If you ever walked through a hall and felt like everyone down that hall was staring at and judging you, that’s exactly what Tinder is like, except the hall is an app and they're staring at your age and the pictures you decided to put on your profile. As this app grew to be more popular, I heard that there was nothing but guys wanting one thing on there, and that they made it apparent by asking you if you were looking to hook up right away. All I could think was, well, what sort of guys are these girls looking at? So that gave me the idea of performing a sort of experiment.
If you’re not familiar with the app, you are basically looking at pictures of people and deciding if you are interested in getting to know them a bit more. By swiping their picture to the left on your phone, you are saying no, by swiping right, you are saying yes. You are essentially “liking” or “disliking” people.
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So that got me to thinking, what would happen if these guys had no choice but to just go based off of my looks? There would be nothing on my profile but what is required to be on every profile: my first name, age and a few pictures of my choice. I wanted to see what guys would message me initially, if anything, and if it is any different from how I’ve been approached in real life. Rules were that I had to swipe right on every one and I could not respond to any of the messages, since I was just interested in seeing the initial reaction to “matching” with me.
Disclaimer: I took a second to look at each picture to make sure I didn’t know the guy in real life in order to make them part of this, and I will not be releasing any pictures or names of these guys. This is not to shame people from using Tinder. This is just based on my experience.
Here is what my profile looked like.
In a matter of a week, I matched with 543 guys, and about 272 messaged me. Of all of those messages, only 93 of them were something different from “hey.” Sometimes the “heys” were creative and were followed by an emoji or it was something similar, such as “hi” or “hello.” The 93 different messages consisted of compliments, GIFs, just an emoji, question about where I took a certain photo or tourists asking me to show them around Las Vegas. I was shocked by the fact that of the 272 messages, only two guys were upfront in asking me if I was trying to hook up with them. There were two guys who got upset with me because I didn’t respond. One threatened that he would “get on [me] about [my] forehead” and another told me to “not be a fake a**” and that it was “no wonder [I] had to get a Tinder to talk to people.” For the record, these two guys were guys I would not find attractive in real life.
After a week I have concluded that Tinder gives guys a crazy amount of confidence, in a good and bad way. It is good because there were some gentlemen who are on what I personally think is the not so good looking side that were nice enough to say hello and some were shocked that a girl such as myself matched with them. It is bad because some guys think it’s OK to just say whatever they want to girls when they don’t get the reaction they want. It is also bad for the women of tourist cities. We are not your personal tour guides, and we don’t strive to get into be with any tourist who comes our way.
This told me a lot about the way men could possibly be thinking about me when they see me out and about. I was shocked that I didn’t get as many upfront messages as I was expecting, but that could have a lot to do with the fact that I may not give off the impression that I’m about that since none of my pictures are what is considered to be provocative.
Now that I have gone through this past week, I am so glad to have deactivated my account. If this is what the future of dating is coming down to, I want no part of it. There is too much mystery that goes into online dating, and that is too stressful for me. For all I know, all of those guys probably think I’m a catfish now since I never responded. This is not to discourage anyone else from using these sort of apps, I just found out it’s really not for me. If you see someone you like, don’t be afraid to let them know, or at least try and strike up a conversation with them, you never know what could happen.
