Brandon at Random Reviews

Intro

In this day and age, in the midst of a pandemic or in the immediate aftermath of a pandemic (however you see it), a lot has changed in the dating world. A lot of people are just plain less comfortable going out and meeting strangers in public, and they weren’t that comfortable before this. Everyone is trying to be safer and keep their distance and not contract COVID in whatever flavor of the month variant or form it has taken. It’s understandable. People have every right to feel this way and despite government-imposed restrictions being relaxed, a lot of people still don’t have the warm-and-fuzzies.

Because of these concerns, people just aren’t going out as much at all. Bars and restaurants, theaters, concert venues, etc. have all reopened, yet there doesn’t seem to be as much for flocking to these places now. I mean they are, but not like they once were.

Without as many places to be able to meet people in a less threatening environment, dating is getting even more difficult than it once was. Where can people go to fulfill their needs to find romantic companionship? What can they do?

Online Dating

We all know this option. It’s great for avoiding the issues brought forth by the pandemic. A lot of sites/apps have taken great strides to improve its users’ ability to communicate, whether through video chatting or voice chatting or…well I guess that’s really it but it is a positive. It’s good to be able to interact with people on an audio or video level ahead of actually meeting to get a better sense of how they really are and how they behave.

We all likely have an opinion on online dating (OLD). Many still maintain that it is only good for meeting strange weirdos, no matter which site you use. I don’t agree with that necessarily, but I do feel it has a myriad of other flaws to cope with.

Finding the Right Service(s)

There are dozens of apps out there for you to try and whet your dating whistle. Actually, sorry, that sounds a lot more like a euphemism than I intended…well, whatever, I typed it, it stays. Some of the most popular options include Tinder, Bumble, Match, eHarmony, Facebook Dating, and many others. Most of these apps have become nearly identical. Some are more simplistic than others, some require a paid subscription to interact with people, which sucks.

Some sites force you to go through a laundry list of questions to understand you and what you’re looking for so they can find better matches for you, and then the matches end up feeling no more curated than the ones you’d get on any other site. My favorite thing the apps like to do when curating is let you put in your desired distance radius in which to find someone and then they match you with someone twice as far away because they’re just too good of a fit despite that I guess.

All in all, I’ve found mixed results with each app I’ve used (Tinder, Bumble, Hinge, FB Dating, OkCupid, Match, eHarmony, Coffee Meets Bagel, Plenty of Fish, and I think there are more but they may now be defunct). One app will stand out and I’ll have a lot of success with it until whatever spark I had fizzles out and then when I inevitably go back, it’s trash. You’d think that needing a paid subscription would mean that the people who are in it and willing to pay as well are seriously looking to find someone. But that’s the thing. You usually can’t tell on subscription-required sites who does and does not have a subscription, unless they changed something on me. People can create profiles but not subscribe, then you can get interested and message them and they may never respond because they don’t wanna pay for that shit, and I get it. So just trial and error the different sites and see what you prefer, but don’t be afraid to seek greener pastures at any given moment.

Swiping and Searching

Depending on the dating app you use, the most popular format has become the “swipe right to like/swipe left to pass” style that was popularized by the app Tinder. Think of all the profiles you want to view as a deck of cards facing up. You make your way through the deck by swiping one way or another in order to get to the bottom. Everyone else has their own deck. If you both swipe right in each other, you match and can then message each other.

This concept of swiping in the post-Tinder era feels like the only way it could’ve ever been, since so many apps use it. It’s hard to imagine the days when you used to just put in some parameters and search and out would pop a list of profiles that fit that criteria. Then you could just message whoever you felt like and get ignored by appealing profiles en masse. This was not a great system, but a while back, it was all we knew.

Setting Up a Profile

Now, when setting up your profile, I guess it’s important to have as many images of you doing awesome shit as you can. Riding on a dolphin’s back, bungee jumping, getting shitfaced on a patio with friends, finishing first in the Iditarod, visiting a touristy location like Ft. Wayne, or whatever else floats your boat. You have to let people know how much better your life is than theirs, so they have something to strive for.

My favorite choice for a good OLD profile is to include some reference to or quote from the popular US television series “The Office”. Don’t get me wrong, I love The Office (until Steve Carell leaves), but I think we’re waaaaay over-referencing it at this point. Not everything has to be a gif of Jenna Fischer as Pam Beesly smiling and then breaking down and crying. Tell us who you are, the TV show you like, good or bad, should not be your identity. The person viewing your profile might actually be interested in who you actually are or what kind of person you’re looking for.

Every site has its own variation on the profile format. There are some with prompts, general descriptions, large paragraph options, a series of items to be selected from a drop-down or with fill-in-the-blank, etc. All of these are there to tell people who they are and what they want, it is important to be honest with people and be honest with yourself. What are you really looking for? Most people don’t do this, but they should. And hopefully you get some matches based off this and start interacting.

