IMO dating is a numbers game. I met my wife on Tinder ~9 years ago. No idea the online dating scene now but even back then Tinder was known as a hookup app. I was very upfront that I was looking for a long-term relationship, on Tinder and another app I was on. I believe you can learn more about a person in 5 minutes in person than you can in any amount of digital communication pre-meet. Another good thing about online dating is both of you know exactly why you are speaking - when you try to convert acquaintances into romantic partners there is a bit of confusion there.

Numbers game because most will not be a good fit, and also you will get rejected a lot. If you are emotionally prepared for commitment then you can be emotionally prepared for disappointment. But once you find a good fit you will find a partner for life! I think you can do it.

The reality of online dating for women is that all you have to do is show up.

yes, you will get a TON of messages. You'll have to sort through them. we know this.

it's an entirely opposite experience for men. online dating is still geared towards separating them from money.

I hope to never have to deal with it again, honestly. it's depressing.

Tinder is a waste of time for women too; if you’re at all attractive you get dozens of messages a day and half of them are scams. The best I’ve ever gotten out of Tinder has been mediocre, meaningless sex; it’s far too much work if you’re looking for anything more.

You have to go do things you enjoy and be a more interesting person. If that’s just your daily life, you’ll meet people who enjoy the same things you do and you can potentially date them (or their friends).

But yeah, I agree with you. Just because Tinder sucks doesn’t mean you shouldn’t date; just that you shouldn’t look to an app to find a partner.

Based on what I've heard from women, it's bad for them too. Easy to find a root, but hard to find someone to introduce to mum and dad.

IRL dating is worse. Apparently in the post-#metoo era men just stopped talking to women in general.

Given your self-description, you're probably not understanding the problem from the men side. The problem is - how, specifically, to go out and talk to girls in real life.

As Elon Musk says, let this sink in. We're talking here about modern times, where people have less opportunity to contact each other - and the problem existed way before, now it only became harder. The main chunk of the problem is that it's unclear how to arrange for a lot - enough - opportunities to talk to girls in real life so that the results would be sufficient.

forgive me for waxing poetical but i've thought about this a lot - since i have tinder and okcupid accounts - online dating is one of the most nihilistic enterprises to come out of the digital revolution. take one of the most personally rewarding and edifying experiences and completely formalize one of the most exciting parts of it (if not the most). what becomes the point of your life???

i read a stupid platitude somewhere that you should do something that scares you every day and approaching people you're attracted to (not on the street you pua twats) is one of the few "scary" things still available to us as denizens of modernity (i'm not sailing over the ocean blue, summiting mt everest, hunting moby dick, etc.). why would you want to sidestep that.

Plus, I have the feeling that asking out women is considered increasingly rude.

> Developing crushes on people you actually know in your social scenes is more reasonable.

This is certainly an option for people in their 20s, or maybe in very mixed professions with a lot of interactions, but not an option for a lot of us who don't have a rich social life. Plus a lot of people refrain dating people at work.

I still feel dating apps are the best option, even though they don't work for me anymore since I'm past 40.

Online dating is a competition like anything else in life. I had some success at online dating and I am not the best looking guy, so it's possible.

I’ve talked about this recently, but I feel like the culture around dating apps has a way of stripping everyone down the the most generic, basic image of themselves. I really can’t imagine connecting with someone based off a few pictures and text snippets and developing any sort of mutual attraction via a brief period of text messaging.

Unfortunately it’s the only way it seems for me to meet people. I go out and all, but I’m often the youngest person in any place I’m at by at least a decade. I’m also very boring when sober, at least superficially and stupid while drunk (although the latter can at least lead to a fun night). I can’t see anyone being remotely interested in or attracted to me without at least months of getting to know me.

