Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
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I'm not in Jesusland, but my experiences are similar to yours, so I don't think it's a regional thing. I think it's that there's two general groups which I'll call Type A and Type B. Type A people generally are who they say they are, are generally honest, and are trying to make meaningful connections. There is always going to be a certain amount of bad behavior and game playing, but it's minimal, understandable, and manageable. Looks are obviously important here, but personality, intelligence, and compatibility are more important factors in overall attractiveness. Aside from certain ingrained cultural norms like the guy proposing the first date, etc., men and women tend to act similarly. Type B people see relationships and dating primarily as an extension of some kind of seduction game. Hookups are common, cheating is common, suspicion is common, possessiveness is common. Physical attractiveness is an overriding factor. The men are aggressive and the women capricious.
Generally speaking, people date within their lane. If a Type A guy sees a Hinge profile of a Type B girl, there are subtle hints that direct him to the skip button, and if this system fails and he sends a like anyway, there's a backstop in that the subtle hints on his profile will prevent her from matching. If the mismatch goes any further, and a Type A guy ends up on a date with a Type B girl, it usually ends up in the "Funny Dates from Hell" story archives. The problem arises when Type A people inadvertently send Type B signals and invariably end up on a tragic series of dates with Type B people, causing them to become disillusioned with the process. With men it usually results in their friends remarking that they sure know how to pick 'em. With women it results in a series of loser boyfriends whom their male friends never accept into their circle and who snigger at him behind his back. With men it's easy to write this off, at least for a while, because there's an implication that the guy made a conscious decision to prioritize sex over anything else, though after a while people start to suspect that he might just have bad luck. Women get more sympathy, usually along the lines of "She's such a nice girl; it's a shame she always ends up with such bad boyfriends. If only I knew a nice guy to fix her up with."
I blame bad dating advice. By which I mean most dating advice. Romantic problems aren't exactly uncommon, so there's a vast universe of books, internet articles, Reddit posts by unqualified morons, and other stuff out there, in addition to what is reinforced by TV and movies, that purports to reduce romantic success to a series of easy-to-follow tips. While generalized advice isn't necessarily bad, once you start closely following the rules of the game, the only people who are going to follow along are those who know how to play. And Type A people don't play games. This may sound odd coming from my because I gave out Hinge advice a while back, but Hinge itself is an app and totally is a game and I can tell you how to filter for and attract Type A people. But I made it clear then that once she walks through the door and sits down, you're on your own. At that point you're no longer trying to outcompete some guy on an app but you have her undivided attention, and it's all on you.
Consider the below advice that the guy should send sexualized messages between setting the date and the day of, and to unmatch if a favorable response is not received. Now, I have neither sent such messages nor received any, but I have a lot of Type A female friends who have and say it's a turn-off. I have no desire to send such messages, and if I were to receive one I'd consider it a red flag. If I already had a date planned I wouldn't cancel it due to principle, but I wouldn't go into it with high expectations. Then again, I'm probably already filtering for women who wouldn't send unsolicited sexts to strangers. It's worth keeping in mind that women can follow similar rules if they want to. In fact, there was an entire movement around it in 1996 called The Rules, a thin book of dating advice by two women who would tout its supposed advantages on Oprah and other such shows.
Though the authors never stated it explicitly, The Rules were driven by a strong undercurrent that feminism had been a disaster for women's dating prospects and that what was needed was a good dose of old fashioned traditionalism.
The truth is that nobody is qualified to give advice on how to obtain a long-term relationship. If you're looking for a wife, would you take advice from a guy who's been married five times? If your goal is to simply find a wife, then this guy is evidently good at convincing women to marry him, but few would say that he's any good at relationships. A lot of people on this site would find that idea appealing. What they wouldn't find appealing was the actual rules themselves. They suggested that women should play hard to get, that men should always pay for everything, and that women should basically play all kinds of games designed make the guy practically beg for their attention and should be prepared to cut bait the minute he got a little out of line. In other words, they're basically the female equivalent of the rules @SSCReader gives below. The book was absolutely savaged by feminists, not only because of its retrograde nature but because it treated men like toddlers who are only interested in a toy that somebody else is playing with.
What both positions boil down to is basically fear. Yes, it's true that the person who is less invested has more power in a relationship, and it's also true that some people don't appreciate what they have until faced with the prospect of losing it. What these sets of rules do, though, is see these things as ends in themselves that are to be exploited. On the one hand you have a guy who is in constant fear that his girlfriend isn't that interested and is on the verge of leaving him. On the other hand you have a woman who is only acting the way she is because she is secretly terrified that her boyfriend will dump her if he finds out she actually likes him. Does this sound like the foundation of a healthy relationship? If rules like this have any value, it's that they prevent interaction between members of the opposite sex who are playing by similar sets. A Rules Girl will never have to worry about the SSCReaders of the world, and the SSCReaders will likewise never run into any Rules Girls. But that's as far as it goes. Intelligence isn't reverse stupidity, and landing the kind of person who has nothing better to do than sit by the phone waiting for your call isn't exactly triumph.
