match rate,” he reported. “Close to 150 matches in 20 minutes. She is insanely attractive in person but I was not expecting that. She could get as many matches in one hour as I could in 4 months.” In part, this guy is complaining about the problems of being a man in the world of online dating: There’s lots of competition for attractive women, and women get much higher hit rates than men. Granted. But in the midst of this he also said something incredible: “I got approximately 350 matches in 5 months.” That’s seventy people a month. Twenty years ago, if you met a guy who said he’d met seventy women who’d expressed interest in him in the past month, you’d assume he was quite a stud. Today he can be any guy with a smartphone and a thumb to swipe right.
EXHAUSTION:
ARPAN VERSUS DINESH
Derek and all the other people like him have vastly increased their dating options, but at what price? I learned all about the toll online dating can take when I met two very different and interesting men in a focus group in Los Angeles.
It was a Saturday morning and we were conducting our interviews in an office building on the west side. I walked in from the parking garage and got into the elevator, and I saw two Indian dudes. One was Arpan. The other was Dinesh. At first I was scared: Was one of these guys my Indian stalker? Nah, they seemed cool.
If I had to guess who had the better dating life based just on our initial hellos, I would have easily said Arpan. He was dressed a little more fashionably, he had a confidence and charm to him, and he seemed comfortable with all these strangers. Dinesh was a bit shy, not as hip in his dress, and just not as jovial. When the focus group started, though, a different picture emerged.
We began the discussion by just asking what people were looking for. Arpan slouched down in his seat and told his story.
“I’m Arpan. I’m twenty-nine and I live in downtown L.A.,” he began. “I’m looking for something serious. I’ve been single for a few years. And you know, at the initial stages, especially when I was a little younger, like, twenty-six, it was cool. There are so many options!” For a while having easy access to a world of single women who lived nearby was exciting, and he’d spend hours online checking out profiles or casually flirting. He went out a lot too, and gradually honed his technique.
Arpan then described his descent into darkness. He said that initially he would spend a lot of time crafting enticing personal notes to women, his logic being that women receive so many messages that he had to do something to stand out from the crowd in their inboxes. Eventually, though, the return on investment was too low to justify all that time and energy. He would spend all this time being thoughtful but then felt like the women would just dismiss him based on looks or some other variable.
And even if the girl responded, it wasn’t always easy. “Then finally she responds. You’re like,
Yay!
A euphoric moment,” he said. Then he’d be drawn into a back-and-forth exchange with this person that could last quite a while and then, as he described it, “either it fades out, or you meet up with them and it’s horrible, and you just wasted all that time.”
This all started taking a toll on Arpan and he became a different person. He decided he was going to stop with the thoughtful messages because it just wasn’t worth the time. He started mass mailing what he admittedly described as “douchebag” messages.
“I’m so jaded and so tired of it that I don’t actually take the time anymore. I will send a stupid message like ‘Hey, you’re pretty. Want to grab a drink?’ Literally mass message, like, twenty, thirty people because I’m so tired. They’re going to base [their response] on looks anyway.” The lack of thoughtfulness in his messages made things easier and more effective. “There’s no work,” he said. “And I get more response rate, which is so
EXHAUSTION:
ARPAN VERSUS DINESH
Derek and all the other people like him have vastly increased their dating options, but at what price? I learned all about the toll online dating can take when I met two very different and interesting men in a focus group in Los Angeles.
It was a Saturday morning and we were conducting our interviews in an office building on the west side. I walked in from the parking garage and got into the elevator, and I saw two Indian dudes. One was Arpan. The other was Dinesh. At first I was scared: Was one of these guys my Indian stalker? Nah, they seemed cool.
If I had to guess who had the better dating life based just on our initial hellos, I would have easily said Arpan. He was dressed a little more fashionably, he had a confidence and charm to him, and he seemed comfortable with all these strangers. Dinesh was a bit shy, not as hip in his dress, and just not as jovial. When the focus group started, though, a different picture emerged.
We began the discussion by just asking what people were looking for. Arpan slouched down in his seat and told his story.
“I’m Arpan. I’m twenty-nine and I live in downtown L.A.,” he began. “I’m looking for something serious. I’ve been single for a few years. And you know, at the initial stages, especially when I was a little younger, like, twenty-six, it was cool. There are so many options!” For a while having easy access to a world of single women who lived nearby was exciting, and he’d spend hours online checking out profiles or casually flirting. He went out a lot too, and gradually honed his technique.
Arpan then described his descent into darkness. He said that initially he would spend a lot of time crafting enticing personal notes to women, his logic being that women receive so many messages that he had to do something to stand out from the crowd in their inboxes. Eventually, though, the return on investment was too low to justify all that time and energy. He would spend all this time being thoughtful but then felt like the women would just dismiss him based on looks or some other variable.
And even if the girl responded, it wasn’t always easy. “Then finally she responds. You’re like,
Yay!
A euphoric moment,” he said. Then he’d be drawn into a back-and-forth exchange with this person that could last quite a while and then, as he described it, “either it fades out, or you meet up with them and it’s horrible, and you just wasted all that time.”
This all started taking a toll on Arpan and he became a different person. He decided he was going to stop with the thoughtful messages because it just wasn’t worth the time. He started mass mailing what he admittedly described as “douchebag” messages.
“I’m so jaded and so tired of it that I don’t actually take the time anymore. I will send a stupid message like ‘Hey, you’re pretty. Want to grab a drink?’ Literally mass message, like, twenty, thirty people because I’m so tired. They’re going to base [their response] on looks anyway.” The lack of thoughtfulness in his messages made things easier and more effective. “There’s no work,” he said. “And I get more response rate, which is so
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