Most of my peers I know in a relationship, got it from being in an institution where they were forcibly around their peer group. Think high school, college, military, or even casual groups where shared interests were common (unfortunately I’ve failed to find one of these myself). I really haven’t had any of these. Was kinda a loser through most of school, around high school really put my focus in other things that totally failed, never went to college and ended up directly in the workforce. I’m still kinda a loser, not anything you can see explicitly, but a few important facts can reveal that. I don’t think I’m terribly unattractive, well besides being underweight and not photogenic (for some reasons 90% of photographs taken of me don’t look right, particularly but other people), but I’ve seen much worse make it.

I understand what you're saying, and I recognize the blessing/curse that comes with attracting people.

However, as I've become an adult with a career and have left essentially all my friends behind, I've realized that making new friends is incredibly difficult. Even worse is trying to find dating partners. Lately I've been resorting to just talking to strangers and seeing if I can start a conversation.

Not to excuse the behavior of your drivers, but you should understand that men are having a difficult time with approaching women these days. We feel really inadequate and sort of aimless. The dating world is seriously dangerous right now and to be honest, there isn't a lot of guidance from women.

I've experienced a range of rejections and the least painful are always honest and upfront. Maybe you could try that?

I'm in the top 5% of attractiveness IRL and tinder was bizarre to try and use. It was this weird self referential world where you needed a completely new set of skills to be noticed. I was reminded of trying to learn how to write an effective resume after university.

When I had a woman make my tinder profile attractive to other women I just deleted it: the type of woman who would find that appealing is not the type of woman I would find appealing.

I’ve seen the opposite of this: Online spaces are full of consensus stories about how dating is hard, dating is terrible, dating is miserable, and that it’s nearly impossible to find anyone.

Many of my (completely average looking) friends have found success in online dating, but they’re not broadcasting it to the world. They also avoid talking about it with people who are struggling with online dating because those people don’t want to hear about other people doing well.

Among my friends who are struggling with online dating into their 30s, this entrenched cynicism is turning into self-defeating mindsets. As an outside observer it’s frustrating to watch them self-sabotage by insisting that the problems with their dating are 100% society’s fault and 0% due to things they could possibly change. This ranges from not spending enough the tiniest effort on personal appearance to declining second dates or follow up conversations unless everything goes exactly as they imagined it. They retreat to online spaces like Reddit where they can get endless confirmation for their biases that other people and society are to blame, and that there was nothing they could do differently. I’m surprised to read the suggestion that “nobody” is talking about the difficulties in dating when it’s quite literally front page topics on sites like Reddit all of the time.

This is how people who go on lots of dates treat dating in general. If you don’t treat a momentary social action as a big deal most people won’t either. Propose a date or make romantic interest clear. Be declined. Move on.

“He/She/It doesn’t like me? Oh well.”

The thing is that nowadays the expectation is that you date using an app, and the apps are absolutely 100% one dimensional single-faceted gamified systems. Ideally the solution is to stop using apps, but the problem people run into there is that they don't really know how to interact any other way because they never learned.

You need to learn... this is the most important part. This is where men struggle. Men aren't struggling because they have a bunch of hits and need to just follow up. That is hardly the issue these days. Men have endless advice about how to act, respond, message, flirt, etc. There's endless services out there for that these days. The issue is that most men can't get a single match. Go look up the stats on this - most men never even get matches on dating services. Point blank. The same is true for going out to bars, clubs, etc. Almost all the men I know who have slept with dozens of women in the recent years say the same thing: Bars, clubs, etc. are absolute garbage for meeting women because it requires immense physical attraction for the women to want to spend any amount of time with you. The same is true of dating apps. And, guess what, most men aren't that physically attractive and never will be. This is where things like "warm approach" and building absolfuckingutely huge social networks is what most men are spending their time doing these days. (That and going to the gym, dermatologists, and cosmetic surgeons obsessively)

I think this might be more reflective of the time and place you grew up. It's certainly not the same now. I can't imagine any of my friends who are women going on a date with a random guy they haven't seen even a photo of yet. I mean - that's also a very old timey story, tbh. These days you put in the wrong phone number and you don't know where that call is going as cellphones put you anywhere in the world.

