I tried an alternative way to date – and it worked
independent.co.uk
independent.co.uk
Isn't this literally what already occurs? From the other side, it seems like this is exactly how most women are doing it? I don't see a lot of my female friends going on dates with every guy they match with (which is usually >200 so pretty hard to date 200 people), so they're rather picky which makes sense. Although, the profile thing is lacking, it's usually just a few photos.
> If a guy can’t set up a decent profile or send a message beyond “Hey”, it doesn’t mean he’s too busy. It means he’s lazy, careless, or not actually invested in dating.
I wonder if she's ever actually sent a message to someone else. This entitlement of "entertain me peasant" is one of the reasons why I deleted these apps.
And even then, "hey" is a correct way of starting a conversation. Sure it can be improved, using something about their profile works better.
Though to be honest, women who start with the "entertain me" mentality, that's a good hint that she's not going to work out.
There are such women of course, but this tiny trivial level of effort and sincerity is not that.
This is exactly what I mean by pathetic.
So if anything, they had to step up and entertain me fist, since they had to even have anything remotely interesting in their profile to talk about like that. And yes I did the same in mine.
Though you then risk get an "ok" back because that wasn't "cool enough"
So you're free to do better then, the bots will appreciate it as well
That may be why some men do it, but that doesn't counter an observation that better results can be acheived by using that behavior as a strong negative signal.
> And even then, "hey" is a correct way of starting a conversation
In a zero-latency medium with non-verbal side channels, like face-to-face oral conversation, sure. In text media, even where I know I want yo interact with someone, I find it annoying.
1) Is photos are _way_ more important and the first message doesn't really affect the reply rate
2) It's a way to filter out recipients who think they are too good for hey or not going to reply anyway (window shopping or whatever they call it)
>Dudes are pathetic
That was subtle. I recognized the irony only upon looking at your username ;)
My expectation when sending a "hey" is not a "yes, i want to marry", it's another low-effort "hi :)" or something like that. This has its meanings of its own, by providing answers to the two questions above. It says that she has ideally given your profile a second look and does indeed want to have a conversation with you, on that app.
Yes, after the "hey" I had people tell me that they don't like talking on the app but you should follow them on instagram (likely they won't respond to you there either), or offered me various paid services. Writing "hey" provides a great filter for me, too. And yes, I was actually able to start meaningful conversations after the first "hey" warm-up.
The problem on dating apps is that with many profiles, you cannot start any conversation specific to those profiles due to them not revealing anything about themselves in the profile. Even if a woman reveals a little bit about herself in the pictures or in the bio, she will probably receive whatever specific-to-her starter you can think of in 20 different variations. Yes, you were not the only one who saw the famous monument in the background that she's been to. Yes, you were not the only one to notice that she likes avocado toast. She is literally talking with dozens of other people who also only saw that monument picture and the avocado toast line.
I was about to write something about everybody’s time on this planet being limited and how there’s actually a human being on the other side of that chat window. But… an appeal to human decency feels pretty pointless here.
Though there's an important distinction between writing a message and real-time chat. "Hey" may be perfectly fine for a chat, but not for an email or similar type of direct message. I tend towards the latter.
Mind you, my experience is all way pre-tinder. I've never been on Tinder, and things may work differently there, because if I understand correctly, you first need both people to already be interested in each other before you can send messages, and the messages are explicitly chat, so there a "Hey" might work. But on many traditional dating sites (many of which are scams now), you search profiles and send a message before you have a match, leading many women to get inundated with low-effort "Hey" messages from men with seemingly no content or personality at all.
Maybe the Tinder approach is better.
Note that it was a man saying it. And I, also a man, agree: men who just send "Hey" to all women they can find are pathetic. It's a shitty, spammy way to behave on a dating site. It helps nobody.
We used to all fight against spammers like the Spam King, because everybody suffered equally from that flood of unwanted messages. But because these minor spam lords only target women, it seems lots of men think it's not really a problem. If the people suffering from it think it's a problem, then it's a problem. And as far as I can tell, a lot of women on such dating sites do consider this a problem.
From my dating-app days, a lot of women profiles were also contentless: A few pretty pics, and a catchline they (more frequent than not) copied from somewhere else.
You couldn't really start a meaningful conversation, if you tried. After matching, "hey" or some BS comeback to their catchline is often the best you can do without coming out as unpleasantly inquisitive.
> I wonder if she's ever actually sent a message to someone else. This entitlement of "entertain me peasant" is one of the reasons why I deleted these apps.
Aren't you basically agree with her then? That once she moved away from a generic bland profile to actually putting some effort into it she got more success?
I am not sure I agree with her advice about being picky though, if you actually make a profile which appeals to the kind of people you want to meet I am not sure you have to be that picky.
Some people just aren't interested in that stuff, so why waste time on trying to date them?
And as far as I'm concerned, this goes equally for both men and women. From my chats with women on dating sites, the behaviour of a lot of men is totally irrational to me: they just message every woman. Lots of women are inundated by messages from men who didn't even read their profile. This makes the dating experience for women extremely frustrating, as there's piles and piles of crap to wade through. So they end up ignoring most messages, which makes the experience also frustrating for men.
My advice to women on dating sites is to just ignore the flood of incoming messages from men you didn't contact, and instead look for interesting profiles and contacting them. I think that massively improves the experience for both men and women.
Coming from a culture where dating doesn’t exist but has now sadly been somewhat imported by American applications, I’m still surprised that people find the idea appealing. The whole thing still somewhat baffles me. It’s like job application applied to life partner, capitalist productivism extended to relationships. That and the whole idea that people should date around and non exclusivity is the norm are probably the most repealing part of American culture to me (and there is a lot I dislike about American culture).
I could not agree more. It’s a bit disheartening to see somebody think through online dating to this extent, write an article about it and not realize this.
Before giving up on these apps I actually tried what happens to be the OP’s main recommendation: I wrote in my profile “If you are not interested in a friendly respectful chat starting with a simple ‘Hi’ please swipe no”. Unsurprisingly it didn’t work…
All that can I say about this is that the selection criteria works both ways.
If a person is not willing to give a chance to another person simply based on the first word that comes out of their mouth/keyboard, perhaps it's them that don't deserve a chance
I find that it's better to mention what you do want rather than what you don't want. People seem to respond better to positivity than negativity.
I think the more reasonable explanation is that they don’t read the profile text: they look at the picture for 20 ms and ask themselves “do I want to be entertained by this peasant or not?” I know it sounds cynical, but I’m trying to take it with a bit of black humor.
And I can confirm that this works both ways. I've always known that most women aren't the right person for me. I don't just want some random woman, I want someone who understands me and who I can understand.
I met my wife online. I forgot what I wrote in my profile, but it was probably slightly funny and self-deprecating, and honest about being a nerd. It had a photo of me in front of the gate of Timbuctoo. My wife recognised it and wrote a message where she referenced Ouagadougou, the capital of neighbouring Burkina Faso. Most Dutch women would completely lack that sort of knowledge, so that immediately drew me in. She's smart, sensible, not a nerd, but gets along great with nerds (one of her best friends was a nerd in denial).
I really do not understand men who just send a "Hey" to every woman they see. Have some standards. And some personality.
I cannot say I understand it but many women on Tinder are the same. Zero personality.
It’s the exact opposite if the direction of change fron people’s normal inclinations the typical advice goes for improving results. But most people are selective enough naturally (and rightfully so) that, yes, even aoplying the typical advice to try to filter out as few people as possible either with the profile or with how they react to others profile or contacts, they are still filtering out the vast majority of the space.
> This entitlement of "entertain me peasant" is one of the reasons why I deleted these apps.
Wanting to eliminate as much as possible of the dating space with incompatible goals or personality is not “entitlement”, Your attitude, that you are somehow owed people not respecting themselves enough to do that, is.
I use different dating apps and regularly come across women with copypasted bios or also who just say "hey" if they initiate (usually they don't). I see other women complain about those same behaviors in their bios. I don't know what to say about that besides that she shouldn't speak for others but a lot of people who do things like that are potentially scammers also. I think women should be aware that dating apps are not easier for men and actually probably harder. Men face scammers and people who put low effort in too and maybe just saying hey worked for them before.
On Hinge I get a lot more women responding to my messages and also more requests directly from them.
> If a guy can’t set up a decent profile or send a message beyond “Hey”, it doesn’t mean he’s too busy. It means he’s lazy, careless, or not actually invested in dating.
This sense of entitlement grinds my gears though. Typically that's what women say who never make the first move.
Hinge has a leveling program just like Tinder does
You didn’t escape, I’m glad you are entertained
the recipient of a rose+message is just as weirded out or skeptical, has a ton of them, and has a ton of likes from people at their level. which is the reason their level is high at all. so you're just in their long list of matches, not standing out at all.
and outside of your own initiative, in both leveling systems, higher leveled / attractive people never see your profile at all to make a decision for or against you.
in all dating applications, many people have their notifications turned off, and actually forget to look.
if you have another way to meet people, consider more of that. its healthier mentally. the leveling system attempts to mimic the non-dating app attraction world, but is still hampered by how few physical inputs a dating app provides about a potential partner, compared to in-person selection.
For those unaware, the algorithm solves the Stable Marriage problem: find a global set of matches, where there's no pair who prefer each other to their own partners.
https://blogs.cornell.edu/info2040/2021/09/30/hinge-and-its-...
> This sense of entitlement grinds my gears though. Typically that's what women say who never make the first move.
I don't get why people see this as entitlement. It's just sensible. I'm a man, and I also don't respond when a stranger has nothing more to say than "Hey".
I did this about a decade ago (before the rise of tinder and suchlike) and the difference in experience for men and women is huge. I made an extremely basic female profile, with a photo that didn't even show a face and barely any other details - and I was immediately buried in a completely unmanagable landslide of messages.
And none of them were from people who'd read the profile and considered details like personality, interests, values or compatibility - I hadn't provided anything! These people must have been purely playing a numbers game, copy-pasting the same message to dozens of women a day with barely a glance at their profile.
That gave me an appreciation for the fact that women on these website have to get through their messages fast and even if my messages were nuggets of gold, they were buried in a dung pile of other messages.
Spending any attention at all on that endless flood on low-effort messages would mean you're never going to find time to actually find and date someone.
Change the objective to long term and start a family for life then those numbers would plummet to low single digits. That’s my guess, but this is always a charged topic so I should have stayed out of it in the first place.
> present yourself exactly as you are
> be picky
I feel presenting yourself as you are (but slightly improved version) is just sound advice because you do not want to waste your time anyway with people who are not attracted to you.
Anytime this gets posted along with "and I get lots of matches" - it is almost universal that the person is in-fact not an average looking guy. Post pics and numbers of matches/week - you're very unlikely to be average looking if you claim to do well.
The overwhelming amount of men who post on dating profile advice subreddits like tinder, hinge, etc. and are average looking men with reasonable profiles who get 0 matches proves your point to not be a reasonable expectation.
As for the "innovation", that reminds me of "Ask HN: I’m 41 and still unmarried – what should I do?" where OP went on dates with 120 men and rejected every single one
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As with job candidates, meeting 50% of the requirements is pretty good. The important part is that they've got enough to interest you, and that their annoyances (everybody has some) is stuff you can tolerate.
Of course there are red flags that are immediate dealbreakers; don't tolerate those. But be prepared to find someone who may be completely different from what you may once have dreamt about, but who may still be right for you.
If a candidate (for anything) meeting 50% of requirements is “pretty good”, whoever created the list of requirements does not understand the concept of requirements.
Is this very surprising? More and more women are choosing not to date men at all because of the low quality of partnership. Men really don't try very hard in terms of supporting the women around them, from my experience.
If the situation was reversed we men would behave the same most probably
[0] https://www.netimperative.com/2019/04/05/online-dating-trend...
The disparity also makes tinder basically useless since it's clear that many guys are just swiping right on everyone, sure in their head they do believe they'll take what they can get, but if they're not doing any filtering then the fundamental contract of the swipe system is broken, that both of you are actively and on consideration interested in one another.
Maybe I'm just too old.
Not that hard, you just talk like, you know, humans, and you either hit it off or not. Why is that any harder/different from the awkwardness of asking someone you know (possibly forever) out for the first time? At least here both parties know exactly what they signed up for.
Sounds like you take your skills for granted.
Sounds like it's something that came easy to you - I'm just pointing out that it's not an universal experience.
I've had gfs on normal dating apps too but it's harder, you have to be very interesting or attractive, and competition is higher so you're less likely to meet someone really good. For me at least, it doesn't come naturally and incurs a lot of mental effort. It's probably not good for mental health either.
Same as with everyone else I guess, common hobbies/interests or just small talk and if it seems interesting then just meet in person and check if you click?
I've used dating app while living in foreign country not speaking local language with local population very limited English knowledge so dating/IM app is quite obvious choice in that case unless you are after bar girls. Met my wife through dating app.
Though I was also quite chatty going to parks on weekends talking to people/girls/female colleagues but end up with wife from dating app, so it was not that I would meet women exclusively only through those apps.
Any dating advice seems utterly useless unless the goal is actually defined.
A lot of people on online dating platforms seem to be "lifestyle daters". It's very similar to lifestyle dieters: people who are eternally "on a diet" but never lose weight or become happy with their bodies. There's nothing wrong with it, but I think for most people online dating is a means to an end and not something they want to keep doing for its own sake.
To be countered with Fembot AI Plus, which converts profile fiction into real world filters. "I'm looking for a deep emotional connection" -> "Find me the hottest guy in a 10 mile radius that has no criminal record or hobbies".
>In the digital dating sphere, “burning the haystack” means obliterating 99 per cent of the dating field immediately so that you’re able to see the 1 per cent that might be right for you (...)
> There’s no shortage of men who want to date you, (...) the good ones are out there, though, and this method makes them more findable.
So, soft way of saying that 99% of men aren't "good". I think it's sexism and it irritates me.
If I'd say that 99% women aren't good for me, that'd be still technically true, but still something that'd be perceived in a negative way.
Is there malicious intent? Probably not, but I still think this statement is sexist against men due to generalization.
No, its a way of saying 99% of people on dating platforms aren’t right for any given potential partner.
People using dating apps like Tinder optimise for matching profile attributes. The only information we have to filter people is their profiles. And we assume that a greater number of shared interests/values/etc. will make for a better partner.
But that's not necessarily true. I actually find it quite unlikely to be true. There might be some correlation, but it can't be very strong. If it were, than all the long term happy couples would consist of basically identical people. But that's clearly not the case.
I suspect that most relationships fail not because of true incompatibilities, but because the huge increase of the dating pool size has made us believe that it's about finding the right match, instead of making it. And in that process we have lost some critical relationship skills that are needed to make a partnership work.
That's very unfortunate, but at the same time an incredibly helpful realisation.
Yes this has happened to me a few times. Despite my opening usually was something like "I've got this disability, if you're uncomfortable with that please just unmatch me right away".
She was intrigued by thoughtful messages, and a lower volume of them
My friend added paragraphs of text to his phones autocorrect
like “a” could be autocorrected to an entire thoughtful and whimsical intro
Its an art
Not being a user of Tinder et al. I can't say I have a lot of experience first hand but what I do know is a lot of women who are constantly swiping and such (I have a solid group of "hot" female friends to study - Im not sure this is a good thing as I've learned some pretty terrifying stuff about dating from them). They admit they are mainly there for attention and validation and that the whole thing has very little do with dating. In fact, its more about a free meal at a nice place. Literally every one of them has a side-guy she's having sex with on the semi-regular anyhow and he's not paying for shit. I'm not making this up - this is what they tell me they use the apps for. When they see pictures of some sexually appealing guy or even better one flaunting money with cars and what not they get interested fast.
So, post sexy shirtless pics of you and your gym body in front of your Lambo. Extra points for backwards hat - the bigger the bill on the hat the better apparently. Better yet post sexy shirtless pics of you and your boat. Happen to find yourself in a private aircraft of some sort - POST THAT PIC!
If you do these things you can write a profile about being sociopathic sex offender complete with misspellings and idiotic grammar and get away with it - nobody is reading it anyhow. The reward is more often than not, earning the right to meet a girl at the hot, exclusive, trendy and EXPENSIVE new place and buy them a nice evening. Afterwards they frequently - not always mind you - end up over at my place telling me about the stupid guy they went on a date with and ditched at 10PM. This isn't abstract - this is absolutely real. When I want to eat I buy groceries, when girls want to eat they go on dates. I'm 100% absolutely not kidding.
Personally - I never got into The Apps thing. I have guy friends who do it quite well and believe me they're not looking for a wife and the girls they bring around are most certainly not wives in waiting. These guys are living proof you can in fact get good at this and contrary to what you might think, these guys aren't exactly Ukrainian Underwear Models either. Quite the opposite but with their Rolexs and Real Estate Portfolios, that stuff isn't important anyhow.
Status trumps money. Money trumps sex appeal. Sex appeal will still get you in the door but well behind the status and money guys.
What I really love personally about the shit show that is pervasive app based dating is simple - I can now walk up to a girl at a show, a nice venue, where ever there are girls having fun and say "Hello" while looking them in the eye and introducing myself. Nobody does this anymore and it seems to blow their minds by the look on their faces when a real guy in the real world bothers to walk straight up to them and start telling them silly jokes.
It seems to convey the message of "I dare you to reject me, in fact thats why I bothered to walk over here and chat you up in the first place - this kind of social jeopardy is inconsequential and entertaining to me. I don't care because I have big brass balls and you don't scare me one bit - besides theres tons of girls here and you're not in a position to negotiate with me as I have plenty of options you can see right now with a brief look around the room here". This seems to convey the understanding that Im a High Value Male and more often than not it works. At worst you get a dead fish handshake from a girl with no social skills. In the best case you actually make a new friend or find a gaggle of girls to spend the day with and take things from there.
I encourage anyone who wants to flip the script to give this a try. Im here to tell you that the old school game of collecting phone numbers from in person interactions still works as well or better than it ever did. Apps are for attention seeking women and men who seek to industrialize the process of sourcing girls for the purpose of sex.
Personal connection in the real world is a powerful thing and allows you to leverage advantages The Apps just don't offer. Simply be attractive to the demographic you're going after (if you're seeking Goth Girls be a Goth Guy etc), have some witty things to say and don't be a creep. Get some phone numbers. Wait a few days and follow up with some texts etc. PROPOSE A DATE AND MAKE THE ASK. It wont always work of course but it puts a lot of the choice making process back in your hands.
No matter how you approach it, it's always going to be a difficult grind but at least this way you get to have a little fun in the process and sharpen your own social skills.
EDIT: Seems this post has been flagged? Seems like a perfectly valid article to me - at least considering the source. Maybe someone didn't like what the had to say as it hit a little too close to home me thinks.
I regularly strike conversations with the women I met just because as I do with any other person regardless of their sex and some of them even have genuinely interesting things to say. Strangely my dating life is doing fine despite being a very normal 30-something man who is neither a trader nor an athlete.
Reading this comments section, I'm starting to understand why women are tired of dating apps.