Actually my wife is Type A girl. My "rules" only really work for online dating and are there to short circuit the sheer volume of matches and interest women get, to ensure you are able to keep interest romantically not platonically. No sexting involved just sexually charged flirting. Those are very different things. If you were aiming just to hook up you wouldn't need those rules at all.
Its only useful for a Type A man trying to keep the interest of a Type A woman who is getting potentially hundreds of matches and messages.
I was dating to find a wife not to hook up and indeed succeeded. I aggressively filtered out women who were not seriously looking for a long term relationships (Type B's in your parlance I guess).
I would give very different advice for non online dating. Its a high volume platform by nature, so you have to adapt. Someone who is not messaging you much when interest and mystique should be at there highest right at the start is sending you a signal.
All i can tell you is that almost all my dates were with what you call Type A women. Witty sexually suggestive flirting works pretty well.
I was reluctant to call you out by name specifically because I didn't want to make any untoward implications, so to the extent I may have done so, I apologize. With that out of the way, yes, I understand you're competing with hordes of other guys on these apps and your general desire to not waste your time pursuing women who aren't really that interested. I'm not going to criticize anyone's personal strategy if it works for them. My concern is more that the OP presented a specific problem and, from the 10,000 foot view at least, following your advice doesn't do anything to address the problem. The only one that does is telling him not to overmatch, which is fine on its face, but if the problem is with his selection criteria that's not going to help much. For example, if he's swiping primarily based on hotness, telling him to be more selective just means his match totals will go down and he'll have the pleasure of having hotter women flake on him.
So I'm dubious of everything you say after that because, if you are indeed only dating Type A women, then they probably would have shown up for the date regardless of what you did. As I mentioned in another comment, I never had a problem with cancellations, but I have no tricks to offer other than "assume people will show up to things they agreed to show up for". Beyond that, I understand that you aren't willing to waste your time with people who aren't showing a ton of interest, which is fine, but I don't know that it works as a universal rule. Maybe they aren't that interested. Maybe they aren't that interested now, but will be once the guy they're talking to the most stops talking to them. Maybe they've been having bad luck, are burned out, and just aren't checking for messages that often. I tend to give people the benefit of the doubt. I understand that the nature of these apps encourages bad behavior, and I'm willing to give people a little more leeway than I would IRL. The way I figure it, even if I think the chances are slim, while I wouldn't get my hopes up, cutting bait only takes them to zero. But then again, neither of us are complaining about any of this.
Here's the only point of serious contention I have. One of the benefits of online dating is that you don't have to worry about sending the wrong signals. It's not like some girl you meet at a party who ends up friendzoning you because you never showed any explicitly romantic interest; it's abundantly clear to both parties that the only reason you're even talking is because you're looking to date each other. If you're trying to differentiate yourself, suggestive flirting doesn't seem like the way to do it, since flirtatious guys are a dime a dozen. For a lot of them, it's pretty much their entire bag of tricks. I can't find any real data on it, but it's my understanding that the vast majority of guys either don't send messages with likes at all or don't send anything of substance. I have seen stats that suggest that the average message response time for guys is longer than for women. Some women showed little to no interest from the beginning, and I didn't expect much. But of the others, the ones that didn't end up with dates are ones where I wasn't entirely engaged, procrastinated sending messages, or wasn't very thoughtful with them, and they eventually stopped responding. I probably could have converted a decent chunk of these just by putting the work in.
For the record, I select against hotness. I don't waste likes on people out of my league. Or on normies. Actually, fuck it, here's my list of Icks: More than one mention of sports Generic "Travel" Leftist and/or any demands that I also be Leftist The word Intersectional Demands that I be Christian (_______) Energy Guys way hotter than me in their photos. Truecrime (it's just a tone-deaf thing to waste space talking about, the female equivalent of Warhammer Lore Videos. I can just assume you watch Truecrime, and I have as little interest in that as you do in the Dark Angels Legion. Gods, I hate how generic people have become)
The main thing I keep an eye out for is any mention of nature or wildlife, especially bugs. And arts&crafts hobbies.
Three days active now. Zero matches.
