Recently I hopped back on Hinge. Oh, the scary depths of Hinge. Ever since I did, I developed this anxiety that I'll see the people I matched with, or ones that liked me, when I leave my house. The real possibility of them seeing me on a walk or in the grocery store really sits with me. Imagine you're in the grocery store, someone pulls you aside and says, "hey, I liked you on Hinge the other day," and you remember you actually hit the X button on them anyway. That feeling makes me nauseous, like seriously what would you say to them if this happened.
Now this is overthinking to its finest, and why should I care, I shouldn't, but I think this started when someone liked me and said "hey, I think I saw you on the street today." Okay, creepy way to start the opening line. Why should I care about if they see me though, like why does this opinion matter to me?
It must come from an underlying fear of caring too much about what others think of me. Things that I've thought about to figure out why I might care about this are a deep down fear about my perspective on photos of myself. I think when we all take photos of ourselves there may be a few or a couple hundred, and we pick out which ones we look our absolute best in (at least this is what I do), so automatically in my head I'm like, am I catfishing? No, no, you're not, you're just capturing the best moment, is what I had to tell myself. If this photo isn't edited, then it's not really catfishing, is it?
Another thought I had towards this, or what it might be, is I feel like I'm feeling this way because to me, sometimes it's so hard to put yourself out there, it can be embarrassing to online date. It's sometimes sad because I'd love a meet cute, but that's pretty hard to come up with these days. I tell myself now that we have to do the hard things, which is putting yourself out there to get what we want. I genuinely want a relationship, and maybe Hinge could be the place where I find it, so I can't limit the opportunities that may come from it.
All to say, if you have encountered the weird, maybe niche, fear of going out and thinking, oh, I may see someone from Hinge out in public here, do note you aren't alone in this feeling. it's not embarrassing, you are confident in what you want, and hey, they are on this app too.