Kat Fish: a Tinderella Story

Ray explains how to use Tinder.

If you're in your 20's, chances are you're familiar with the speed judging dating app Tinder. Tinder is great in theory, but kind of painful if you're actually trying to meet people, not just boosting your ego for 15 minutes a week. For guys, the Tinder process goes something like this:

• Swipe "yes" to 50 girls.
• Match with five of them.
• Message four of them.
• Recieve only one message in return: it is a one word message.
• Get angry, swear you're going to delete the app off your phone.
• Don't actually delete the app. 
• Forget Tinder exists until roughly a week later.
• Repeat.

Being an average dude, I've always wondered what it would be like to be a beautiful woman on a dating app. I figured seeing how fellow guys approach the Tinder game would give me some insight into what to do (or not to do) when messaging girls on dating apps. So last night, I created a fake Tinder profile of a beautiful woman and swiped until my 100 free "likes" were up. What I found out is that guys are really, really, really boring.

My profile. Accidentally misspelled Sapiophile lol.

Having discussed Tinder with female acquaintances, I was expecting to be bombarded with a lot of attention, and I was. I swiped "yes" to about 75 per cent of the profiles I saw, and I would say that out of the 100 dudes I swiped "yes" to, 85 of them were instant matches. The sheer volume of matches was a bit startling, but the big surprise came once the messages started rolling in. It wasn't the amount of messages that overwhelmed me, it was the amount of boring, uninspired stock messages I was getting that really made my time as a woman on Tinder a nightmare. With maybe ten exceptions, every single message I received fell into one of the following four categories: 

1. Hey/Hi/How was your weekend?

I'm like "Hey, what's up? Helloooo..."

About 30 per cent of the messages I received started and ended with some variation of "Hi." A couple dudes spiced the pot up a little bit by asking me softball small-talk initiators like "how are you doing tonight?", but for the most part, one word greetings were the best these guys could do. Guys, if you're thinking of sending "hey" without following it up, don't even bother. There are 50 dudes in every woman's inbox who have sent her the exact same thing, and unless you look like Brad Pitt, you're not getting a response back.

2: OMG UR SO GORGEOUS (EMOTICON)

Zohaib has no chill.

This seemed to be the de facto conversation starter for Arab bros/sketchbags; and unsurprisingly it was often followed with a message that conveyed a strong tone of thirst/creepiness. One guy was the exception and actually pulled it off, but he was good looking, flattered me, didn't use emoticons, and obviously understood spelling/punctuation. This approach might work for you, but if you're gonna try it, make sure it's a genuine compliment and not the digital equivalent of yelling catcalls from a moving car.

3: Are you a bot lol?

I can't tell if this guy was curving me or if he didn't get the joke.

These dudes were all self-effacing nerds, and when I tried joking with them they seemed to be genuinely clueless. Unless you want to belong to a sub-species of human jellyfish, don't send messages like this.

4: Really uninspired question about my profile

Your mom must be proud.

The only information I put on my profile was my height, the fact that I was Australian, and that I was a sapiophile. As a result, I received the questions "what are you doing in Canada?" and "what's a sapiophile lol?" about six or seven times each. At first I thought they were good questions, because they gave me an opportunity to reply with a snappy, catchall comeback. Eventually, however, the repetition, coupled by the inability of the dudes who asked me the questions to hold any sort of interesting conversation became too much, and I stopped responding to these messages. Guys: if you're gonna ask a question about a girl's profile, put a little bit of thought into it. Girls: put more than six words in your profile description and you'll probably get some more interesting messages.

What I learned:

I think this guy was on to me.

Look, I'm not a woman, so I can't tell you what really works or doesn't work, but I can tell you that I got bored of the four questions I just discussed really quickly. Bored =/= sexy. I'm assuming a strong picture game more than compensates for effortless messages, but if you're matching and not getting responses, it's probably because -- like 80 per cent of the guys who messaged me on Tinder last night -- you're sending boring ass messages. 

It wasn't all bad though, these dudes had some serious game:

I thought this guy was pretty funny; I was playing hard to get, but would've more than likely tossed him the drawers eventually.

... and of course, this dapper young man impressed me a lot. 

So there you go. I hope this piece sheds some light into the complex world of being a woman on Tinder, and gave you some good pointers to sharpen your game up. Happy swiping!