The trouble with dating apps is that the carousel never stops. How can anyone make a considered decision about Daisy from Putney when Julia from Richmond is a thumb-twitch away? And somewhere behind Julia, surely, is someone even better. After years of swiping, the patient zero of our interminable romantic misery, the apps, are finally in their death rattle. If they achieved one thing, it’s uniting the world against them.

With the apps came dating insanity. I’ve had my fair share. One match popped up with a gallery of elegant, charismatic photos and a profile Jane Austen could have written. She turned out not to be in her late thirties, as the beautiful prose suggested, but in her mid to late seventies. How did she get away with it? Simple. She’d used her daughter’s photos because, in her words: “I get more matches that way.”

Can’t argue with that. Over the froth of my seemingly never-ending cappuccino, I asked: “But… does it work?” “Oh yes,” she said. “I’ve had loads of fun with younger men.” To be fair to her, the sex was fantastic (kidding). And she wasn’t even the strangest. There was the beautiful woman who took me back to her Surrey mansion, where her husband was waiting in the hallway, in a leather armchair, naked from the waist down.

Apps are a dopamine drip that never runs dry but they don’t actually work because romance was never going to be found by searching. It grows out of attraction and chemistry, one of the few parts of being human that still feels like magic.

I’m not alone in retiring my exhausted digits. In a single year, Tinder, Hinge and Bumble lost more than a million UK users between them. And the people my age who hang on are the most devoted of all. 55- to 64-year-olds on dating apps spend nearly six hours on them in a month, longer than any other age group. That’s a lot of evenings scrolling past partners in crime.

And it’s mostly men doing the swiping: more than six in 10 people using dating services in the UK are male, which will surprise no woman with thumbs. What men get wrong is written all over their profiles. In my work helping people in acute emotional pain, break-up and divorce, I hear from women who are on the apps even in their heartbreak. The relentless draw of the next swipe keeps them chasing the dating app dragon, and they end up drowning in a sea of clichés. If men say they want “no drama, no time-wasters”, they are talking about their last relationship, not hopes for the next one.

Apps are having to adapt too. Tinder has introduced an “events” tab where users can choose to go on real-life dates, from trivia nights to ceramics classes. So, the company that invented “the swipe”, now wants you in a room with other people, making a wonky mug.

These days I give relationship advice to more than 400,000 women on social media. I’ve heard it all: the ghosting, the man who messaged for three weeks and never once suggested a coffee, the profile photos with the ex badly cropped out. I’ve built a whole part of my business offering advice on meeting people in real life.

So, if you’re ready to put the phone down, here’s where I’d start.

Go somewhere more than once. A weekly class, a choir, a walking group, a volunteering shift. The first week you’re a stranger. By the fourth, you’re a familiar face. Attraction often grows out of simply seeing someone regularly.

Choose things you would enjoy even if you met nobody. If the only point of the evening is finding someone, every evening without them is a failure. If you’d happily go anyway, you’re relaxed and better company. Nobody has ever been charmed by someone gritting their teeth through salsa.

Take a friend, then talk to other people. Arriving with someone makes walking through the door easier. Just make a rule before you go in, so you don’t spend the whole evening talking only to each other.

Say yes to the invitations you’d normally dodge. The 50th birthday, the leaving drinks, the barbecue at the house of a friend of a friend. An awful lot of good relationships still start with someone saying: “You must meet my friend.”

If you do stay on the apps, put them in their place. Set a time limit, check them at set times rather than all evening and move to meeting in person quickly. A week of messaging tells you far less than 20 minutes over a coffee.

The swipe had a good run. But it made us fussy, and a little greedy, always sure someone better was one flick away. My seventysomething coffee date understood the game better than any of us: the apps reward the picture, and she’d simply borrowed a better one. The rest of us might do better turning up, again and again, until someone notices.

Harry Hardisty writes about relationships, heartbreak and mid-life at dadhugsforyoursoul.com