A few years ago, this piece would have taken me weeks to write. I’d be stuck in a time warp, staring at a blocked WhatsApp thread with my ex or checking obsessively if they’d viewed my story yet. My work and wellbeing would be far down the priority list, relegated by romance. Back then, I called it ‘chaos dating’, an extreme scattergun and occasionally frantic approach to swiping. But not anymore. It also turns out there’s a more official term for what I was: a love addict.

In my chaos-dating days, when I was in my mid-20s, I was a spiritual magazine editor, but some generic words of affirmation from a Tinder boy grounded me way more than meditation, gratitude, yoga, astrology and tarot-card reading. My bedtime and morning routines used to be consumed by hours of swiping. Off the apps, I had to move out of one house-share because a situationship with a housemate ended badly to another house-share, where I slept with a neighbour. (Perhaps naively, I counted that as a win in better boundary-making.) I deleted and re-added a guy’s contact so many times I accidentally learnt his phone number, which I knew I’d inevitably use in an emergency. I avoided asking what my crush’s true intentions were for fear of reality. I got ‘the ick’ over the good guys because they didn’t give me the hit of the chase.

“I spent my 20s as a ‘chaos dater’ and love addict – this was what finally made me change”