I really like online dating. While every site has its own nuances, algorithms, and characterized users, the ability to virtually cross paths with dozens of people in one sitting is phenomenal.
It takes less time and effort to swipe than it does to strike up a conversation in person with a stranger. And with the right attitude, online dating can actually be fun.
More than all of that, as if that wasn’t enough, online dating is effective.
This post is about how to get the most out of the dating app Tinder.
Just a warning… if you aren’t willing to take full responsibility for the results that you see in your dating life, then this post is not for you. Think of dating somewhat like gambling.
Anyone over the age of 18 can go to a casino. A highly stimulating, and enticing environment, where you have a variety of people. First timers. Amateurs. Gambling addicts. Gambling professionals. Within that hodgepodge crowd, every single person in the casino is either purposely, or inadvertently, creating their own results. Tinder is almost no different. With a little luck, and skill, you can generate great results, even meet someone that you want to date seriously, or marry.
Walking into a casino with your last twenty dollars when your rent is due, and your car payments are late, wouldn’t be a smart idea. Neither is logging onto Tinder as a last resort for finding love, after all of your previous efforts have failed.
If you want Tinder to work for you as a platform, you must first believe that it can.
You can find fun, love and excitement on Tinder. You can meet someone amazing, and actually ENJOY doing it.
First things first. Tinder is a business.
Started as a skunkworks project by IAC, the owners of Match group, aka match.com, Tinder was designed to appeal to a new audience and capitalize on the technology and function of the smartphone. Being a business, Tinder could careless if you find love or not. Simply put: Tinder ain’t here for you.
Just as the average slot machine isn’t here for you. Tinder doesn’t care who you are, how long you’ve been single, or how many dates you go on. Tinder is just a platform. The success you have using it is up to you.
If you are willing to use the application in a way that it’s meant to be used, you’ll meet EXACTLY who you’ve been looking for.
So how can you use Tinder to your advantage and actually find lasting love?
Step 1. Stop blaming Tinder.
Tinder is not your enemy.
Many people think online dating apps have been the downfall of the modern dating culture but I disagree. Despite what you have been fed culturally, Tinder isn’t ruining dating.
Tinder like money, or alcohol, only enhances who people are. It’s like a spotlight that shines on our talents and insecurities. We have not changed as a culture, and Tinder has not changed us.
Tinder has only put a spotlight on the true nature of single, and not so single, people.
Tinder has revealed how much we want to be validated by others. How much we want to have casual sex. How much we enjoy meeting new people with little effort, and our desire to judge others without feeling guilty.
If we didn’t naturally want these things then Tinder wouldn’t work. So you have to admit that Tinder is not a creator, just an enabler. It might be a stretch to tell yourself that you love Tinder, although I find myself saying it from time to time. These are the reasons why I think Tinder is great resource for dating.
- You don’t have to get dressed to used Tinder.
- You can use it anytime.
- You can select users by age and location.
- You have control over who can engage with me.
- You have control of who you match with.
- You don’t have to engage with anyone who doesn’t match up with what you want.
- You don’t have to worry about getting “stuck with someone”.
- It’s easy.
Another fundamental advantage of Tinder is that it gives you incredible data about who likes you and who doesn’t.
You get data about by how others’ see you with almost every match you make. Even when you don’t make matches, Tinder is telling you a lot about yourself.
Like I said, telling yourself that you love Tinder might be a stretch, but consider how much you learn about yourself just from using Tinder.
Step 2. Admit Your INSECURITIES.
Insecurity is not a sin, or a crime.
In fact, most adults are plagued by it in many areas of their lives. It can be most prevalent when it comes to our romantic relationships. You don’t have to like the way that you look to find love. You don’t even have to like yourself to find love. But you have to accept your insecurities if you’re going to find love on Tinder.
There’s a powerful saying, ‘Denial, ain’t just a river in Egypt’.
If you don’t consider yourself gorgeous, fit, rich, intelligent, powerful, or influential. Tinder, being the spotlight that it is, shines a light on what we don’t like about ourselves.
It can reflect our insecurities with every match that we don’t make, and every response we fail to get.
If you’re uncomfortable with how you come across on Tinder, or any online dating platform, don’t ignore it.
The best way to get the most out of Tinder is to take temperature of how you are really feeling about who you are, and how you come across to others. Realize that it’s worth changing your opinion of yourself.
Tinder works best when you feel good about yourself.
In fact, I don’t know any attractive person who doesn’t have pleasant experiences using Tinder. Remember the casino analogy?
Have you ever woken up on a day and you just felt lucky. You just felt like something was meant to “happen” for you? On days when people win the jackpot at the casino, it’s because they had a feeling. They were “tapped in” and they acted from a place of knowing, or believing.
If you’re not fully convinced that Tinder can work for you, from the moment you create your profile, it will NEVER work for you.
Your insecurities have nothing to do with Tinder but they will follow you wherever you go. You should take an assessment of how you really feel about your chances of finding love by asking yourself the following questions, and answering them honestly.
- Do I believe the person I like finds me attractive, or will find me attractive?
- Do I believe the person I want to date is on Tinder?
- Do I believe that I can control the results that I get on Tinder?
Think about this: The person that you want to date is walking around this earth somewhere, wanting someone just like you. Tinder allows you to connect with people who are geographically near you.
This means that the person you might meet on Tinder, you could have actually met in real life. The same thing that is blocking them from coming into your life while you walk down the street, is the same blocks you’ll encounter on Tinder.
Tinder isn’t the issue, and you have to come to terms with that.
If you’re unable to allow love into your life, it won’t come. Not from Tinder, not from the sky, not from anywhere!
