this post was submitted on 06 Nov 2023
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I married a smoke show I met on Bumble.
I gotta be real: you're all doing it wrong.
It's a sea of people's assumed personas. Being genuine actually makes you stand out.
Feel like you're pressured to be or act a certain way in order to get matches? And then you're sad that they're of low quality? While you are actively misrepresenting yourselves? Wtf did you think was going to happen?
If you're approaching it like you're trying to get a high score, you aren't going to be yourself, and you and the people you match with are going to be disappointed. Faithfully represent yourself and what you want. Accept you'll get even less attention than you already are. Get much fewer but higher quality connections.
Every online dating forum's advice is incredibly terrible, and people failing to realize that they don't HAVE to treat the platforms as a Skinner Box are what I think the root causes of the decline of online dating.
Which, isn't to say the industry doesn't bear most of the responsibility. If people treating your platform as a Skinner box decimates the value of your platform, maybe you shouldn't go to such great lengths to make your platform such a box.
My ex was on bumble and she had over 4000+ likes. She was too anxious to even open the app by the time we had met. I deleted it for her.
You can have the greatest profile in the world as a dude, it just dosent matter statistically speaking if you're not perceived as attractive/ have shitty photos.
If you married a smokeshow you met off of bumble, you could have probably had the same or better luck in real life. I'm not saying boo hoo poor boys but at the same time most of the guys desperately hoping for a connection on these apps won't be able to get a date. Guys outnumber women on these apps something like 4 - 1.
The monetization of the apps are no good. I'm not agaisnt online dating but at the same time the status quo is pretty shitty, espcially if you fall into categories of people who are viewed as less desirable on these apps; ie Asian men and Black women.
I can't stress enough that I understand the mechanics at play. I am a software engineer. It's literally my job to step back and understand how systems work.
I'm saying my initial failure, and the failure of most users, is choosing to compromise their authenticity for short term gains, if long term connections are your objective.
Look at any dating app forum. They're all obsessed about min-maxing your profiles. They've got repositories of pickup lines. They're all running under the faulty premise that you want to maximize the number of matches.
That is a great strategy if you are looking for a hookup. That is a great strategy if you're looking to maximize dopamine hits.
It is an intrinsically self-defeating approach if you're looking for a steady long term relationship.
I guess I can still only speak anecdotally, but the moment I stopped trying to be broadly appealing, my matches tanked by like 50x.
But the quality of the matches from that point on skyrocketed. Basically every match turned into a LTR. Then a marriage in the ultimate case.
But maybe I'm just good looking enough that despite my best efforts, the floor on my appeal was still high. (/s)
Anyhow, if you're planning on completely abandoning the platform anyhow... Why NOT change the approach? What is the worst that could happen? Meeting people IRL and on an app have never been mutually exclusive endeavours. Shackling yourself to a modality if interacting with the service because someone told you it was the best way of doing things or that you're gaming the system is some kind of Andrew Tate Neil Strauss thinking. If it isn't serving you: change it. Don't double-down on a losing strategy.
And, sure, "abandon apps completely" is A way to change things up... but I hope people could learn to incrementally experiment and innovate rather than have step 1 just be burn it down and walk away.
It was my goal to arrange an in person date pretty much ASAP assuming there weren't any massive red flags in chat. And, I certainly wasn't drowning in matches with my initial approach either, I absolutely had the time to go on a date with every match I got... Not like anyone was in danger of falling through the cracks. So, I don't think there was any danger that I wouldn't have noticed good matches.
I don't know. Maybe I'm also burying the hook here but I'm NOT college aged anymore. I was in my early 30s when I switched it up. There is a pretty big demographic shift of singles in that age range that makes it less unfavorable for men. Maybe it had nothing to do with my approach and I just coasted to greater success on the prevailing winds and have been wrongly taking credit for it. I dunno.
Without a doubt though, my own relationship with the apps themselves improved significantly when I stopped treating it like a game to win. It's so much easier on your mental state to stop micromanaging your image and just faithfully represent yourself knowing and coming to peace with the fact that a lot of people won't like you. Maybe it was age, but maybe it was just the maturity that came with age. Maybe you can get that maturity without necessarily having the age. I don't know. I don't have enough lives to do a properly controlled experiment.
Dating sucks, though. I don't ever miss being single. My heart goes out to all y'all.