The Tinder Experiment

A recent article about Tinder.com on The Huffington Post had me re-evaluating the state of dating in the US. For those who haven’t heard, Tinder is a dating app. It features a photo or photos with a 500-character description, which is the equivalent of three plus tweets. The person viewing your picture places an X on it if she doesn’t like the profile or a heart if she does. Instant notification happens when someone you hearted has hearted you.

The article, written by dating coach David Wygant, explains he developed a profile to try the app out. He considered himself a decent looking man and appealing to the opposite sex. Wygant hearted several local women. Some older than him and others he deemed as attractive as him. There were those he believed would check him out in a public setting and even younger women who preferred older men. He got exactly zero hearts back. After heart-ing dozens of women, Wygant received no likes on his own photo. What was the deal?

He wasn’t looking at models or actresses, but ordinary women. However, each woman rebuffed him.  The earnest male has just entered the world of women.  No matter how smart or funny women are, the hip to waist ratio ends up as the measuring stick.

The ironic thing about this article was that women might be applying the same extreme standard of attractiveness  that they’ve complained about men using.  Here’s a handsome man who knows how to write a good description because he’s a dating coach, but he gets nada. It also gives him a feel for what his clients are experiencing too.

Then there’s the possibility that he was too good-looking or too smooth in his description. There are plenty of posers with attractive photos whose only goal is to separate a woman from her money. The woman in question could have dismissed him as not real.

Meeting someone you’ve never met and know nothing about takes courage or stupidity; it depends on whom you talk to. Women as a whole want to know more about the man than the tiny Tinder profile allows. The meeting is for the exchange of information, but it looks like very few people ever make it to the actual meet.

Then again, the dating coach isn’t exactly anonymous. Maybe a few women googled the picture and wondered if they’d be part of the next article or lesson. Inadvertently, they actually were.

Wygant could have checked the article on Global Grind  about why women swipe your photo to the left to figure out if he was guilty of any the dating app stumbles.

He finally ends the article with a comment about Tinder being something for people in their twenties. Maybe it is. Still, it cuts out much of the initial flirtation, the meeting of the eyes, the shy smiles, casual hellos that mean something more. This is all lost in a fast food approach to dating. A woman might pass on a man whose smile isn’t wide enough or his eyebrows need grooming. 

Your Tango gave three women’s POV in another blog. Two weren’t that interested since they had heard men used the app only for sex. The third woman discussed going on about a dozen dates that never developed into anything.

Going back to our dating coach, you have to wonder if the women he hearted just felt they were a booty call.