WhatsApp archives are a dating godsend

In our Love App-tually series, Mashable shines a light into the foggy world of online dating.

You know your love life is messy when someone asks you, “So, how’s the old love life?” and the only valid response is to laugh. Oh boy, do I have some dirt to dish, some eye-watering, toe-curling tales to tell. Where do I even begin?

Before we get into all that, I’d like to thank my WhatsApp archive for being my constant companion during a very chaotic dating season.

In the summer of 2021, WhatsApp rolled out a change to its archive feature. I’ll be honest, I was annoyed by it at first.

Before, when you archived a chat in WhatsApp the messages would stay there until that person sent you another message. Once that message was delivered, the convo would jump out of the archive and straight back into your main inbox. In a way, it was the best of both worlds: tidy inbox while not missing any messages. But yes, it did enable archive zombies.

Now, when you archive a chat it stays there even if the person sends you another message. You won’t receive any notifications for the new message, but a (1) will appear next to the archive at the top of the page, alerting you to one unread message. 

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As an anticlimactic Hot Girl Summer fizzled into Horny Girl Autumn, and my love life took a turn for the chaotic, the archive settings became a life saver.

It was cuffing season and my DMs were a hot mess. First, there was the guy who I’d been messaging for a few months. He’d asked me to come stay with him several times but I wasn’t all that keen on getting on a train to another city for a sleepover with a man I’d never met in real life. Red flags were proved right when I got a text from his live-in girlfriend who’d found messages from me after he accidentally sync’ed his phone to her work laptop. After a phone call during which I told her everything, I blocked him and permanently relegated our cursed chat to the archive. Then there was the guy who yelled at a woman in the street to “go fuck yourself” on our third (and final!) date, who proceeded to sit in a moody sulk as I awkwardly sipped my glass of white wine in silence. Into the WhatsApp archive you go! Just when you think it couldn’t possibly get much worse, I threw myself back into the ring just days after the shouty date and met up with a guy I’d been chatting to for over a month. Midway through the date he said, “Full disclosure I’m married,” (albeit separated) before propositioning me for sex. 

Amid this chaotic bonfire of a time, the File 13 of fuckboys was neatly stowed away, out of sight, out of mind. If one of them messaged me, I wouldn’t get a notification. But sporadically I’d see a (1) next to the archive, and I’d go in, have a look, and reply if I needed to. After time, I found that it helped create space between myself and the dates that hadn’t gone so well. I didn’t ghost, but rather tidied them away to a place that wasn’t so visible.

“The only serotonin I got from the situation was dramatically hitting the archive button.”

I’m not the only dater making excellent use of the archive. Belinda*, who’s polyamorous, uses the WhatsApp archive when she needs to “hide mess,” she says. “My most recent use of the WhatsApp graveyard was to bury a connection I made with someone I really liked who actually turned out to be already be dating my really good friend,” she tells me. “He decided he didn’t want to complicate things further with the polyamorous connection being close to home, and the only serotonin I got from the situation was dramatically hitting the archive button.”

Daisy* says she uses the archive as a test for herself to see how interested she is in the people she’s talking to. “I’ll archive their messages as a way to be like, if I go to check they’ve replied I must like them,” she tells me. “If I forget that they’re there, I shouldn’t be pursuing them because they’re not on my mind.” She also uses the archive as a “graveyard for men who are overly persistent or rude as a reminder of what I will not put up with.”

“Recently a guy I’d never met but had been a Hinge match sent me a message at 7 a.m. with ‘do you see a future with us’ despite us exchanging maybe a week of messages and no date,” she says. “So he stayed in the archive.”

For Daisy, the archive is also a storage unit for fuckboys. “I don’t like deleting, I like to keep them so I can not be re-tempted to message again. It means Drunk Me has evidence of why it’s a bad idea.”

There’s method to our madness, according to the experts. Dr. Caroline West, Bumble‘s sex and relationships expert, says using the archive is a great way to manage your love life when you’re going on lots of dates. “No one tells us about the admin side of dating, but it is important to keep on top of chats as multiple messages can feel chaotic or overwhelming,” she says.

It’s also useful for taking a step back to see how you feel about someone. “When we are waiting for replies it can be very distracting to keep seeing the chat on your screen as you wait for the sign that it has been read,” West adds. “The archive can give some breathing space, as having a small piece of distance can help you to figure out if you truly like this person, or are just getting an endorphin hit from seeing their messages every time you open your WhatsApp.”

“Mindful dating allows us to use tools such as the archive to not fixate on the immediacy of a reply.”

If you’re someone who finds the wait for a reply truly agonising, and stares at the ‘Last Seen’ status on a love interest’s chat, then the archive might be helpful for you. “It can be very draining to look at those ‘Last Seen’ online timestamps and wonder why they haven’t text you back yet,” says West. “Mindful dating allows us to use tools such as the archive to not fixate on the immediacy of a reply, and if someone doesn’t text back, we can let them go and get on with finding someone who will never leave us on read.”

Hot tip: if you hide your Last Seen status, you won’t see anyone else’s either. Free yourself!

Liam Barnett, dating expert and relationship coach, says the archive can be helpful to see your development in communication through time. “It can even remind you of particular phases you went through during different spans of time frames,” he says — but urges caution when it comes to archive etiquette.

“Ghosting can easily trigger people with the fear of abandonment,” says Barnett. “It deeply connects with our biological need of creating bonds, and once a bond is broken in the form of ghosting, a person’s feelings will be affected despite the level of connection that was going on.”

“It only takes one message to give them closure. Leaving without a trace, reason, and explanation is considered cruel: it leaves the person feeling hopeless, and ‘mights’ and ‘whys’ will haunt them,” he adds.

Dating is fun, but it can also be messy, annoying, and overwhelming…so do yourself a favour and make use of the archive.

Of course, when someone’s behaviour is truly egregious (as demonstrated by my own nightmarish dating debacles), then I’d have zero qualms about archiving a chat, or even smashing that block button if it warrants it.

Dating is fun, but it can also be messy, annoying, and overwhelming. A high volume of messages in your inbox is enough to make anyone run for the hills, so do yourself a favour and make use of the archive. Whether your love life is chaotic, or because you can’t bear the agony of waiting for a reply back, or perhaps you need a bit of space from dating admin, archive it. You’ll thank yourself later.