I know I am not alone when I say finding productive things to occupy your time during the dumpster fire of 2020 is difficult. It’s more difficult when you have to actually quarantine and find things to do to keep yourself from going crazy. As I mentioned in my last post, my mom has cancer, so the actually staying away from people and quarantining is not foreign to me. However, I have been with my family up to this point and not really alone.
My parents aren’t together, so when I decided to see my dad (after we hadn’t seen each other in months) on Christmas day I knew that meant at least a 14 day quarantine and covid test before I could see my mom again. Around Thanksgiving I got the genius idea to sign up for a dating app to help occupy this newfound alone time. Because why wouldn’t I?
Let me preface this by saying, I’m familiar with dating apps but have never been on one. So the idea of it was nerve wracking and exciting all in one. I’ve mostly avoided them because I didn’t want to deal with seeing people I know in real life on there. It was a valid concern, I’ll explain more later.
So even though my actual quarantine didn’t start until today, I decided to start casting for my very own version of the bachelorette right after Thanksgiving. My plan was to talk to guys in the masses and try and set up as many virtual dates as I could while doing my quarantine. I’d talk to them and just like on the Bachelorette, send someone packing every few days and unmatch once I knew they weren’t for me.
I decided to go with Bumble because it seemed classier than the others and there was no question about who would message first. For those of you that don’t know: after you match, the girl has 24 hours to send a message to the guy or the match goes away, if the guy doesn’t respond within another 24 hours, the match goes away. So staying active on it is a must to actually get conversations flowing.
I live in a bigish city, but still managed to swipe through all the guys in my preferences within a few days. From that, I had 12 matches and wound up messaging 9 of them. From the 9 I sent first messages to, 5 responded. Of those 5, 3 continued on into actual conversations – it was a solid start, but not really enough to form my own posse of men vying after my heart.
Ben – a 36 year old actor who recently moved back to the area to be around family.
Jordan – a 32 year old nurse that hates bacon and is allergic to basically anything furry.
Zach – a 33 year old single dad and quite possibly one of the most good looking people I have ever laid eyes on.
I’ll say, these conversations were pretty good and I was pleasantly surprised. I fully expected to encounter some real assholes, but these guys were all nice and respectful.
After about a week of messaging within the app, Jordan asked if I wanted to text. So we exchanged phone numbers and off we went. After a couple of days of texting, he asked if I wanted to go to dinner. I explained my situation and that with COVID, I didn’t feel comfortable. He seemed understanding, but dropped off. Bye Jordan.
Around the same time, Zach asked if I wanted to meet up for a drink. I told him the situation, he was understanding and said we could each make our own and talk over FaceTime – so we set the date, which never actually happened. He ended up having his son the night we were supposed to talk and asked if we could reschedule, which also never actually happened. I went to respond to a message he sent me one night and got this weird “away message” that Bumble provides when someone puts their profile into snooze mode. It basically told me he was prioritizing himself and taking some time away from the app, so he wouldn’t get notified about my message until he un-snoozed. Awesome. I looked again the next day and he had deleted his profile. Bye Zach.
Ben never acted like he had any plans to take anything off the app, and he also never asked any questions about me and only talked about himself, so I ended up unmatching with him. Ain’t nobody got time for a narcissistic pen pal. Bye Ben.
I went from 3 guys to no guys very quickly, so I decided it was time to enter the big leagues and I downloaded Tinder.
Almost immediately I realized the swiping aspect of Tinder is more complicated than Bumble and that got me into trouble early. You get 1 super like a day and that’s basically supposed to make your profile stand out to the person you superliked. For starters, it tells them you superliked them and you can attach a message to it if you want. The tricky part is that a right swipe means yay I like you, a left swipe down means bye no I don’t like you, but a left swipe up is a superlike. I did not know this.
The pre-mentioned Zach came up as one of the very first people I needed to swipe on. I thought long and hard about this because while I would like to look at him some more, he could have asked for my number before deleting his bumble account and didn’t, so he must have not been that interested. I decided to swipe left, take that Zach. Only I swiped up and left instead of down and left. I didn’t know! So here we are, moments after I’ve created my new shiny profile and I already accidentally used my only superlike on someone who has already rejected me once. I decided to start over and deleted my profile. I couldn’t bear the humiliation of looking so desperate to have superliked this guy after everything. I also fully realize these are dating apps and not that serious, so I know you guys, I know.
On my second go around with Tinder I started reading about the various benefits to the version of the app you can pay for. You can see who likes you. You can make your profile so that only people you’ve liked can see it. You get 5 superlikes a day and something called a boost, which I think makes your profile more visible. So I decided you know what? Let’s do it for the sake of the QuaranTinder Bachelorette. I paid the money and it was worth it, so worth it.
I’ve been on the app for about a week and a half. So far about 3,000 guys have liked me and from that I have 14 matches, but the best part is I can just look through who likes me and like people from there, so I don’t have to mess with all the swiping and accidental superlikes. I’m still working on the roster and seeing if I can spark enough conversations to turn this into a digital Bachelorette. Stay tuned!
Highlights from the next episode: The first virtual date, guys who know me IRL texting me after seeing me on the Tinder, an invitation to go on a trip, seeing Zach liked me and deciding to roll the dice and match with him.
Cocktails at Tiffany's 