Why Online Dating Is So Hard
From the perspective of a 23 year old guy
It’s supposed to be simple.
Swipe. Match. Chat. Meet. Repeat.
Right?
Wrong.
I’ve gone on more Tinder and Bumble dates than anyone I know. I have dedicated the most time to it. This means I’m the loneliest? Whatever.
It also means I have suffered through more hours of bleary-eyed swiping at 3 in the morning, more awkward first dates, more blue-balls, and more unanswered messages. I have experienced all the highs and lows of online dating.
And there are a lot of lows.
I moved to a new city a couple months ago and have matched with 250 women.
I’ve gone out with FIFTEEN of them. That’s not even a ten percent success rate.
Ladies, what the fuck? There’s guys that have had more success than that by cat-calling.
And if you can’t even get fifteen matches, you probably just need a profile overhaul. Or you’re overweight and need to get in shape. Tough love. I struggled too, trust me.
Let’s crunch these numbers and try to make sense of this.
First, take away the fifteen women that I went out with. This leaves 235 women. Now let’s subtract 30 from that because, after further consideration, some women just don’t look the same once you sober up.
Come on, I know I’m not the only one to go on Sloshed Swipin’ Sprees.
Now we have 205 women that have expressed a mutual physical attraction. I can work with that!
I mean, surely everyone who has taken the time to download Tinder or Bumble is more than willing to actaully go on dates with their matches. After all, that IS what dating apps are for, right?
Yeah…you probably know where this is going.
My approach to messaging on dating apps goes something like this:
That right there is TEXTBOOK. Short, sweet, and simple. I break this down in further detail here.
I eagerly fired off my “Hi” messages to all 205 women. How many responses did I get?
100.
Boom. Just like that, the dating prospect pool is sliced in half.
Ouch.
I sent the second message to those 100, the one asking them out on a date.
Aaand now we’re left with 40.
We started with 250, and it dropped faster than my self-esteem when nobody showed up to my birthday party in the sixth grade.
I ended up going out with 15 of those remaining 40, like I said. So what happened to the other twenty-five?
Half of them ghosted for whatever reason.
I didn’t even send any dick pics, I swear.
Dating apps suck for a lot of reasons, but the biggest one for me is how flaky people are. It comes with the territory I guess. Women get bored and spend one night on Tinder, never to look at it again — I’m sure I have been the victim of many “hey girls wanna get wine drunk and make fun of guy’s Tinder profiles!?” parties. Then some just use it as an ego boost. And then some are just plain busy.
The other half said they “want to get to know [me]before we meet up.”
Okay, whenever I hear that, I can’t help but get pissed off. I was going to save this rant for another post, but I’m fired up just thinking about it.
I run into this all the time. I call them “pen pal seekers.” They download an app that is specifically designed to simplify the dating process. In other words, the apps are meant to help them meet other people and, you know, to GO ON DATES WITH THEM. But some women just want to text guys for weeks on end to “get to know” them?
THAT IS WHAT DATES ARE FOR!!!!! You get to know people by hanging out with them!
These women think it’s weird to meet people that they don’t know. You know what’s even weirder than that?
Trying to “get to know” someone based off of scattered text messages about nothing, instead of real life human interaction.
These women need to stay off dating apps, they are enormous wastes of time. They also tend to have the most boring personalities, just saying. I think there’s a correlation.
But there’s something else at play here. Why, out of 250 women, do only 15 follow through with a date?
It’s because the women that I just talked about are actually right. It IS weird to go on a date with someone you have never met. Even though online dating has revolutionized the industry, it still doesn’t beat the old fashioned way. Yes, online dating has changed the lives of millions of people for the better. But it will never come close to meeting someone in person, whether it be at work, a party, a rec sports league, through a mutual friend, etc.
I acknowledge that there are a lot of variables, such as your mating market or which app you are using, that can affect response rates, but no matter how you look at it, 15 out of 250 is downright pitiful. Most women just don’t take dating apps seriously enough to message guys at all. More than half of the girls I match with on Bumble never even “make the first move,” which is required, or else the match will dissolve into the ether.
The lesson is not to do away with dating apps, it’s to go out into the real world and to engage with it. Otherwise you’ll be stuck in the endless cycle of:
Swipe. Match. Chat. Chat. Chat. Chat….
Repeat.