You have to believe and know that you the right person for you is available to you. And that they will want you too. Once you can accept this, Tinder then just becomes a faster, more convenient way, to meet them.
Step 3. Put effort into your profile.
If you want to meet the right people on Tinder, then you have to create an offer, or profile, worthy of a swipe right.
Your profile directly influences your results. Decades ago, single men and women placed personal ads in the newspaper, in hopes of finding a date. Today, Tinder is a modern day version of the personal ads of yesteryear.
Your Tinder profile resembles what an ad 30 years prior might have read like.
At this point you might be wondering if Tinder, or online dating is even worth the effort. Like many singles, you want to believe that luck is the sole factor in finding love in the modern day world. Unfortunately, luck has little to do with life success.
Life should have taught you by now that you get what you’re willing to work for. Unfortunately, few things worth having come easily.
I am a HUGE champion for improving our self-esteem as adults.
If you aren’t willing to show your Tinder audience that you care enough about yourself, to create a profile that truly speaks to who you are, I can’t imagine WHY they would want to date you?
Step. 4 Apply the data
Unlike meeting someone in person, you have quantitive data about how well you are received on Tinder.
Use the data to your advantage. What you learn about yourself can be used to better your profile, and improve your judgement. The data, and feedback that you receive from Tinder can also help you to narrowly define your audience.
From a strategy standpoint, I have historically made my final picture my best picture. I consider myself attractive, and I don’t respect a man who swipes right on the first photo. That’s for amateurs. Curiosity and attention to detail, are important to me, so I want a man that will investigate further than first glimpse.
However, Tinder recently released a feature that calculates the data on your photos.
When a photo becomes more popular than the rest, Tinder reorders your photos putting this popular photo first. I’m not the biggest fan of this feature but here are few ways to apply similar data.
There is as much as a 24hr window, some times more, between your swipes right, and the users who actually match with you.
I have noticed that users aren’t always shown your profile, or given the ability to swipe right on you, until you have swiped right on them. So failing to make a match right away isn’t a bad thing. Sometimes it isn’t until you close and reopen the app that you actually discover the matches you’ve made.
A few more ways that you can apply data towards improving your profile, and overall success are the following.
Delete low performing photos.
As Tinder delegates a photo as “popular”, meaning highly swiped right on, you should continually add a new photo weekly. Add a photo that you deem more attractive than what Tinder has qualified as “popular”.
Keep in mind that you have to actively use the app between photo swaps. By keeping every “popular” photo and testing if new photos that will eventually become the “popular” photo, you could essentially have a profile of all high performance photos.
Once at least 3 photos have been classified as popular by Tinder, you can now confidently swipe knowing that your photos are effective. This is important data because an effective photo is far more important than just an attractive one.
Test new opening lines.
I released an ebook of 50 opening Tinder phrases. Many I’ve used, or currently use personally. While there is no way of 100% knowing why someone hasn’t responded to your message after you’ve matched, the feedback you receive from the responses you do get are valuable. Even a “no response” often enough can help you to weed out the phrases that just don’t resonate with others.
Define your ideal audience
There is only one type of person that matters when you’re dating, and that is the person, or people, who like you. Many of us are accustomed to working harder on the things we’re not good at instead of doubling down what we do well. There is no reason you should ever worry about who DOESN’T like you.
When it comes to applying data to define your audience, you have to actively swipe on users you like, and users who you think would like you.
These are user who have interests, occupations, or photos similar to matches you’ve already made. This is how “types” are developed. Too often we think of our type as the person who constantly rejects us, instead of the person that consistently hits on us, or in this case swipes right.
You may not think about it, but you are someone’s type. Sounds weird right? There are users out there who are immediately interested in someone like you. Because of this you have to build an audience around who already likes you.
By taking a closer look into the patterns, and similarities of your matches, you can use that data to create opening lines that are effective.
Step. 5 Give people a f*cking break
I know it’s a very popular thing to complain about how inappropriate people are on Tinder but stop taking everything, or anything, other people do so personally.
I used to hold a seminar for women on meeting Mr. Right. One key point that I emphasized during this event was that men do what they know how to do. If a man isn’t doing what you think he should be doing, or he is doing something that you don’t like, it’s because it’s all he he knows how to do.
But this is true for everyone. When it comes to dating, most people are doing what they’re doing because that’s all they know.
If you don’t like what someone says, or you think they did something wrong, let it go. Instead of sitting back, and passively judging them for bravely putting themselves “out there” just to date you, give them a break. Dating is hard already, so you don’t have to be so hard on people.
If you are waiting for someone to impress you, then you are going to get played. Point blank. Anyone who knows the right things to say and do, is a predator.
I know that men and women can be offensive, rude, or ignorant online. I am not talking about the extreme cases where someone purposefully being disrespectful. What I’m talking about is something common and completely unnecessary, which is the expectation that a stranger knows what you want.
Or how you want to feel. Or even how to date you.
Keep in mind that everyone is just doing what they know how to do, and if you don’t like it that’s your problem, not theirs. You don’t have to judge the person, just the behavior. But have you asked for anything different?
Have you made it clear to them how you like to be approached, or addressed?
Have you done anything to help them to connect with you, other than get offended because there aren’t enough punctuations in their messages? If other people knew what they were doing, they probably wouldn’t be single. If you like someone’s profile, then you have to take the reins and do the work in making a connection happen. If it doesn’t happen that’s fine but give people a break.
If they don’t know all the right things to do, or say, and you think you do. Then you do it! Don’t wait on someone else to make the right moves. If you want success with Tinder, then you have to take control where you can.
You’ll know it works by your results.