The New Handsome Me

A few weeks after my first failed attempt with Tinder, I decided to give it another shot. This time I wanted to confirm my suspicion that the failure the last time around was because of my photos. So, this time I used just one photo of a man that I thought looked well-educated, cultured, respectable and perhaps even attractive.

And, as should be obvious, the response was much better. I swiped right indiscriminately like the last time and within 24 hours I had 20 matches. Of these, I had substantive conversations with at least 4 women. We chatted, we flirted, with a naughty reference thrown here and there. I was confident that if I'd asked them out, they'd have said yes. The common feature in what all these women said was that I was respectful to them and in their experience it was rare. I knew there are a lot of jerks online, but I was still surprised to hear how rare men who want a normal conversation were, at least on Tinder.

Perhaps therein lies the key to online success: just being a normal human being, being as respectful to women online as you'd be in the real world. (Of course, you need an attractive photo to even be given a chance to prove that you're a nice guy, but that's a different story.) In that 24 hours, I got to know a Brazilian woman, a single mother who's trying to make it in America; a second-general Indian-American who had learned a lot from two failed relationships; a recently-divorced Caucasian woman who seemed to be genuinely befuddled by the dating dance; an older woman who was clearly lonely and just wanted someone to chat with.

I knew this charade could not continue much longer. Although I enjoyed chatting with them, I was also misleading them with my photo (even though everything else I said about myself was honest). At the end of the day, I gently told them that I was going to delete my account since I wasn't going to be able to meet anyone in the immediate future. I wished them well, and hope they find someone to share their lives with.

In the meantime I have to figure out my biggest stumbling block to online dating success: my photos. They're, unfortunately, not a great ice-breaker. They don't get me too many hand-shakes.

Plastic surgery, anyone? :-)