“Wow, I’m so glad that’s over.”
That’s what I said to myself as I got home from my date that night. It was the second date that I had in a week, both with different guys.
On top of those two dates, my entire week had been a rollercoaster of craziness, and it’s solely because I joined Tinder.
For those of you who don’t know, Tinder is a Millennial dating app that consists of you “swiping” profiles of people you find attractive and waiting to see if they “swipe” you too (hence, they think you’re attractive as well). Due to my commitment issues, cynicism and hesitance to date, my friends and I thought it would be a great social experiment to join Tinder, and man was it interesting. I rattled with the idea for a few weeks, but honestly I would have never gone through with it had it not been for the ever-present nudging of a few people who wanted to see me endure a week of complete chaos.
Because my friends knew I wasn’t completely sold on the idea, they knew I wouldn’t give it my all unless they set some ground rules.
Hence, the experiment:
1. I couldn’t put “troll” photos on my profile. I really wanted to have a picture of a turtle wearing sunglasses but apparently that’s “unacceptable.” I ended up using a selfie, a hiking picture and a “cute,” normal picture. My bio on my profile was simply “Sassy & Classy.”
2. I had to swipe for at least ten minutes everyday.
3. I had to respond to every guy who messaged me. If the convo died out after that, then that’s fine but I had to give it a shot.
4. I had to message at least one guy first.
5. And the most interesting rule…I had to meet at least one of these guys in person for an actual date.
Oh, and did I mention? I used different personalities for all of these guys? Yeah, it was wild.
I picked a “character” within the first few message exchanges with each guy, and I was astounded by how spot on each interaction was. Either my friends and I are really good judges of character or these guys are super predictable. Either way, every character that we chose ended up being the exact type of girl that guy was looking for, and they really hit it off.
Cutie (aka QT):
Cutie was the first guy on Tinder I ever matched with (about five minutes after I created the account). As I’m sure you can gather, he got his code name because he is super cute. So cute, it made me wonder why he’s on Tinder (I soon found that out). For the sake of experimenting, I messaged him first. He was also dubbed the “control,” so I didn’t have a character with him but I also wasn’t completely myself. We talked about dancing and made plans to go that weekend until I realized I didn’t want to drive to El Paso (40 minutes away) and he realized he didn’t want to drive here. We exchanged numbers, but as soon as the conversation left Tinder, it took the first exit toward Boredsville, USA. I stopped replying to him when I realized I was basically falling asleep reading his messages. Never heard from him again.
Super Like:
Super Like got this name because he was the first one to ever “super like” me on Tinder. At first, I didn’t know what that meant, so I consulted my friend who had previously been on Tinder. There are certain ramifications with super likes, but the biggest thing is that you can only give out one a day, so it’s a pretty big deal. Well this super like came about 30 minutes after I created the account. I swiped right (said yes) because it felt appropriate to see what would happen. We then decided I would be the “nice girl” in this situation. The Super Like was followed the next morning (very early) by a message: “You had me a sassy” and then an intentionally cheesy pick up line. The conversation quickly led to a request for my phone number, followed by an invitation for a date.
The couple of days in between our date were spent texting, and he even called me a couple of times, which I appreciated. As any nice girl would do, I always texted back or answered the phone and made sure I seemed super interested in our conversation. The day of our actual proposed date he had to stay late at work and ended not being able to make it (he would have to drive from El Paso anyway). Most people would say the working late thing was an excuse, but he had mentioned to me earlier that work was crazier than usual that day. And he apologized so many times it was starting to get annoying.
I went camping the next day so we didn’t talk, but the day after that, he made a point to call me as soon as he thought I would be back in town and he asked me to dinner. Not being very interested and not wanting to lead him on, I talked him down to just coffee. Needing some moral support, I met my best friend before that at the same place I was going to meet him. When we knew he would be getting close, we went to her car and I sat with the passenger seat completely laid back while she described every car and person passing by until she saw him. After he told me he was there and I sent a “Right around the corner!” response, my best friend gave me a pep talk that consisted of the advice “Don’t be yourself.” And I left. We met and the conversation was adequate, but I was by no means very intrigued.
Plot twist.
A little bit into my date, my friend showed up, followed by another friend, followed by their two friends. They didn’t know I was on a date so they ended up sitting with us. I’m sure Super Like thought I planned that out, but it was actually just a funny coincidence. He handled the situation pretty decently though, I will give him that. He hung out for a while and then excused himself to drive back to El Paso. He kissed me (wasn’t expecting that), and then he left. As he was driving away I thought there was no way I’d hear from him again after the stunt he thought I pulled.
I was wrong.
