a ball and spot a handsome man in a frock coat across the room. Meeting someone in real life isn’t totally out of the question.
That’s how most romantic comedy novels begin, after all, as well as Austen. In the meantime, perhaps the odd foray on the dating apps, with Dennis (the puppy) looking approvingly, or disapprovingly, over my shoulder.