5 Questions to Ask Yourself Before Dating Again After a Breakup

Regardless of who ended things (or if it was a truly mutual decision), you went through a breakup. You then did the requisite work to get back to feeling like yourself: You had a few (dozen) good cries, you cleansed your space of any traces of your ex, you watched all of the best breakup movies and finally, you think you’re ready to reenter the dating world—kudos. But before you do that, you want to make sure you’re really ready. I asked Logan Ury, a dating expert at Hinge, for five questions you should ask yourself before starting to date again after the end of a relationship.

Logan Ury is the Director of Relationship Science at Hinge, the dating app that’s designed to be deleted. She is a behavioral scientist turned dating coach, and the author of How to Not Die Alone. At Hinge, she leads a research team dedicated to helping people find love, and her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post and more.

It sounds cliché (and often really hard to do), but Ury stresses that you should try to see a breakup as a learning opportunity. She tells me, “Psychologists Ty Tashiro and Patricia Frazier found that people often don’t take advantage of the potential for personal growth following a breakup. Many individuals ‘Tarzan’ (swing from one relationship to the next) without considering what they’ve learned from their last partner and how that should inform whom they choose to date next.” She explains that this is particularly important if you’re trapped in a cycle of choosing partners who don’t work out for the same reason. “Help yourself grow by reflecting on your past relationship with questions like What aspects of this relationship did I enjoy? What would I want to do differently in the future? Were there red flags in the beginning that I ignored? What side of me did this relationship bring out? What can I learn from this relationship in order to find an even better match in the future?”

“Start by being honest with yourself about who you are and what you want,” Ury says. “There’s no right answer to the question of what you want. The important thing is to be upfront with yourself and potential partners to save time and potential heartache down the road.” Be honest with yourself whether you’re looking for something casual or you feel ready to commit to something more serious.

Dating takes time, and as Ury puts it, “Being ready for a relationship means being willing to make room for someone and giving them time and effort.” Recognize what starting from scratch, dating-wise, entails and make sure you’re in the right place to commit.

“We all have different identities: daughter, friend, Beyoncé fan, and so on,” Ury notes. “We act differently depending on which of those identities we lean into at any given moment.” It’s important, she tells me, to reinforce your own identity as a dater, not just someone who goes on dates. “Stand in front of a mirror and say out loud: ‘I am looking for love. I am a dater.’” The admits that this might feel a little ridiculous, especially if you haven’t been on a date in a while, but that you should do it anyway.

Dating after a breakup, no matter how right a choice said breakup was, is hard. Ury points to the stat that over half (53 percent) of Hinge daters say that worrying about rejection has held them back from pursuing a potential relationship. She concedes that it’s scary, you might get hurt or you might hurt someone else. “When a date doesn’t turn out how you hoped it would talk to yourself the way you’d speak to your best friend,” she explains. “You’d try to give a pep talk: ‘Come on. It’s just one date. Good for you for getting out there. I bet you learned something, even if the date sucked.’ Learn to be your own cheerleader. Learn to use that compassionate tone with yourself.”