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?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
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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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