Ed, 34, messaged me right away. It could’ve been seconds, five or six, after we’d matched, an exhilarating feat on what had otherwise been a particularly drab Sunday morning – yes, I was hungover. He wanted to know how my weekend had been, what I did for work, and where some of my profile photos had been taken. Chatty, enthusiastic, and possibly even a little bit overzealous, he quickly became someone I allowed myself to feel optimistic about.
We developed a rapport, sending four or five messages at a time. 'Is tomorrow too soon to meet?' he teased, as I was smothering my face in night cream as I got ready for bed. I replied that it didn’t have to be and fell asleep thinking about our date. The next morning, Ed still hadn’t replied. He was probably at work, I figured, an excuse I extended for a week. 'Hey,' I finally messaged. 'Just checking to see if you still wanted to hang out?' That was two months ago. Apparently, it’s still too soon.
This has happened before. Quite a few times, actually. Every Sunday, famously the busiest day of the week for dating app activity, I’ll tap through Hinge and strike up a conversation (or four) with a man. The chat will be active, engaging, and excitable… until Monday, when they suddenly stop responding and it feels like it never happened at all. The whole thing transmogrifies into a delusion, one destined for the archives in my ever-expanding tome of romantic fantasies.
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Introducing 'Sunday Boys', a term we’re using to describe this particular breed of man. He’s hot, he’s cool – and he even asks you questions. But his existence is reserved for one day a week. I’ve come across myriad men like this in the last three years I’ve been single; they are an epidemic in the modern dating landscape. 'I have a prompt on my Hinge profile that says my typical Sunday is either a 10km walk or rotting in bed,' says Emma*, 30, who has been single for one year. 'So many guys would respond on Sunday by asking me, "What is it today?" We’d have a long chat about our weekends and then they’d never respond again.'
The most insidious thing about the Sunday Boy is that he can vanish even in the middle of the most heartwarming of conversations, the kind where you feel as if you’re truly connecting with someone, a fleeting rarity on dating apps. 'Once, I was chatting to a guy while dog sitting my friend’s puppy,' says Izzy*, 32. 'The questions about the dog, how we were spending time together, and how she was doing came thick and fast.' On Monday, after plenty of back and forth, dog man had vanished. 'The last thing we spoke about was as innocent as it had always been but something had clearly given him the ick. Or, as one friend suggested, his girlfriend had returned to their shared flat.'
Ghosting is objectively cruel, regardless of when and how it happens. But even in 2025, when it should surely be passé, it’s still a disappointingly common byproduct of an online dating landscape that is largely characterised by dehumanisation and callousness. A recent study by Forbes found that 76 per cent of respondents have either ghosted or been ghosted while dating. Swiping has been compared to shopping, while the rest of it feels a little like looking for something to order on Deliveroo.
All this feeds into the Sunday Boy mentality: when you haven’t met someone in real life, the stakes couldn’t be lower. They exist purely on your screen, a vessel for you to project all of your stockpiled romantic charm and charisma onto until it’s no longer convenient. 'He’s bored and maybe with a hangover horn, so will give you his all for those last few hours of the week,' posits Izzy. 'But when responsibility and a busy week arrive, it’s at the expense of his manners and engagement. It’s wild to me and is a pattern that I’d like to see disappear ASAP.'
The trouble is that this behaviour is not reserved for men. When you’ve spent years on these godforsaken apps (hello), trying and failing to find something real amid the rubble (yep, hi), it’s easy to blame everyone and everything else (still me). But the truth is that we’re sometimes doing the exact same thing. I’m almost certain I’ve been a Sunday Girl in the past, looking for a quick fix of validation because I’m feeling lonely and vulnerable after a busy weekend. It’s all too tempting to open Hinge and start talking to someone, only to later realise that my judgement was way off and I had no intention of actually meeting that person. Because I haven’t met them, have zero mutual friends with them, and generally owe them nothing, my disinterest is often expressed by way of ghosting. I know; I’m a hypocrite.
But aren’t we all? And while accountability is important – god knows all of us could do with being a little kinder to one another online – how much can we blame ourselves when the apps are the ones facilitating this behaviour by turning dating into a video game? It’s hard to treat each other like human beings when every facet of the technology is psychologically conditioning us not to. Maybe Ed, 34, is fundamentally a decent bloke. And to him, I was just Olivia, 31: a single woman-slash-digital doll for him to pick up and play with for a while one Sunday afternoon. Come Monday, the doll was quickly and efficiently discarded. Not out of malicious intent. But because the doll felt disposable. And it was all too easy to pick up another one.
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