Tinder can be entertaining, as long as you don't take it too seriously. But there appear to be a lot of married men on that app. One day, when my friend Gabriela and I were hanging out, she showed me a few of the conversations she'd had with guys on Tinder. As I read one of them, I remarked, "This guy is married."
"How can you tell?" she asked. "He says he's single."
"I can sense it."
"That's total BS. Women have a stronger intuition about these things."
So I told her to write to this guy confessing that she was married, but that her marriage was strained. And to apologize for wasting his time. And sure enough, the dope fell for the ruse. "No problem," he wrote back. "Technically I'm married too. So no issues."
"Wow!" she exclaimed. "This is so simple!"
This guy happened to be Indian, visiting from Australia on a business trip.
"So you're just looking for a no strings things?" she wrote to him.
"Yes, just fun," he replied. "Casual fun."
"You aren't getting any action at home?"
"Not enough. Haha! She's very conservative."
"I can understand your situation."
"Good. I like you."
He had an unusual enough name. So I asked Gabriela to look up his name on LinkedIn. And sure enough, his profile and photo came up. So now we knew which company he worked for.
"Tell him you're with a friend visiting from Sydney who's also Indian."
"Why?"
"Just do what I tell you and watch the fun."
She did.
"Nice," he wrote back. "Have you known her for long?"
"Yes, a very long time."
After a few more messages back and forth, I took over from Gabriela.
"OMG," I wrote on Gabriela's behalf. "I was just showing my friend your profile and she says she knows you!"
"Really?" he wrote back.
"Wow, she says she knows you and your wife. Don't you work for XYZ company?"
There was what I image a stunned silence for a few moments. The he wrote back, "Who is this friend of yours?"
We waited for a minute or two before responding. "Sorry, I was talking to my friend. Wow, she's furious to find you on Tinder. She's threatening to tell your wife. I'm trying to calm her down."
"Oh, wow! I'm in trouble, aren't I?"
"Sorry, I didn't mean to get you into trouble. I'll try to convince her to stay out of this. But just in case I don't succeed, you should bring this up with your wife first before she hears it from others."
"Oh, what have I done? I didn't mean any harm. Please tell me the name of this friend. Please."
"She told me not to tell you. Don't worry, I'll talk to her. But you should go back to your wife and get out of this app asap."
"I will," he promised. And vanished.
Gabriela looked at me dumbfounded. "You're evil!" she exclaimed and burst out laughing. "Evil genius!"
I'm afraid I've unleashed a monster. Since that day she has tried this on numerous men and has gotten most of them to admit that they're married. The template is very similar. Chat for a bit with the guy. Put them at ease. Then admit you're married. Most of the naive ones, or those eager to cash in on the no-strings-attached nature of getting entangled with what they thought was a married woman, eagerly admit to being married as well. Then with some additional information they carelessly provided, she looks them up on the internet. If she finds additional details about them, like their current employer, she uses it to bolster her story of how a friend of hers recognizes them. Most of the men apparently crumble and plead with her to not expose them.
She has talked about this with a couple of other friends of hers, and they too have reportedly successfully used this trick to weed out the married guys. I don't know how all of this is going to end. If these men wise up to this trick, it will stop being effective. But, on the other hand, the more men believe they've been exposed, the less they're likely to prowl dating sites and leave the field to us single men, who're getting increasingly crowded out by the married ones.
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