I hate to be this presumptuous, but I think I've figured out your problem. When you say "Leftist", do you mean actual political comments or simply self-identification as a liberal? If it's the former I can understand but if it's the latter then you're eliminating about 60% of women right off the bat. Galup studies show that 40% of women aged 18 to 29 self-identify as liberal, but when you break it down to specific issues they identify with liberals over age 30 closer to 80% of the time. I have reason to suspect that women on Hinge are more likely to be liberal, so I think my 60% estimate is in the ballpark. Pretty much all the profiles you describe as being in your wheelhouse are going to be from single women. I have seen very few conservative profiles, and the vast majority of them were generic and involved girls who were aiming for a performative kind of Fox News-style hotness. There were also some who were obvious rednecks, but few of these came across. The number of interesting profiles from conservative women was vanishingly small to the point that I honestly can't tell you if I ever even came across one. I have seen interesting profiles from moderates and apoliticals (people who simply don't list anything are more or less uninteresting by default), but again, these are a minority of profiles, and interesting women are more likely to be liberal.
If you're not dismissing these women right off the bat and are sending likes to them, that also explains the problem. Even if a woman doesn't performatively mention politics on her profile, it doesn't mean that they're not important, or even a dealbreaker. Since you're presumably not advertising yourself as liberal, and distinguishing yourself on these apps is of critical importance, why would any of these liberal women date you when there are plenty of liberal men out there? This is going to be a tough pill to swallow, but, depending on what you're actually doing, your politics are eliminating somewhere between 20% and 60% of potential matches. While it's good to be selective and not overmatch, this one criterion is correlated with the others such that the women who meet all your other criteria are more likely to be liberal.
The bigger problem, though, is that you're actively trying to screen out normies. I looked through your post history, and it appears that IRL you've surrounded yourself with a crowd that is more than a little offbeat. You describe certain character types as people that you come across regularly who, while I may have run into someone fitting the general description from time to time, it isn't often, and never anyone in my actual social circle. And I have a pretty diverse social circle. The criteria you set forth don't sound particularly bad in theory (none of those are things I personally look for), but I don't know how you're actually putting this into practice. My guess is that you're unconsciously selecting for weirdos, and weirdos act, well, weird. The thing about normies is that they act normal. 95% of normies don't flake out on dates, or ask about pronouns, or do any of the things I see you describe. I hate to give advice, but start going after the normies. Don't worry about sports, or generic travel references, or true crime podcasts. You may think these people are boring, but it turns out that they have basic social skills. It sounds like the problem isn't that you're overmatching but that you're being too selective, and at that in the direction of the flakiest cohort.
I wouldn't worry. When I first used Hinge it took about a week to get anything, but after that I was consistently getting enough matches that I stopped looking for new ones. There's a weird feast or famine aspect to it, and while some would attribute that to the algorithm intentionally fucking with you, I think it's to be expected; it would be more suspicious if you were consistently getting the same amount of action. If I were going to theorize, I would suspect that people who have been using the free plan for a while and having success aren't likely to start paying any time soon, so they try to get new users paying early. And the best way to do that is to show them profiles they aren't likely to match with early so they get desperate and start paying, thinking that paying will get them better matches. And in a certain percentage of people, the paying does correlate with getting matches, except they were matches they were going to get anyway, had they waited. But that's just a conspiracy theory that I don't think is true. What is true is that if you make changes to your profile it will give you a little boost. Hang in there for another couple of weeks and see how things go before drawing any conclusions.
Leftist as in specific use of the word Leftist (or communist) in their own prompts, not just listing "Liberal" which is what I'm listed as anyways, I just don't have any political prompts. Normie means sports and mimosas. Normies flake even moreso than "weirdos." My first experience of using Hinge in chicago was a normie who flaked on dates three weeks in a row before I took the hint and stopped asking. It felt like Charlie Brown going after that football.
And once more, its not about liking Truecrime, its about putting that in your dating profile in lieu of literally anything else. I listen to RedLetterMedia and very long film podcasts made by a welshman, an aussie, and southerner, but I recognize that this isn't attractive to the opposite sex and also doesn't usefully define me, so I do not mention it in my dating profile. It's the female equivalent of holding a fish.
Today I passed on a "Marxist Feminist" profile. I don't like/match with anyone who self-describes as leftist.
I realize three days isn't enough to give up hope, that was just an update.
I don't know what to tell you. For what it's worth the women I've dated through the app have all been in their 30s, so whether it's a demographic issue, or a geographic issue, or a generational thing is beyond me. But I find it hard to believe that things are so different that I'd never experienced any of them is beyond me. It's clear that either your profile isn't attracting women who are serious, or there's something off with your selection process. I can throw out suggestions about what the problem might be, but if you keep insisting that what I suggest isn't the problem, then there's nothing I can do to help you.
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Oh no offense taken, I'm somewhat tickled if anything that you think my serial monogamist self was like that. I'm going to tell my wife as soon as she gets home from work!
I married my first wife at 19, and stayed with her till she passed from cancer when I was in my 40's. Then raised my kids to adults then moved to America and started online dating in my 50's. Met my now-wife and don't intend going anywhere else.
