‘It’s not you, it’s me’ is the gist of college student qualms with dating apps. Hook-up culture declines while young people search for genuine connection.
‘It’s not you, it’s me’ is the gist of college student qualms with dating apps. Hook-up culture declines while young people search for genuine connection.
I can’t stress enough that I understand the mechanics at play. I am a software engineer. It’s literally my job to step back and understand how systems work.
I’m saying my initial failure, and the failure of most users, is choosing to compromise their authenticity for short term gains, if long term connections are your objective.
Look at any dating app forum. They’re all obsessed about min-maxing your profiles. They’ve got repositories of pickup lines. They’re all running under the faulty premise that you want to maximize the number of matches.
That is a great strategy if you are looking for a hookup. That is a great strategy if you’re looking to maximize dopamine hits.
It is an intrinsically self-defeating approach if you’re looking for a steady long term relationship.
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I guess I can still only speak anecdotally, but the moment I stopped trying to be broadly appealing, my matches tanked by like 50x.
But the quality of the matches from that point on skyrocketed. Basically every match turned into a LTR. Then a marriage in the ultimate case.
But maybe I’m just good looking enough that despite my best efforts, the floor on my appeal was still high. (/s)
Anyhow, if you’re planning on completely abandoning the platform anyhow… Why NOT change the approach? What is the worst that could happen? Meeting people IRL and on an app have never been mutually exclusive endeavours. Shackling yourself to a modality if interacting with the service because someone told you it was the best way of doing things or that you’re gaming the system is some kind of Andrew Tate Neil Strauss thinking. If it isn’t serving you: change it. Don’t double-down on a losing strategy.
And, sure, “abandon apps completely” is A way to change things up… but I hope people could learn to incrementally experiment and innovate rather than have step 1 just be burn it down and walk away.
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It was my goal to arrange an in person date pretty much ASAP assuming there weren’t any massive red flags in chat. And, I certainly wasn’t drowning in matches with my initial approach either, I absolutely had the time to go on a date with every match I got… Not like anyone was in danger of falling through the cracks. So, I don’t think there was any danger that I wouldn’t have noticed good matches.
I don’t know. Maybe I’m also burying the hook here but I’m NOT college aged anymore. I was in my early 30s when I switched it up. There is a pretty big demographic shift of singles in that age range that makes it less unfavorable for men. Maybe it had nothing to do with my approach and I just coasted to greater success on the prevailing winds and have been wrongly taking credit for it. I dunno.
Without a doubt though, my own relationship with the apps themselves improved significantly when I stopped treating it like a game to win. It’s so much easier on your mental state to stop micromanaging your image and just faithfully represent yourself knowing and coming to peace with the fact that a lot of people won’t like you. Maybe it was age, but maybe it was just the maturity that came with age. Maybe you can get that maturity without necessarily having the age. I don’t know. I don’t have enough lives to do a properly controlled experiment.
Dating sucks, though. I don’t ever miss being single. My heart goes out to all y’all.
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