Dating apps are spreading like wildfire today. Be it Ok-cupid, Tinder, Grindr or any of the hundreds of other proliferating the cyber dating market, we are all guilty of trying or having tried one or the other at some point in our lives. And, why shouldn’t we? Not only has these apps made potential dates accessible to us from across cities, it has also eliminated all the courage and trepidation which took over us when approaching an attractive stranger.
But all is not hunky-dory in the world of dating apps, for “IT’S A JUNGLE OUT THERE!”
Problem #1
You need to package and market yourself.
Just because it is virtual and you are behind the security of a screen, eating ice-cream out of the tub in your sweats while scouting out matches on the apps, does not mean that you don’t have to package and market yourself accordingly. Within a few words, a couple of pictures and cleverly composed answers to some oddly pointed questions, you are supposed to present yourself in a manner which attracts the partners who are “good news” from those that are not. Sure, you don’t have to spend hours creating the look of “careless, make-up- free, all natural beauty”, to present yourself to every new match. You can use that one great picture your pretentious friend with a fancy DSLR managed to capture for once. But you must make it work with your words.
The uncertainty of initiating a conversation with a stranger is eliminated here.
Problem #2
Separate the great matches from the cringeworthy ones.
Anytime you create a user account at one of these websites or apps, you are inundated with a deluge of “potential prospects”. Sounds great, right? WRONG!
The impression they give you is that of an unending catalogue of people to pick from. If you are a newbie, you’d think “THIS IS IT! I will always be able to find someone”. Again, sure you can find someone, but the question is, do you want THAT someone? Speaking from a straight girl’s POV, I can say from my own experience and those from my friends’ that the frequency of receiving messages like “Hi!” is often much lower than receiving messages claiming “I sex you good!” Of course, there is nothing bad about being confident in one’s capabilities, especially that of ‘sexing someone good’. But if you have more than immediate satisfaction of your carnal pleasure in mind and prefer a well-constructed sentence, then these matches might not be the ones for you. Therefore, these apps are not completely immune to the cons of meeting someone at the bar or a party. Although you might not be physically approached by those, who make you want to smile uncomfortably and quickly change your seat, you won’t be completely shielded from their efforts either. So, ladies, put your filtering glasses on and get ready to sieve through the scores of unabashedly forthcoming, boastful to the point of becoming cringeworthy messages, to get to the handful of “matches” that you would like to consider.
Problem #3
Ignoring works both ways.
In the last point, I mentioned how you need to separate between ‘The Good, The Bad and the Ugly’ messages and select your prospective matches. However, this process of ignoring and eliminating works both ways. There is every chance in the world that the ‘buffed up, bespectacled, cutie with the puppy’ you fell for in the first instance, will discard your match, message or interest, like a stranger’s smelly gym sock. Sometimes it can so happen that he will start talking to you and abandon you mid-conversation, or you will find out that ‘All that glitters is not gold’, because behind his cute as a button face, there is a button sized brain. Either way there is every chance that despite the apps providing you with a seemingly unending list of veritable matches, you will spend your Friday’s at home with your cat, a bottle of wine and a good movie, going over in your head, “What went wrong?!”
And finally, once you have converted such a match into an actual, real-life date, there is no guarantee that all the online flirting and connection is going to translate into an actual spark. For once you are out on a date, it won’t matter where you met each other – whether at a coffee shop or on Tinder, the evening can go either way. So, my advice is, at least try picking the venue of that date cleverly like a good restaurant or a movie that you really wanted to watch. This way even if the date tanks, you will get a good meal or entertaining movie out of it.