PUAs told me how to game online dating. They were wrong.
I was so ashamed the first time I made an OkCupid page that I deleted it after a couple of hours. I let the society we live in convince me only losers used OKCupid and I didn’t need to resort to geeky online dating . A few years later, online dating became ubiquitous enough to no longer carry a stigma. Besides, bars and clubs weren’t my scene; there was no other way for me to meet women other than OKCupid.
I’m the kind of person who gets nervous ordering takeout, so messaging strangers of brud Sri Lankan the opposite sex I thought were cool elicited promising job interview-level nerves. To say it in meaner terms: I sucked at OKCupid. Few women responded to my messages, and even fewer actually sent me messages first. The only girl who went on a date with me did so because she thought I worked for BuzzFeed (which I only contributed to as an unpaid “community member” at the time).
After over a month of poor luck, I saw a Daily Dot article about a woman soliciting OkCupid profile rewrites for only $25. I contacted her. When I finally gave her the green light, she never answered the email. I like to think she got a real gig and didn’t need to stoop to something so low anymore. While that was great for her, I was still out an OkCupid profile. Realizing online dating probably wasn’t for me, I gave up. At least until the next year.
I restarted my OkCupid in 2014. I received slightly more messages this time around because I flat out didn’t care what anyone thought of me, which lead to an apparent uptick in the quality of the messages I sent out. Still no dates, though.
Morose and crestfallen, I considered Tinder. Even someone as (willingly) disconnected from popular culture as myself had heard of the popular swiping app. I avoided it because I felt it was sordid and awful. How could an app centered around objectifying women based on their looks do anything other than make me a misogynist-or at least misogynistic enough to feel gross about myself?
I became increasingly desperate as my 2014 OkCupid adventures turned out just like my 2013 OkCupid adventures: Unanswered texts and an empty inbox. One night I signed up on Tinder and started swiping, guiltily sorting human beings into “desirable” and “undesirable.” I matched with five women in the first month. None of them responded to my messages.
I tried to hack Tinder and it was a disaster
Not long after this, I saw a Medium post by Blake Jamieson explaining exactly how to garner over 800 matches.
I called in a favor and had a friend photoshop a few pictures of me to emulate Jamieson’s example. I also wrote up a nice little bio I’d use once I reinstalled the app. Another thing I did was check out r/Tinder for any advice. The pick up artists (PUAs) there recommended making a new Facebook, one separate from your real one, for your Tinder account. They also suggested liking tons of pages to see if you and your matches had similar interests. I spent about 20 minutes liking stuff with my new fake Facebook page before signing up for Tinder with my newly photoshopped “Match of the Day” images.
Encouraging at first. While I didn’t come close to the 800 plus Jamieson promised, I increased the my amount of matches by about 400 percent (so I got around 20 matches as opposed to five). The advice about liking lots of stuff helped a lot. One girl I matched with liked Slate. She answered my first message, which confirmed whether she actually read Slate. When I asked if she noticed a marked decline in Slate’s quality she didn’t answer.