Pre-Meeting Up Interaction

If you or the person you’re interacting with doesn’t like audio or video interaction online, you’re stuck. Stuck with the fancied up version of them. Their nice profile, their quippy personal descriptions, their snazzy adventurous pictures that you have no idea when they were taken or how different they look now, and their witty messages that they have all the time they need (within reason) to think of and type. These are potentially someone putting out a false image of themselves and it’s something almost everyone does.

Pictures

There’s also no good way to know if someone is putting on a façade in order to win over your cyber-based affections. Old pictures from 50lbs ago? Maybe on premium subscriptions they might tell you. But I doubt it. I think I did have one site tell me that my pic was too old to use because it was taken over 6 months prior to that, so kudos to whatever the hell site that was.

I once had a couple of dates with a girl whose pictures were of a thin, dark brown-haired girl who liked to get out and adventure. On our first date, she arrived 10 minutes late and had put on a decent amount of weight and her hair was bleach-blonde. Now I’m not saying I would begrudge anyone’s weight gain, and she was still very appealing with blonde hair. I would have been happy to date that person if I saw her up-to-date pictures on her profile. But the lie, that’s what started the ball rolling. All of a sudden I started realizing some of my favorite parts of the profile were stretched truths. Not. Good.

Messaging

So anyway, let’s say you match with someone on an app. When you start messaging, they’re probably putting on the best version of themselves that they can muster up, and let’s be honest, you are too. It’s like a résumé and interview kind of thing. You wouldn’t be super casual during most interviews, and you wouldn’t include parts of prior jobs on your résumé that didn’t demonstrate real, hopefully relevant skills.

When you message, you have to break the ice and develop a rapport with the other person as best you can in a short span of time before they lose interest and ghost you. And oh boy, will even the best people straight up ghost you.

GHOSTING: the practice of ending a personal relationship with someone by suddenly and without explanation withdrawing from all communication.

The Dictionary

Anyway, if they don’t ghost you, you start interacting and you develop a real conversation together on this little messenger portion of the app and hopefully you can keep the wheels rolling. But then, if you don’t use audio or video, you’re just digging a very deep hole of false expectations. You or this person you’re talking to might just not be that quick with the replies when they get out on the spot. Hell, maybe they even have someone helping them. So that kinda sucks.

Expectation vs. Reality

With all of the movies I watch, I have a certain image of what dating should look like, even if those movies are usually old or just plain unrealistic. The man asks the woman out, she says yes, he picks her up, they go to dinner, he does all the chivalrous things like holding her door and paying for the meal, she laughs at his dumb jokes, puts down his coat in a fucking mud puddle so she can walk across, etc. They walk around town after dinner and have an interesting, albeit over-scripted feeling conversation. He takes her home. They don’t go up to her place because it’s a mess and she has to be up pretty early in the morning. Then maybe things proceed from there, maybe they don’t.

In my experience they rarely proceed from there unfortunately. I try and change things up quite a bit from the date template discussed above, but it seems that no matter what happens, I can rarely make the next date happen. Sometimes the going to her place indeed happens, sometimes it doesn’t. Usually if it does a second date happens but that’s it. I’m just not fucking good at this y’all.

The Sucky Part

Here’s the thing with OLD, it sucks. But why?

There is too much to choose from. Your selection of profiles with which to match is too vast. My guess would be that the average good-looking person has typically matched more in the first day to week than an average person ever might. Then all of a sudden this good-looking person starts chatting someone up, but they’re all jaded and don’t give a shit and are just looking for the first red flag so they can move on to one of the hundreds of other matches they can try.

It all takes so much time and pressure for the average person. They finally find a single desirable profile and they latch. It becomes their “precious” like that Lord of the Rings guy and they pour their soul into this match and meticulously plan every message and try not to do anything to put them off because they must have them for their own. And then still, that match can just elect to move on at a moments notice because some other person has a picture of themselves windsurfing and that’s a sexy-ass water sport that they’d like to get a chance to do sometime.

My Backstory

As I may have mentioned, I am not very good at the love-life thing. I’m probably way better at getting and initiating dates than I am at making them stick. It gets worse the older I get, and it seems like I’ve started to concern myself less with the whole concept. I’ve had so many go-rounds with OLD, and it just gets fucking tiring. All the hope for my dating life is most certainly lost. Which is shitty.

In closing

Don’t be afraid to get out there. Spread your wings and fly like you know you can. Be true to you. Have some standard pics along with a few fun ones to show you aren’t boring. Try and make a conscious effort to forge a connection with someone and keep an open mind.