Ex broke up with me 4 months ago (first relationship, lasted about 3.5 years). We continued to together until I moved to Seattle about a month ago. At around the same time, I decided to start putting myself out there on these newfangled dating apps. Made an account on Tinder and Bumble, threw some pictures up.
A month later...
I've gotten a total of 3 matches. One on Bumble where I got their number, but she was always busy when I tried to make plans with her, and she didn't seem particularly interested in making any time for me. One on Tinder where I said "Hi! How's your week been going?" and sent a "how you doin?" gif, and immediately got ghosted with no response.
The third match was on SoulSwipe, which is essentially Tinder for black people. I swiped on all the chicks on that within a 2, 5, 20, and ultimately 50 mile radius. That app doesn't have notifications, and is horrible in general, so I just said something along the lines of "this app doesn't have notifications, which sucks, so here's my number:" It's been about 2 days with no response, so I'm gonna just write that off too (though if I eventually get a random text or call, then hey! pleasant surprise!).
At first, I was extremely picky. I would control for looks, pets, kids, stupidity, polyamory, and cigarettes. I thought that was the right way to use the app; take whatever info I can from the bio and pics, and use that to decide to swipe or not. Then, I realized that maybe I should take things easy for a while before I just jump into another long-term relationship, so I changed my bio to something like "not looking for anything serious right now." It's tough to convey that I'm not opposed to another long-term relationship, but would rather not go into one with some unspoken assumption that will be the endgame if we don't break up without, IMO, severely impacting my already-bad match rate.
So now I control solely for the answer to the question "would I be happy seeing her when I wake up in the morning?" and I spend as little time as I can coming up with an answer, generally in under a half-second. Worst case scenario, I'll end up ghosting a woman or two.
I dunno. I live in a very highly populated city, and yet I seem to struggle when it comes to online dating. I had the same problem before I met my ex. I was on OKC for about a year and a half*, using it way too fucking often. In that time, I went on exactly 0 dates, despite all the attempts at reworking my profile, etc. I canceled the first date I would've went on from that site when I scheduled the second date with my ex.
I wasn't really satisfied with how things had been going, so my solution was to change my daily habits such that I was in more situations where women might actually be around for me to talk to without approaching/harassing them as they go about their day in public. Went to a local book club for young folks, and met my ex.
I actually went to another book club last week, but while I was the only guy there, literally everyone was already taken.
I'm kind of at a loss as to what to do.
The volume of women I'm queuing up in front of is significantly more vast than it was in my OKC days, but in a way, I feel like I was doing a lot better on OKC simply by virtue of writing thoughtful messages. When I went to find out just how long I'd been using OKC, I had to scroll past hundreds of "you got a new message" notifications. But none of them went anywhere, even after I adopted a "ask for a number within 5 messages" rule. The other issue is that I don't wanna deal with the stress of even further increasing the amount of effort I spend on women who may easily dismiss me with a single glance at my profile picture, not to mention answering all those god damn survey questions again, and filling out a long-form profile... ugh.
At the same time, I have no idea where to go to meet women. Book clubs are great, but I honestly have to treat the "meeting women" aspect of it as an optional perk and not the goal, otherwise I'll do it a couple of times and stop.
My current plan is to simply do P90X3, then start over.
* Side note: Here's an excerpt of the response I got to the first OKC message I ever sent. My message was something like 3 paragraphs because I didn't know any better and I try not to half-step in life.
"First of, let me just say we should go ahead and get married as that was the best message I have... (read more)"
She was cute, and we talked for a few days (even exchanged numbers and started texting), but I was promptly ghosted when I tried to make plans with her, as I recall.
