Dating : 10,000 Swipes Later

First of all, I’m glad to confirm what I’ve long suspected for my own part: in some places of the world, Tinder doesn’t work very well for me. In London and New York (and Poland of all places…), I match with more girls than I have time or perseverance to talk to — even with the abundance of spare time given by corona-induced social distancing. In other places such as Budapest or Sydney or Cape Town, I hardly match with anyone at all.

This lines up with my experience from tindering in these places pre-corona, IRL.

Now, this could be because the culture and frequency with which people use the app in those places is much less pronounced than in London — that there’s a systemic difference between places, making some Tinder markets deeper and more liquid and more likely to result in matches. Or it could be that because whatever my profile projects is less demanded in these places; after all, tastes in cuisine and clothing differ across these places so it would be strange if taste in partners and dates didn’t.

As a way to estimate the number of swipes (sadly, I didn’t keep a record), I use the 12-hour limit of around a 100 likes that Tinder allows its non-paying users. In the last two weeks I have probably hit this limit about five times, for a good few hundred likes — say 600 in total (5×100 for the days I hit the limit, plus some more Tindering on other days).

Anecdotally from noticing how I use the app, there are about 5 swipes left for every swipe right — for a total of 3,600 swipes. (Yes, the quality of people on Tinder is surprisingly poor). Between one-tenth and one-fifteenth of likes result in a match: in the last two weeks I counted 45 matches (1.25% match rate) — an outsized number of whom came from setting my app to New York or London. This is roughly in-line with other quantitative assessments of Tinder.

For a good half of my matches I find myself wondering why I even swiped right and I usually just ignore them. After all, I only have so much energy to say something interesting and there is, unfortunately, only so much (read: nothing) I have to say to a 22-year-old girl with greyish-blond hair and a caption that reads nothing, or “No ONS.”

Of the 20-odd girls that I did message, 7 of them never got back to me; 5 went AWOL after one or two responses; a few of them held out a little longer, about four replies, before they too disappeared; and a sheer total of 6 girls resulted in some kind of conversation.
Swipes-to-conversation rate: 6/3,600 = 0.167%

Don’t get me wrong, some of those conversations were, um, interesting. I got to

• practice my Portuguese with a Brazilian girl living in Lisbon
• bite my tongue while some New York film critic elaborated on the virtues of “critical theory perspectives of fashion” (no, there are no such virtues)
• bite my tongue again while politely having to listen to a girl in HR explaining how important her bullsh*t job was (yes, all HR jobs are bs)
• on two separate occasions I learned about the daily struggles of being a single mum
• and finally one pretty long conversation lasting more than a weekend with a London-schooled musician and opera singer who actually seemed pretty cool.

Needless to say, within a few days, all of them stopped replying. Swipes-to-date rate: 0/3,600 = 0%.