I Swiped Left
Ah! Look who’s back writing about relationships, making this her 5th post on this topic, and 5 years since she’s been on and off dating apps! Coincidence? I think not ~ Wait, why am I even talking about myself in the third person?
So, yes. 5 years in and I was swiping the other night, i.e., the loneliest hours of any given day, when I realised I wasn’t swiping with the intention of finding “the one” like I did when I had just joined. I wasn’t even swiping to meet someone. I was swiping because I was merely looking for someone decent. Not even to get a coffee first and see how things go. But more so to prove a point that not everyone on here was shitty. Someone kind and not just interested in the sex aspect of things. Someone who doesn’t act like they’re sexually liberated when in fact, they have an adolescent obsession over it. Someone who doesn’t unmatch/ block/ turn nasty the minute it becomes clear sex is not on the table. And that was when I had to stop and wonder why I was even here. It felt like all I was doing when I open an app was swipe left. At an increasing rate over the years at that. Which I don’t know whether it's because the dating “pool” feels like an actual pool when you’re 23/24 and more like a mirage when you’re 28, a month shy of 29. Or if it’s because I just have lesser patience and less interested in “give him a chance” now. Like I don’t care how good the profile is but if I see a picture of a guy next to a heavily sedated tiger in a “zoo”, I just swipe left these days. I swipe harder than necessary when they’re touching it or holding its tail and giving a thumbs up. Just… why? Things like flipping off the camera (you’re not 16), the whole “iF it mAtTeRs tO y0u, i’M 1.8M tAlL” shtick (No, Jason, I do NOT care about your height. I’m 1.52m. 95% of the adult population and 80% of the teen population is taller than me.) and the use of “sapiosexual” and “fluent in sarcasm” in their bio were all getting HARD lefts from me too even if everything else seemed fine. I just had a very “Been there, done that” attitude towards such profiles. Not that I have done them, but you know what I mean. Like the reminder of past experiences chatting with people who had such things in their profile and how horrible it went. Because such guys often tried to overcompensate for something by putting me down (E.g., height: dominance. “Sapiosexual” and sarcasm: superiority. Expect messages on “deep” stuff only to read what feels like the thesaurus. Lots of big words, but not much substance or sense when strung together). I really hope it’s clear that that is ALL I meant by “done that”.
Anyway, moving on, it feels like once you have swiped left on such cases, you have already swiped left on 75% of the “pool”. Then there are cases like the couple of guys who had “TamBrahms only” on their profile (okay, casteist) and the guys who sent me a Facebook or Instagram request even before I saw them on the app. It happened enough times to tell myself “Probably saw me on an app” when I saw a weird request from an unknown guy. A few swipes later, I would finally see them on the app, think “There you go” and then swipe left. And now there goes 80% of your pool.
Frustrated by all this, I once did this thing where I swiped right on EVERYONE. I told myself to do it for 24 hours to see what happens and to treat it like an exploratory study. The aims were simple (two-fold if you want to get really research-y). 1. Swipe right on everyone like I said. 2. Reply to any and all messages that come through. Well, appropriately of course. The point was not to leave them hanging. The results? I lasted 6 hours and I might as well have declared “I have no standards” on my profile. I got messages from ALL the guys with weird fetishes, “nice” guys, and I feel mean saying this but … people who just don’t seem to have a clue about life? And that was when I had to stop and evaluate exactly what it was I was trying to achieve through these apps because this whole “dating” thing was starting to seem a lot like a non-starter. So, I looked at the times that it went well, i.e., when I swiped right. And I looked at why I had swiped right. All of them had made an effort for their profiles or their message to me in a way I truly appreciated. It just seemed like enough thought, care, and attention had been given to it and they did not have any of the bizarre things I mentioned before in their profile. They didn't get all desperate to meet right away (that's another hard left: people who have "I prefer to meet instead of sending texts" in their profile. Like, I've only been texting you for 30 minutes now Gabe. I'm not going to meet you for at least 2 more days). I also realised I didn't swipe left because they didn’t seem too young for me or I didn’t feel too old for them in a way that had nothing to do with the years we were born. As great as these sounded, they didn’t feel specific enough to help sustain the lifespan of my online dating adventures. So I thought about my IRL experiences instead and that’s when it finally clicked. I don’t get attracted to or find someone attractive right when I see them. It’s usually because I get to know them and I find something, like a specific quality or a few things about them that makes them increasingly attractive over time. This realisation connected right back to the epic meltdown I had about my sexuality after feeling incredibly bored during Magic Mike while all the girls around me were visibly losing their shit.
So, here’s what took me 5 years to realise and probably over 5000 left swipes. I should have swiped left to the whole concept of online dating which has been entirely built on the concept of “love at first sight”. Yeah, many apps try to get you to fill out questions and captions and other little boxes to try and zhuzh things up a little and give you a bit more personality than two-dimensional photos but who are we kidding? You don’t “look good” to someone and you’re out faster than the Dalgona trend left us in 2020! (Can you believe the Dalgona was THIS year?! And on that note, is anyone still drinking Dalgona style drinks?) I’m happy for those who have had great experiences on such apps, I think it’s great they have had that luck with it but I've come to realise this whole concept is just not for me and I’ve deleted every single one of them. Somehow, the myriad of choices on dating apps has also really skewed things, specifically towards the negative which is why I have gotten so many abusive messages, messages from guys who are already married and looking for a fling and just other shitty people in general. And the longer I am there, the more I find myself getting jaded by men. Part of my mostly romantic self still wants to hold on to the idea that a good guy who's truly meant for me is out there somewhere and so, I’m going back to the old-fashioned way of meeting someone. In person and getting to know them over time. I mean, I also believe in things like the universe will give you what you need, when you need it, so maybe my timing has not been right so far either. But what I do know with certainty, having tried it out for so long, is that these apps are just not the way to go for me. And if I don’t have an adorable meet-cute at my workplace or like my true fantasy, a museum, then so be it. I would much rather be happy by myself than be in a relationship just because I’ve been raised to think I would be incomplete without one and waste any more of my time mindlessly swiping left.
Subscribe to my monthly newsletter, "Thendral's Telegraph" here!*
