Last month, a pair of University of Michigan scientists published a study that shows that people who date online tend to pursue mates 25 percent more desirable than themselves. I find this difficult to believe. My experience with online dating suggests that the best strategy is to pursue the people who seem the most *interesting*. And by interesting, I mean that they crusade for social justice while naked on roller skates, or shoot rainbows out of their butts. This post, which originally appeared in 2016, explains. Enjoy!
Being single as a 35-year-old woman in the tech age is an interesting science experiment. There’s a lot that’s cool about it, like your time is all your own, you actually feel pretty good in your skin and you have some solid sense of what you want. You also get to tinker with tools of modern romance that your peers missed out on entirely, like Tinder.
If you don’t know what Tinder is, because you live under a rock (forgivable in these times, as it’s surely safer there), it’s a phone dating app that basically works like this: You set your age and gender preferences, set the mileage of your search radius, and then parse through hundreds of short profiles that the app pulls up for you, each with five or six pictures and a terse little bio, swiping left to reject and right to match.
My married friends and friends with children, who are legion in my social circles at this point, always seem to want to TRY my Tinder app. To them it’s both exotic and vaguely nostalgic, like a game on a Game Boy, if Nintendo had made a game where you were a rat trained to press a paddle over and over again expecting some reward, but then simply began pressing the paddle because there was ALWAYS MORE PRESSING TO DO. More…
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