I get a text the next day, and the next, and the next…
After a week of turning down hanging out with him and him still trying, I finally had to send the “Look dude…” text. Luckily he got the hint then (when it punched him in the face) and hasn’t reached out since. He’s a nice guy, but he’s at the stage in his life where he has a house and a 401K and mows his lawn every Saturday, while I can barely figure out what I’m going to eat for lunch. He would very much like to marry and have lots of babies with the random girl he met on Tinder, but I still have a lot of wild college student left in me.
Dragon
One night, my friend begged me to let her swipe for me for my ten minutes that day. Thinking it could add an interesting twist to the story, I obliged. This friend challenged me early on to be completely myself with at least one guy, one I could see myself dating. Enter Dragon. One of the guys she selected. It was pretty easy to be myself with him. Dragon drew me in by challenging me to a thrilling battle of “Would You Rather.” He was witty, charming and knew how to hold a conversation and…he was literally the WORST with face-to-face interactions!
After some convincing and hard work on his part, I decided to go on a date with him. We met for coffee at 7 p.m. and my friends were supposed to come at 8 p.m. It was the most painful conversation I’ve ever had. I asked the most basic questions, only to receive short, non-descriptive answers and then would blankly stare at the TV while trying to think of another question to ask. I remember looking at my phone at 7:20 and thinking “Dear goodness, I cannot stand 40 more minutes of this.” I wanted to ask him if he had someone texting for him or if he is just THAT socially awkward. I was astounded that someone could be so great at texting conversations and could be so bad at them in real life.
Then for some reason, he had the most off-base idea that the date was going well enough to ask me to follow up coffee with dinner! That was the last thing I wanted to do. I knew my friends were getting there soon so I pretended to look up places to eat to kill time, just praying that someone would come in with a hail Mary for me when they got there.
They didn’t. And as I walked away from my friends, all I wanted to do was throw an adult version of a temper tantrum because, by golly, this is my experiment so it better all go my way! By the grace of God, as we’re walking to his car he gets a “call” from his “friend” saying they “need a ride” because they’re “too drunk to drive.” Of course, the call was completely set up. I think he realized how hesitant I was to go to dinner and decided to put me out of my misery. We ended with a side hug and an unspoken agreement to never talk to each other again.
My favorite part of this date was when I walked (more like pranced) back into where my friends were, and the look of excitement/confusion when I came up to them and said “Guys, I just got dumped!” And couldn’t have been happier. That was the official end to the project, and although it was an interesting ending, I was just happy it was over. Little did I know…
Caliche
Our first topic of discussion was that he had just got his wisdom teeth out. That set him up to be able to very smoothly ask me out on a date. I will give him props for how sly he went about that. I agreed. On Wednesday, we set up all the details for the lunch date we were supposed to go on on Saturday. I didn’t hear from him the rest of the week until early Saturday morning when he texted me to inform me that he was sick and couldn’t make it (which I figured would happen all along). Still half asleep, I responded with a “you’re good :)” and we left it at that.
Fast forward two weeks.
I get a text from him late afternoon on a Sunday saying he “totally spaced” about rescheduling our date and wanted to know what I was doing that night. Well I’m the type of person who likes to pretend that I have a life, so I declined to hang out that night. But I did agree to dinner the next day (bringing the Tinder date total up to three). It was an mediocre date, nothing spectacular. He pulled out my chair, opened doors and paid for the meal. He was dorky, but in a cute way. Talked a lot, but because he was nervous. After dinner, we separated with a solid side hug. We text a couple times after that, but then I decided I wasn’t going to put energy into something I wasn’t interested in. We haven’t talked since.
Hilary (with the smirking, purple devil emoiji)
With a nice smile and a bio that read “my life is currently somewhere between kegs and kids,” this was another guy I decided to reach out to first. I messaged him to tell him his bio was funny because I think credit should be given where credit is due. But quickly after that, I decided to be the argumentative/challenging girl. This was probably the easiest character for me to follow because it’s the most similar to my actual personality. And that ended up being exactly what appealed to this guy. He didn’t give me an inch, and I shot back just as hard. I intrigued him enough to ask for my number, which of course I didn’t give to him without making him work a little harder for it. It was either really hot with him or freezing cold. No in between. Conversations about life and work were boring and mundane. But when we started arguing, man, that was fun.
I knew with keeping up with his façade, he wouldn’t ask me out, so I just tricked him into it. I used my charm and wit to challenge him enough where he had to prove himself on a date.
We made lackluster attempts at meeting up, but between my traveling and his work schedule, we knew it wouldn’t work out. He said he would text me in a couple weeks when he got back from traveling for work. I told him that would be good because that would “give me time to decide if I even liked him or not.”
Another one bites the dust.
Lessons Learned
There were times where this experiment got really difficult for me. The weekend after I started the experiment I went camping with some girl friends. I love camping and hiking, and all I wanted to do was unplug and be present in nature, but I didn’t want to use any excuses and not fulfil my experiment wholeheartedly. So instead, I sat by the campfire messaging random guys. Side bar: all the other girls on that trip lost cell reception and yet somehow I had LTE. That’s cold, fate.
