How I, a late bloomer, found love — part 2 (2024)

Zero romantic, dating or sexual experience. That was my reality in my late 20s. And as I explained in the first part, it wasn’t fun:

One of the reasons I started this series? Lately, there have been a lot of articles about lonely people (more specifically, lonely men — although obviously women can suffer this fate too).

I’ll put it mildly: not all of these articles seem to be coming from the most empathetic or constructive place. (Then again, algorithms have a way of showing people the content that makes them the angriest and most insecure — so I’m not sure to what extent people even know what I’m talking about).

Fortunately, I managed to get out of this situation without selling my soul to the devil or turning myself into an impossibly perfect angel.

So I decided to post something (hopefully) more helpful.

If I had to go all flowery and poetic, I’d describe my journey as being like a long and winding road, with Easter eggs scattered along the way containing various pieces of advice inside the chocolatey goodness.

Well some of the chocolate eggs were stale and some were downright food poisoning-inducing — but we’ll get to that. For now, I’ll just continue laying out the pieces of advice (good and bad) one by one and elaborating on them, trying to fit them into a sort-of chronological order.

“Just get on the apps, dawg”

After having jazzed up my wardrobe, I felt I was ready to take direct action. Go outside? Don’t be silly — by “direct action”, I mean installing a thing on your phone that lets you like photos with (maybe) a bit of text underneath. And the most famous of the bunch is, of course, Tinder.

In my opinion, Tinder feels like a cross between a slot machine and an IKEA catalogue. But instead of fruit or furniture, it shows folks.

Other apps are guilty of this too. But Tinder especially feels like it was designed more like Bejeweled than a serious way of meeting someone.

(This is just my subjective opinion. If you met the love of your life on Tinder, that’s awesome. Or if it has just gotten you laid a lot — more power to you. But my core audience for these articles probably hasn’t had the same experience.)

I’ve seen a lot of men report getting very few matches on Tinder, close to zero — and the experience was similar for me.

Even the friend of mine who claimed to be successfully using Tinder (in his case, as a hook-up app) told me he pays a full Platinum subscription, to make sure his profile isn’t forever swallowed by the sands of oblivion. And before anyone says “just lift, bro” — he’s a bodybuilder.

Why is this? Well, one explanation is that the ratio of active male users versus active female users on Tinder (and many other apps) seems a tiiiny lil bit skewed.

It seems like a lot of women’s profiles that are shown to men are inactive, or just not very real in the first place.

“Keep the rooster in its pen” & “Just keep swipin’”

We could talk until the cows come home about why that is. One reason could be real women noping out of the app when they get flooded by dick pics.

But if you’re a guy reading this article, I assume you’re intelligent enough to have figured out (or to have intuited from the very beginning) that unsolicited wang shots are a suboptimal way of wooing a lady.

Men also seem a lot more indiscriminate when it comes to their swiping behaviour — and The Algorithm is known to demote those swipe-happy campers to the bottom of the Ranking. Yes, Tinder ranks its users. Forget Bejeweled — this is starting to seem more like chess.

The worse your ranking, the less your profile gets shown to the people who “outrank” you.

It can be a vicious cycle. When the “matches” page already feels a bit like entering a ghost town populated by one single tumbleweed, the temptation to just swipe on everyone to hopefully find the needle in the haystack will increase. But that just hurts your chances even more.

As I’ll explain later, being “pickier” can be paradoxically helpful to your chances — although “pickier” isn’t quite the right term. What I mean is more “finding at least one single reason to believe an enjoyable conversation could ensue between you and that person before you like ’em.”

But again — more on that later.

And in any case, not on Tinder.

“Just delete the apps, dawg”

I’ll say it here: in my humble opinion, Tinder is sh*t. And in my experience, similar apps like Bumble were almost as useless.

This is a huge fast-forward to the ending (SPOILER ALERT), but I ended up finding my girlfriend on an app. So it would be rich of me to tell anyone not to bother with them.

But the apps can take a real toll on your mental health — or at least, they did for me.

