Powered by glolg
Display Preferences Most Recent Entries Chatterbox Blog Links Site Statistics Category Tags About Me, Myself and Gilbert XML RSS Feed
Sunday, Apr 28, 2024 - 22:48 SGT
Posted By: Gilbert

In Search

It's seldom wise to ignore the signals when both one's rationality and intuition are screaming the same tune, which has led to a certain degree of... distraction, and regrettably possibly even unprofessionalism, in recent weeks. Well, I've been slowly digging myself out of the backlog of accumulated work - finally got ahead of the reviewing schedule for one - but the fundamental quandary remains. This called for some inner soul-searching, icky as it might be, and some contemplation brought me to meet my perception, unburdened by ego:

"Let's see... just turned forty, new sports car, romantic flailing about? Yeah, classic midlife crisis, that was easy."

Did I tell you how I dislike such consultations?

Well, Perception-sans-Ego's not exactly wrong there, and so I figured that if I were to get into the dating line, I might as well go about it thoroughly and systematically. There would be some background research on popular apps in the local context to begin with, with Tinder being the most widely-used by some distance as expected, if with a bias towards hookups; since that isn't what I'm looking for, I narrowed it down to Hinge and Bumble to start with. Note that since the Match group owns basically all the majors other than Bumble and Coffee Meets Bagel, I figured that should cover most bases.

A cynical implication of the Match monopoly would then be that they have an incentive to keep users on their apps via various dark patterns for profit, or in other words not deliver on the underlying premise of actually finding matches. Given that whining about it isn't about to get me anywhere, I resolved to simply sign up for the premium version of both apps, and get down to the swiping with looks as the first cut*. This took some long hours, but I soon exhausted the stack of potential candidates, with perhaps a 5% right-swipe rate for "my type"**, with minimal filters imposed (age only, no prejudice towards height, educational level, politics, religion etc.)


Taste is paramount
(Source: kengan-manga.com)


Of course, an actual match would require the other party to likewise also do the right-swipe thing, and on that end all I had was my carefully-curated profile pics, and a no-nonsense bio that basically indicated that I was there to settle down, thanks. Now, it has to be said that it's a tough and superficial world out there, for guys especially - the average male has a match rate of some 1% to 2% supposedly, literally orders of magnitude less than the ladies (which has led to some funny strategies to game the Elo-based algorithms). Part of this is down to a tendency for males to just swipe right on everyone available before deciding later, granted, with the ladies being a lot more selective upfront (an approach I also subscribe to)

Long story short, Hinge wasn't quite working out for me, but there ended up being about fifteen quite acceptable matches from Bumble, which was reassuring in some sense. A number of them never sent the first message - the trademark feature (or peculiarity) of Bumble - but that still meant ten options open, at which I belatedly realized that I should perhaps not have been so exhaustive in the initial screening. There was no way that I could - or wanted to - spin that many plates simultaneously, but the trouble was that starting from the top of the list would necessarily hint to the others that they were the backups. Nothing for it now that the bacon's cooked, I guess, so wish me luck!

[*Yeah, as warned, shallow as accused - to those unhappy about it, you can slap my virtual avatar if you want.]

[**Then again, my preferred (sub)types are not always mainstream; for example, if a bro's after say Selena Gomez (or lookalike), I'd be a great wingman.]



comments (0) - email - share - print - direct link
trackbacks (0) - trackback url


Next: Still In Search


Related Posts:
Getting Phoney
Robo Goes App
Superfreakidocious
Double Tap
Tokyo Drifting
Back to top

Copyright © 2006-2025 GLYS. All Rights Reserved.