Another struggle of mine was the fact that I was dealing with real people. I told myself before this ever started that I would not lead anyone on. But even by denying that, I had a couple of guys who actually started to like me (I have no clue how or why). I definitely wasn’t expecting that and I had absolutely no interest in them, and that caused a lot of internal conflict.
But I think the biggest internal conflict is something that I had felt the whole week, but wasn’t able to express into words how I felt until after the whole thing was over. About six months ago, I made a pact with myself to work on me. I wanted to do everything I could do to be the best version of Bethany as possible. This included everything from eating better to reading more to practicing random acts of kindness. And I had been doing really well with this. Honestly, the past six months is the happiest I’ve ever been in my life. Sometimes I was so happy that I had no clue what to do with myself.
But this experiment took me back a few steps. I was playing with people’s emotions and being someone I wasn’t. And instead of spending time focusing on family and friends or school and work, I was on my phone, talking to people who would not add any benefit to my life. Instead of being the free-spirited, appreciative, motivated Bethany I had worked so hard to become, I was the superficial, flirtatious Bethany that I wanted nothing to do with. The Bethany I was that week is a Bethany I’ve never seen before, and I did not like it one bit.
Going forward, I really needed to take a step back, assess how I feel, break it off with all these guys who probably genuinely like me and go back to focusing on being me. I’m so glad this experiment was only a week, because right now I can do damage control, but I don’t think that I would have been able to do this for much longer than a week without seeing detrimental effects. It’s amazing to me too that I started this experiment for the sake of journalism, which is one of the ways I had been focusing on improving myself. I said to myself so many times that week, “Do it for the sake of journalism,” but it backfired and left me feeling pretty icky. Before I started this, I thought I would be able to complete it without being affected at all. And I wasn’t affected in terms of like falling for one of these guys, but I was affected in the way I felt about myself.
The only thing that kept me going through all of this was the support I received from my friends. When I first started this experiment, I didn’t want to tell many people because I thought I would get a lot of judgment and push back. Maybe I thought that because of the way I felt about it, but I was sure people would think that I’m a total flirt who has actually always wanted to get on Tinder and was just using this as an excuse.
But I found the complete opposite.
Everyone I told was completely intrigued by the whole thing—no judgment (to my face, at least). My friends were completely invested in the process, even starting a “Tinder Trolls” group message, and wanted to be updated with any progression. My other friend asked if she could have my ten minutes one day to swipe for me. And the two friends she was with who I had never met before asked me out to dinner later that week so they could be updated on the whole situation.
The first weekend I started this project, I was at my usual Friday hang out spot with my friends and there were about seven of us around the table. One of the guys would text me and we would all collectively get excited and decide what to respond. There was a random guy at the table who I had never met before who was a friend of my friend’s. He had a Tinder and that night he asked me to look through his profile to see what I thought from a woman’s perspective, and I got some great insight on it from a man’s perspective as well.
It amazed me that everyone had their “fan favorites.” My friend Jes was a fan of QT while my friend Molly was interested in Hilary and Angel wanted me to hit things off with Super Like. These people rooted for their favorites, assisted me in what to reply to them and secretly wished that I would keep the conversation going.
These were the people I was texting for advice in the middle of the night, or the ones who I was making meet with me in person so I could just “talk through what I’m thinking.” I can say this with complete assurance, I would not have been able to do this without their support.
One of the things that was probably most stressful though was the continual process of texting these guys at the same time I was texting my friends updates of conversations with these guys. I had to be super careful and make sure I was always sending a text or picture to the right person. One time I almost sent a screenshot of my conversations with Hilary TO Hilary. That would have been awkward. I am proud to say, I made it through the week without any slip-ups, but it was not without immense attention.
It was pretty funny discussing all of these guys/conversations with my friends. And I kind of feel bad for the guys because both me and my best friend are writers, and having two journalists teaming together is dangerous. These guys were screwed from the very start. I remember hanging out with my girls one night while texting Hilary and trying to decide where to put the ellipses in the sentence. Because depending on where we put it could change the ENTIRE meaning. In the end, we went with the location that allotted for the flirtier response.
I know everyone wanted me to fall in love with someone on here because it would be ironic and then they would make a Lifetime movie about it we would all be famous. Well I still have a heart of stone, so that didn’t happen. But I did learn a lot from this experiment—about myself and about other people. I’m glad I did this, but I would definitely never do it again. When my week was up, I so beyond ecstatic to delete that stupid app. If anything, just because it kills my battery and I was having to charge my phone at least twice a day.
Here are some of my favorite texting moments with my friends from the week: