Don't get defensive

As the loneliness and post- pandemic anxiety epidemic hit (Haidt, 2025) it is easy to understand how UberTherapy came to be. Using UberTherapy is not the same as going on Tinder, but platforms of connection shape how we relate, and what parts of ourselves are uninhibited by all that opportunity to swipe and ghost our way in and out of intimacy. This chapter tries to contextualize our experiences of UberTherapy within the ‘threesome’ business model of relating where digital platforms become the third party in a triadic (Pulignano et al, 2024) therapeutic relationship, a position traditionally inhabited by the therapeutic frame. It explores how platforms of connection shape the therapeutic relationship, offering the seduction of attachment- lite (Lynton, 2020). The reality is that on- demand therapy is carried out in a context that draws on digital cultures and the rules of the attention market of being seen in a system of e- commerce (Williams, 2018), intensive advertising in the attention market (Hayes, 2025) tickling our self- doubt and a retail therapy of buy- this- get- better- be- better. In the commodification of therapy, this e- commercial context paradoxically can inhibit us determining and choosing freely what we really want.

This chapter is a provocation about how social media changes what is possible in therapy and raises a genuine question whether the norms of UberTherapy create a system of Therapeutic Tinder designed precisely to avoid the deep and uncomfortable work of therapy. I spent a lot of time thinking about this chapter, listening to relationship and dating podcasts, therapy conversations with psychologists and the relatively few popular psychotherapy influencers.