I think maybe the disconnect is that while you would hope that indeed by being on Tinder or Hinge or whatever is a strong signal you are both looking to actively date, this does not in fact seem to be the case. So you do have to sort the wheat from the chaff (and the wheat and chaff is different for men and women), lack of messaging interest is in my experience highly correlated with lack of interest in actually dating. There are also many reasons as you point out the woman may not be putting a lot of effort into replying, but fundamentally, to the guy on the other end, he can't tell the difference. So either you must hang on to them all, spreading your attention thin, or move on. You might get lucky of course, but that's not really a strategy.
Like fishing, it might be the fish will start to bite after lunch, or there might be a pike under your boat and they aren't going to bite all day. Given you can't know which, moving on to try and find somewhere the fish are biting is a good option. Unless you are just fishing to drink beer and fall asleep in the sun which is the equivalent of people just swiping for fun with no intention of actually dating I suppose.
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Well, if roystgnr nominated me for an AAQC, I nominated you. While I'm not certain the difference between players and connectors is completely discrete, they probably do cluster bimodally. And of course players aren't immune to long-term commitment for the right person, though I do worry about the foundation that game playing lays for the future of a relationship.
Perhaps that goes to explain my own experiences at the party school. Where, of course, I ultimately met my match (that sounds more ominous than I intended), but not before feeling confused and played by the young woman I talked about in my first comment. When I look back on things, I think she was surprisingly honest, but presumed physical closeness without an invitation of intimacy functioned as one. You could think of this as a shit-test, but perhaps more truly it was a Type-B signal that my Type-A brain read correctly as loading all the risk in my direction, because that's how the Game is played according to the Rules.
On the other side of the fence, one of the strange problems of being a geeky Type-A man dating geeky Type-A women is that, through whatever correlative associations (autism, neurodiversity in general?) drive it, geeky women are often not merely demisexual but asexual. Or they may be confused about their sexuality, which may be a little weird, in the same way in which male geeks are just a little weird.
But an "I'm totally autistic, I have way too many hours in Baldur's Gate 3, my life goal is to pet as many cats as I can, my hobbies include making my own cosplay, I geek out over anime and manga" girl who decides the cutest pic of herself consists of her in a piano-keys themed skirt -- yes I'm thinking of someone I know in particular here -- well, that kind of girl exists, and sometimes she would like a man to have sex with her. (And sometimes girls like that write tentacle porn fanfiction, but we're not going to talk about that right now.) And if Skulldrinker could become legible to her not just as charming bartender but as geeky charming bartender, I'm hopeful.
Often a girl like that is chubby, though. It comes with the territory. "Doesn't get out much, plays video games all day, not outdoorsy, not into foreign travel"... this kind of person would be described as "having a sedentary lifestyle," and the medical literature describes that as a pretty strong correlate of metabolic disorder. The only people I know like that who aren't at least a little chubby have a medical condition or some kind of eating disorder. So it really, really narrows the pool to focus on weight to the exclusion of personal compatibility, and bland dates with thin people who do nothing for you can often be the result.
And yeah, they're often politically liberal. But sometimes not. The more common configuration is politically moderate, doesn't like Trump, cares more about treating people well than solving political problems. Liberal women are what they are, and it is humorous if a little alarming to hear a date say "I would never trust a white man" while she's staring into your white-ass eyes with longing, and even funnier when she subsequently makes a joke about something looking like Trump's hair and then apologizes for getting too political, as though making fun of Hair Force One is more controversial than racial bias.
For what it's worth, I think the tension between Type-A women and Type-B men is what contributes to a lot of the "I'm trying to avoid the redpill creeps" stuff you hear from young women nowadays -- it really is not a fun time to end up attached to a strategically withholding seducer as a basically honest person looking for a meaningful connection.
But the challenge, as always, is that people with a large enough amount of power -- and the attractive, dashing, and beautiful have a great deal of power within their sphere -- are always tempted to play by the rules of the game by which they win, and it strikes me as a real fact about the dating world that the most attractive cohort of people are more likely to withhold and hold out for a 'better deal.' I've never had specific interest in the 'hot girls', but maybe my impression that they're not looking for something meaningful says more about my place in the looksmatch pyramid than any inherent fact about the attractive.
Every piece of relationship advice suffers from survivorship bias. "Just be yourself" became such a big piece of advice for two reasons -- first, that putting on an act, while possible, is extremely psychologically expensive, and if you're trying to reassure someone nervous, telling them to stop looking at themselves from the outside and instead try to inhabit the moment from the inside is a much more fruitful piece of advice that might actually result in chemistry and charisma. And second, because the best and happiest relationships result from connections where "just be yourself" really is the method of making an impression. Someone who finds you charming for who you are is far more likely to find you amenable over the long term, and history is written by the winners.
Unfortunately, women like that who are still single are the sort who made my 20s miserable by constantly complaining that men speak to, look at, or exist near them, and every second sentence they speak makes it clear they have absolute contempt for all the men they supposedly share a subculture with.
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