This story was also published on Elite Daily

We all know dating is awful. Old song and dance, I know. The actual process of dating, is awful. If anybody tells you otherwise; that the texting, the dating apps, the anxiety of the first meeting wondering, “FUCK is she/he going to look ANYTHING like her pictures? I’ve really only seen her from the neck up…,” is fun, is lying. They. Are. Lying.

The enjoyment of dating only happens when you’ve widdled the four potential mates down to one. Placing them on some Kinsey scale of normalcy. When you’ve both realized you can stand each other enough to start doing things together for more than forty minutes. The butterflies happen. And of course the first time you see each other’s bits and pieces — that’s all fun.

The figuring out of who you can actually give your real number to because in your head you’re fast-forwarding eight months and wondering if you’re inevitably going to have to block this person, is awful and somewhat similar to listening to country music — which is the worst.

I recently wrote how I trolled my Tinder matches with lyrics from Adele’s “Hello.” It was fun. You’ll like it. So go read it.

And I’ve also written about how sucky Tinder is. How it’s basically one giant swimming pool of floating bandaids.

But I’m single. And I don’t know or meet a whole lot of people in my day-to-day life. And the people that I do meet (when I say meet, I mean gawk at from afar), leave my life quicker than they enter it because I’m too much of a pussy to actually walk up to somebody and say hello.

So I need something else to help me, to aid in my finding of that nobody’s perfect person. Anybody. Even if it’s just someone to hang the fuck out with and get a beer.

But Tinder is out for me. Forever. Goodbye. THANK YOU. IT’S BEEN LOVELY KNOWING YOU. Ga’bye!

Bumble is in (Ugh, God. I can’t even say that with a straight face).

Bumble is identical to Tinder except “the woman is in control,” meaning, once matched, the woman has 24 hours to message you otherwise you are unmatched FOREVERRRRRRR. Do you know this? I feel like you already know this and I’m showing my age.

By the way, it’s pathetic just telling my girl friends that I’m either “Bumbling” or have a “Bumble date,” because I can’t help but think back to Gladiator times and what would Russell Crowe do in this situation. THE MAN. THE WARRIOR. He certainly would not Bumble.

But whatever. I’m here. The girl is in control. Great. I actually prefer that.

I download the app. Create a fake Facebook profile because I don’t use Facebook because it’s stupid and I have zero interest in knowing what my 7th grade friend is up to, and load up some pictures with a bio. Something that shows off my wit and sense of humor.

This was my original profile:

Simple, right? Funny. Sarcastic. If you can make someone laugh within the first five minutes, you’re… something, right? Someone said that.

The picture (that you can’t see) is the one found on my Twitter. It’s manly. Disheveled. Unkempt? Unkept? Which is it? Smiling is for the weak and predacious. Showing teeth is hostile in the animal kingdom.

Annnnnnnd I start swiping. I used to take a lot time because, as my bio says, I’m very picky. But I then realized that I can just swipe like a madman on everybody and then un-match at a later time.

I set up my age range, 27–33, do the radius, crack my thumbs and get to it.

And then I wait.

And wait.

And wait.

Do I have notifications on? Fuck. I don’t.

Maybe that’ll help. (Like somehow I think in the history of notifications, notifications suddenly went out for a cigarette.)

Four days later, and this is what I was rewarded with:

Nothing. Not one woman. Flat-effing-nothing. Not one.

Now… I don’t want to sound full of myself, but I like to think of myself as attractive enough to get some attention. I actually thought something could be wrong with app, my settings, my location. But I checked and, ya, still nothing.

My photos are fine. I don’t have bathroom selfies or gym-mirror shots. Maybe that’s a strike against me? I don’t own any tight A/X t-shirts. What the fuck, man? This is Bumble. It’s supposed to be the “classier” version of Tinder.

Dejected. I delete my Bumble account, sulk, and then delete my fake Facebook profile. I wait a day and think about doing something else.

Google “ATM receipt.” If you do, grab the sixth result. Go do it. I’ll wait here.

You got something like this, right? Minus the censored block:

That’s a lot money. In a checking account, no less.

I’m sure you can see where I’m going with this.

Yes… I set up a new profile (had to set up another fake Facebook page), and used this ATM receipt as my profile picture, keeping my bio the same as well as the other pictures I had from my original profile.

Before we continue, let’s address a couple of things.

One, yes, I eat ice cream with a fork and if you’re still using a spoon, I don’t know you.

Just ask Stephanie.

Secondly. I get it, girls. You went to India. Also, Machu Picchu. What is it with women and dating apps and Machu Picchu and the Taj Mahal. Is there some annual trip I don’t know about? Is there a “Take Your Selfie For Your Dating App Profile Here →” sign?

There is, isn’t there. I KNEW IT!

The new profile goes up, complete with some random person’s three-year old ATM receipt as my photo and then I conducted the greatest controlled experiment I could think of.

I altered the receipt in two ways, by the way. First, I photoshopped the date from 2013 to 2015. I figured it was more believable that I had a one-year old receipt just lying around rather than a three-year old receipt (I’m detail oriented). Probably didn’t matter, but whatever.

The second thing I did was I randomly blocked out a line of text that included the ATM location, which was somewhere in New York. Again, overkill, but the idea was that I was somehow blocking out personal information.

Is your mind blown at the level of preciseness? Should I be using my brain for something else? Like curing cancer or doing calculus theory? Ya. Probably. But stfu.

At around 8 AM I signed on. Using the same age range and mile radius as before, I swiped right on everyone. I didn’t care who and what (what?) I swiped right on, I was just trying to get to the front of everyone’s queue, and because I completely deleted my original account, I was able to swipe on the same women.

Sometime around 7:30 PM, not even twelve hours later, this was the fruit of my labor:

Now that’s an edited screenshot. The connections scroll horizontally so it would have been too much to have a 1400 x 100 left to right screen shot. But regardless, you get the idea. And there were more matches. Many more.

Some women, bless their hearts, were honest about why they swiped right.

Two women — two — told me they didn’t even notice the receipt. Call me jaded, bitter, skeptical, whatever. At least they tried.

And one woman, Jill, argued with me about what I was actually doing.

Really, though. Do you think I’d keep $371,945.28 in a checking account yielding a paltry 0.2% interest? Pfftt…

I could have kept this going but I actually reached the point that I was worried about having to re-install this dumb app some day in the future and to swipe for real, and I was worried someone would remember me as, “that douche who put up his ATM receipt.”

There were more “expiring connections,” but to be honest, my experiment proved whatever point it was that I thought I was trying to make. And really, I didn’t feel like editing 70 jpegs (Yes. That many.).

But I’ll leave you with the best text exchange out of the whole thing: