Swipe Right on Meaningful Connections
A brief guide for grown-ups attempting to navigate the apps in their quest for love
If you’ve recently returned to the singles scene after a lengthy hiatus, you’re probably trying to come to terms with the plethora of online dating apps, and the highs and lows they inevitably bring. This brief guide offers some insights to help you optimise your online dating strategy and maintain a positive mindset in a space that is often fraught with frustration and disappointment.
Apps Are No Substitute for Real Life Interaction
It’s too easy to fall for the illusion that dating apps are like Uber Eats. You simply search for exactly what fits your appetite and choose the most appealing option. A few minutes later a dish arrives at your door, and you never even got off the couch!
Sure, it’s convenient to avoid cooking after a long day at work, but unlike Uber Eats, online dating also requires the dish to choose you, and probably get to know you a bit before agreeing to meet! If you don’t have time to get out and socialise, do you actually have time to start a relationship?
Apps like Tinder that support hookup culture by matching people in real time based on geographic proximity are a partial exception to this statement, but our focus is on building “meaningful connections”, so I’m going to ignore hookup culture angles for now.
If you really want to find a meaningful relationship, it pays to work on improving your lifestyle to stack the odds in your favour. Embrace the strategies discussed in the earlier article:
to build the habit of being sociable, and build some activities into your weekly routine that make you feel good while giving you the chance to be sociable. This might involve joining group sessions at a gym, joining a sporting club, a trivia team, a charitable service organisation or any other regular activity that gets you out of the house and mixing with other people in the context of doing something enjoyable.
By maintaining a healthy balance between your online and real-world social interactions, you’ll achieve several important outcomes:
maximise your chances of meeting people with whom you “click”
maximise your attractiveness to the people you meet: someone with an active life interesting social circle and variety of interests is far more attractive than the boring wage slave who does nothing beyond working and moping at home on the apps.
maintaining a healthy perspective on your quality of life and social value, which in turn helps avoid the misery that can come with the inevitably high rate of rejection on the apps.
Which Apps to Use? How Many Apps to Use?
Choosing the apps that suit you is a very personal matter as it depends on personal preferences, demographics, and even geographic considerations. Rather than providing specific app recommendations, I’ve provided some general considerations and suggestions to help you choose.
Each app will demand time, attention, and possibly money from you. Start with a couple and see if you like them, but avoid focusing on more than two or three at a time because they can dominate your life.
Keep in mind that dating apps are a form of social media. Even when you’re paying for them, you are their product, and they will use all sorts of sophisticated methods to capture and hold your attention for the maximum possible time.
Most OLD apps offer a free plan with limited features. Use this to get a feel for the app to decide if you want to pay for the premium features.
Paid apps may give better results by filtering out the tyre-kickers who aren’t serious about finding a relationship. However, human loneliness and desire for romantic connection is a highly exploitable weakness. These apps are not regulated, so avoid making your purchase decision based on claims of the number of users in your area, or the apparent number of matches that you can pay to unlock.
Understand the Implications of a Global Dating Marketplace
Apps have changed the market dynamics of dating by eliminating geography as a constraint for discovering potential partners. Where historically your dating prospects may have been limited to the small population of your home town and a few surrounding villages, you now have the potential to meet a partner anywhere in the world. Since it’s mostly men pursuing women in the dating game, this expansion of the market means you’re no longer just competing with a hundred or so other men from similar backgrounds and with similar prospects. You’re now competing with men from all over the country, if not the world, and hundreds or even thousands of them are experts at playing the online dating game.
Various research suggests an imbalance in online dating preferences roughly to the effect that the most popular 80% of women seek to match with the most popular 20% of men. Whatever the actual figures, it basically means that the online dating game is stacked against most participants, especially if they attempt to treat it like Uber Eats.
Your Profile is Paramount
Before attempting to build a profile, do some research. There are people who specialise in crafting profiles by analysing what works best in practise. You might be savvy enough to know that you should absolutely not post that pic of you holding up your personal best snapper catch, but they know things that you wouldn’t even think to consider, like whether featuring a photo of you wearing sunglasses will increase or decrease your match rate. Heed their advice, or better yet, engage them to build your profile. This will usually involve some professional photography that you will pass off as candid shots, but that’s how you play this game to win!
Know What You Want, But Stay Flexible
Remember, it’s not Uber Eats! There will likely be a very small number of match criteria on which you could never compromise. Perhaps you have strong religious convictions, or an aversion to smoking, or a pathological revulsion to tattoos. It’s fine to use these in your search criteria and to be upfront about them in your profile. Try to frame them positively though: e.g. “I’m seeking a fellow non-smoking Pastafarian” is better than “Smokers and deniers of the FSM need not apply.”
It’s also OK to list a few qualities that you find attractive, but which are not necessarily show-stoppers. For example, this may include common interests and tastes: “Looking for someone who enjoys spending time being active outdoors, and who doesn’t mind indulging my passion for culinary adventure”.
Be clear about your current relationship status and what type of relationship you’re looking for. If you want connection and romance, say so. If you want sex and are open to where else it may lead, be upfront about it. If you just want no-strings-attached dalliances, that’s fine too. The point is to avoid wasting your time and that of potential matches due to incompatible expectations.
Avoid publishing laundry lists of qualities you’re looking for, and especially avoid laundry lists of dislikes or disqualifiers. Either of these actions will create an impression of fussiness, excessive ego, or both.
Keep your search criteria as open as possible too. For any filter you’re tempted to apply, ask yourself this question:
If an otherwise attractive woman approached me at a party, and she didn’t meet this criteria, would I reject her?
If you answered “no”, it’s not a valid filter. Keep this in mind especially when setting ranges such as age or distance. If you’ve set an age filter of your age +/- 3 years, you’ve just ruled out someone 3 years and 1 month younger than you… Does that really make sense?
Stick To In-App Chat, But Move to Real Life ASAP
As soon as you have a match, you can move to the next phase: the chat. Most apps provide in-app chat, and you should stick to this until you meet in real life for your own protection. Dating apps are a lucrative hunting ground for scammers, so sticking to the in-app chat until you can verify that you’re not being catfished is a sensible policy.
Unless you’re actually looking for a pen friend, you’ll want to move from the chat to a real life meetup ASAP. This means initiating a conversation, just as you would if you met socially, with the added benefit that you have her profile to inspire the conversation. Start by asking a question that demonstrates that you actually read her profile, and creates an opening to learn a bit about each other.
Once you establish a dialogue, decide if you’re interested in getting to know each other better. Some women will agree to meet in person for a brief date quite quickly. Others need a little more time to feel comfortable, in which case she may be willing to have a video call, or even just an old fashioned phone call with you so that you can talk in real time rather than texting. The key is to shift the relationship from “texting partners” to a more personal form of real time communication that lets you each decide whether to take things further. This also helps you avoid wasting your time with fraudsters, women who are dabbling with the app with no intent of actually pursuing a date, and women who are actively dating other men and are just stringing you along as part of their backup plan.
This previous article provides helpful advice for arranging those first few meetings or dates.
Ignore Time Wasters
If you match with someone, reach out via chat and they don’t respond, just ignore them. Similarly if you find yourself enjoying a chat with someone, but they’re reluctant to progress any further after a few days of chat, assert yourself. Let them know that it’s important to you to meet in person to get a feel for whether a relationship has potential, and ask them what they need in order to reach that point with you. If you find their response reasonable, (e.g. they are tied up with a work deadline this week, but they’re willing to commit to a date next week), you can cut them some slack. Otherwise it’s probably best to let them know that you’re not willing to invest more time in texting and wish them well in their search.
Keep Your Options Open
Online dating is a numbers game. Until you actually establish a relationship with someone in real life and mutually agree to that relationship being exclusive, it is generally beneficial to keep seeking new matches. This helps you maintain a mindset of abundance, which in turn helps you make better dating decisions by avoiding fixating on one person because they’re the only apparent option in front of you, rather than because you genuinely want to be with her and the feeling is mutual! This mindset will also help you avoid creating the impression of neediness, further boosting your attractiveness.
On the other hand you should be open about your dating status if asked. Very few women would initially object to you stating that you are actively dating in search of a meaningful relationship. Keep in mind that she probably has even more dating options than you do, so this is really not a problem - yet. After a few dates with the same woman, she’s likely to become less comfortable with the idea that she may have competition! In other words, there will come a point in your new relationship where you’ll both need to lay your cards on the table and agree on exclusivity. That’s when it’s time to suspend your profiles, or log off permanently.
Every App is A Dating App
If you adopt the habits of “Social Competence” and also apply them in the online world, you’ll further increase your chances of meeting someone you connect with.
Before meeting my partner, I was actively using several online dating apps, and going on one or two dates each week with women I met via these apps. A tiny number of these dates had any real potential, but they at least gave me the opportunity to refine my dating and social skills in general. It was actually a completely different app that connected me with my girlfriend: I’d posted some articles on a forum that she found interesting and started following me. Applying the habits of sociability, I routinely reached out to thank her for following my work, which led to conversation, which soon led to an amazing relationship. We still have a good laugh about the fact that she had such a misleading profile on this app that I was certain she was nothing like “my type”!