> I can see this is a problem but even that can be improved with local sports events, church, Meetups etc. Opportunities are EVERYWHERE.

Ooph. My man, you have been out of the game for a long time. Sports events with single women? lol - what are you on? Meetups!? Have you ever been to one in the last five years? It's a complete sausage fest for any activity. Church is mostly full of old and married people.

I'm sorry man, you're just living in the days of old. It's very boomer-esque. Looks are paramount for most men to have any success like you had today. You might not feel great looking but you were probably above avergage but more importantly - you lived in a time where your looks weren't as important.

Isn't this literally what already occurs? From the other side, it seems like this is exactly how most women are doing it? I don't see a lot of my female friends going on dates with every guy they match with (which is usually >200 so pretty hard to date 200 people), so they're rather picky which makes sense. Although, the profile thing is lacking, it's usually just a few photos.

> If a guy can’t set up a decent profile or send a message beyond “Hey”, it doesn’t mean he’s too busy. It means he’s lazy, careless, or not actually invested in dating.

I wonder if she's ever actually sent a message to someone else. This entitlement of "entertain me peasant" is one of the reasons why I deleted these apps.

Well, you failed miserably. Not just OkCupid but online dating in general.

I think it is one of the few aspects of 21st century life where the Internet/technology made us more close minded instead of more open minded. If you are at a party and meet five different people, you will immediately notice something that you don't like about them, but you will give them the benefit of doubt and engage them in conversation for at least five minutes and allow them the chance to show you their best selves.

No such thing in online dating.

> No, but women rarely respond at all so I'm not exactly surprised by that

Really? See, that's very weird to me, because I rarely saw women not respond at all. They've swiped right on you, so they've already accepted your pictures and bio, they're willing to be with you if you have a good conversation. If they weren't, why would they swipe right? Tinder, for example, limits the number of right swipes you're allowed to give over some period of time. So that right swipe truly means that all you need to do is have a good conversation with them. Again, I'm really not trying to bash you, and I personally enjoy having this debate with you on HN. But being good at a HN debate is very different from being good at a dating app conversation. I suspect that there was a problem with the conversations (despite the effort and best intentions - conversing well can be hard, especially for my/our generation). But I am sorry that you went through the pain of not getting replies most of the time - that definitely sucks.

>> Would you are cognizant of messaging social norms

// Wow, seeing that I wrote this makes me feel like such an idiot!

> I would say I actively detest messaging social norms. I write legible full English sentences just like you see here because I'm an adult. I specifically ruled out women who obviously felt differently.

Ok, perhaps this could be a big factor in why we had very different results. Unless we're surrounded by very, very, very different sets of people (or we're in very different age ranges), you're specifically ruling out most candidates. In my experience, even the people who write complete sentences in their bios will often follow messaging social norms once you start messaging with them. For a lot of people, following those social norms is required for the messages to feel casual. If I matched with someone and they used complete sentences with proper punctuation in 100% of our messages (e.g. sending "Hey." or something that looked like it could be in a letter), I would instantly feel like I'm in a more formal setting and cross them off the list of potential dates, and the most we'd become is friends. And I know people with much stricter rules about messaging social norms than me, such as feeling like things are too formal if there aren't enough emojis/memes/GIFs.

I'm not trying to convince you to change, and I respect your passion for detesting messaging social norms. But I do believe your messaging style could be a significant factor in why putting effort into conversation yields you no results. I'd be curious to see if the same happens with other people who also don't follow these norms. Thanks for all your responses!

I'm sympathetic to the risks women run, but this isn't necessarily an issue with online dating, but just dating. "Online people" are just people.

The only real difference is that online dating allows you to have as many dates as you can handle, so if you do go on 7 days a week, you could very well have "a bunch of bad dates on Tinder" in just a month.

I think it's the approach people take that is problematic: meeting at a restaurant on a Friday evening and expecting everything (sex on one side and "payment" on the other). I have dates for lunch, coffee and for walks; zero expectations from either party, it works wonderfully and when it doesn't we just go our own merry ways.