Even during the better periods on the better apps, there were long periods of radio silence. And we’re just talking about the very first hurdle, which is getting a match. That’s before you even get to the ghosting, dead-end conversations and all that lovely soul-nourishing excitement.

So if you feel like you need a break — take a break. I sure as hell did, uninstalling the apps for a while and only coming back when I felt mentally resilient enough to give it another shot.

And if you’re gonna use an app, use one that is right for you.

When I first started out with the apps, I installed like 9 of them at the same time (which is a terribad idea — but an interesting experiment).

Of all the apps I tried, only 2 were bearable: OKCupid and Hinge. (And I ended up meeting Laras through OKCupid! OK, whose feet do I have to kiss as a sign of gratitude?)

“Rule 1: Be Attractive. Rule 2: Don’t Be Unattractive.”

These two apps have two things in common that set them apart from their rivals.

Numero uno: instead of being 99.9% about the picture (like Tinder & assorted clones), OKC and Hinge are more like 80% about the picture. You don’t just get a single line of text where you post a bunch of emojis, your height and “W A N D E R L U S T.”

Hinge forces you to answer three prompts, which in turn forces you to come up with a creative answer that hopefully reveals something about your personality — unless you go out of your way to be boring.

OKCupid’s even better in that regard. It makes you answer a quiz about your values, beliefs, preferences and other non-abs related stuff, and then lets you spam an entire novel in your profile — an opportunity which I gladly took advantage of. (If you’ve made it this far, you can tell I’m a man of many words. Too many.)

Numero dos: they let you send a message to someone before you match.

Again: I need my words. I’m cute, but I’m no Calvin Klein model.

“Copy-Paste This Tinder Opener That’ll Make Her Feel Special”

In text though, I can be pretty charming. Case in point:

Me: hey bb
Woman: wow, here’s my phone number: <redacted>

OK, that was a joke example. Please don’t try this at home, kids.

Instead, I’d read the profile. If something about what the woman had written stood out to me — sparking a thought, a question or a even a joke — I’d send that. (This can apply to photos as well — as long as it’s about something besides her looks. Pictures can give interesting info. They can tell you something about what people want to show to others — specifically, to the guy she wants to meet.)

Many first messages went unanswered. But this approach sparked more conversations than if I’d waited for women to like my mugshot first — which at least helped me get more comfortable talking to strange women online. I just made sure the message would be worth their time.

And when I didn’t get an answer, I tried to look at it as writing practice.

Writing a good first message is tricky. And the practice paid off. Because somehow, a joke about lunch break exposure therapy ended up snowballing into a long-term relationship with the lovely Laras!

That covered a lot of app-related ground. Truth to be told, just reading a guide on how to navigate dating apps wouldn’t have been enough for me when I was 29.

They were definitely a part of my journey. But without the real-world insight and experiences I gained that have zero to do with these swipe merchants, I would have kept bumping into the same walls over and over again.

I want you to keep one thing in mind. Dating apps are not made to help you find love. Or even to get you laid. That’s just a byproduct.

Dating apps are above all made for one thing: to make the tech CEOs who own them very rich.

Every time two people meet on an app, get into a relationship and delete the app, the company’s just lost two customers. Or products — the thing with tech is that users have become a weird mix between product and consumer.

For them, this is a terrible outcome that goes completely against their business model. What they want is to keep you swiping your pretty thumb over people’s faces for as long as humanly possible, until you dislocate it. Or something.

They want your eyeballs on their ads. They want your Platinum subscription moolah. They don’t give a hoot if you’re crying yourself to sleep every night.

The apps are not your friend. They and their devious algorithms are, in fact, your enemy. Even the slightly friendlier ones should be treated with the utmost suspicion.

But because they do need to keep up the charade somewhat, they do offer opportunities to get in touch with people in situations you otherwise wouldn’t (in real life, good luck striking up a convo while you’re on the loo.)

If you’re gonna use them, you need to learn to identify their pitfalls. And if they’re getting you down or making you feel desperate, remember: that’s exactly what they want. So don’t give it to ‘em.

Stay tuned for the next installment, where I delve into my social anxiety.