Last week, I wrote an article about creating your profile for Tinder. Even with the perfect profile, you're not going to get those matches if you don't know how to play the game.
Let me set a scene: You're sitting in your room, staring at your computer. You've just eaten a cliff bar. The wrapper drifts down and settles into the growing pile around your chair. Like a trail of gunpowder from a Looney Toons episode, the wrappers lead to your garbage can, full of the debris from several more boxes. As you reach for another, Netflix pauses and you are forced to see yourself in the dark reflection of your smudged laptop screen. The horrifying truth sets in: you have become a cliff bar.
All is not lost! If you can carry on a single conversation with someone other than your mom before midnight, you'll turn back into you! (It was going to be a kiss before midnight, but let's go with baby steps there, killer.) Suddenly, your phone's screen lights up. There's a notification: Congratulations! You have a new match. You open it, who could it be? After a few agonizing seconds of waiting (seriously, why is Tinder so slow?) you see it. You've matched with an ad for cliff bars. Part of you wants to say you swiped right on an ad by accident, but the truth is nothing will ever be sexier to you right now then a new box of c-bars. Yes, you have a pet name for them .
Now, this purely hypothetical scenario could clearly never happen to anyone. I certainly do not have personal experience with anything like this, but just in case someone that is clearly not me has been here, I've got some tips to improve your match game.
Quick disclaimer: I'm going to talk about some stereotypes related to male and female genders here, but especially with Tinder opening up the gender option, I don't want anyone to think those are the only two ways to be. This is all just in good fun, and I hope everyone can enjoy regardless of identity.
1. Do not just keep swiping right!
I'm a guy, I know some guys. Guys tend to swipe right a lot. Some people's goal on Tinder is to hit the max number of likes every day as quickly as possible. I cannot stress to you how ineffective this is.
Tinder devs don't release exactly how they show you matches, but if you think it's random you're very wrong. There's been a lot of theorizing as to whether your frequency of swipes matters, but nothing conclusive. Think about it logically, though. What is the purpose of the app from the developers' perspective? Money. How are they going to make money? More people downloading the app, seeing their ads and using their services. How are they going to accomplish all this? By giving you good matches, matches that you talk to and have a positive experience with. Swiping right on every face you see does not give them any data to help you find good matches, so why would they bother with you?
Something that is a fact is Tinder looks at the depth of your conversations. So even if you don't believe that swiping right all the time will hurt your chances with the app's algorithms, if you match with 10 people and only talk to 1, you're still not going to be looked upon favorably. There's also some impetus to create success stories for positive press, and maybe even a shred of integrity. Point is, swiping right all the time isn't how you maximize your use of the app.
2. Boost if you're really serious.
Or really desperate. If you don't know what this is, Tinder allows you to "boost" your profile so you're more likely to show up to people in the area.
As a little experiment, I boosted myself a while back, just to see if it would work. Well, I definitely got a few matches quickly, aaaand I'm a cliff bar, so I'd say it has some use. (Not a good cliff bar either. I'm the cliff bar that you eat because you already opened the wrapper and aren't just going to waste it.)
The problem is boosting costs money. Is it worth it? Depends on you. For the average college student, I'd say no. Then again, maybe on a cold, desperate Friday night, $3 is a small price for hope. If you do decide to boost, save it for 9pm to get the most bang for your buck.
3. Work on openers.
In a perfect world, cliff bars would be calorie free yet filling and if two people were interested in each other they would just talk. However, to quote Lonely Island, "Welcome to the real world, jackass." Just assume you're going to be the one who has to start the conversation and prepare yourself. Luckily, Tinder is text based, so you have plenty of time to come off as witty only to fail miserably at in real life (again, absolutely no experience with this).
The first strategy is pickup lines. If I'm using a pickup line, it's going to be cheesier than the inside of a mozzarella stick. Try hard to come up with your own, it makes everything more genuine. Failing that, turn to the internet, but try to find one not everyone and their grandma has heard before.
"Hey, are you from Tenessee?"
"No, Tenessee you later."
The second (better) strategy is to take a look at their bio and get an idea from it. You'd be surprised how few people do this, but it already sends a good message that you're not so apathetic as to not read, like, 2 sentences. Protip: even if you didn't read their bio when you swiped, nothing stopping you from reading it before you send that message.
Wanna go really crazy? Combine these two and say something funny related to their bio . This is big league stuff. It requires more than a few seconds of thought and some faint sense of humor. Good luck.
Once you've successfully opened, just go and be free. If you're really struggling about what to do, asking more questions and taking an interest in their response is a good way to start. Other people are just as if not more interesting than you, I promise. Carrying on the conversation might seem as daunting as starting it, but that's why you...
4. Practice, practice, practice.
How do I get better at starting and carrying on conversations? You do it. Seriously. I can give you some tips but just knowing the theory is useless if you can't put it into practice. The fear of messing up a conversation can be paralyzing, I know, but just remember it's Tinder. There is basically no other platform where you have more opportunities to experiment. Have fun, try to meet some interesting people, figure out the best ways to express yourself, and pretty soon you'll feel some genuine confidence.
Conclusion:
Instead of relisting tips or anything, I'm going to leave you with some life wisdom. Being with someone isn't everything. Typically the times we're most desperate to find someone are the worst times for us to be dating or hooking up. Asking someone to be comfortable with you when you're not comfortable with yourself isn't fair. So just don't take things so seriously and get into a good headspace. This requires patience, which a lot of people have a problem with even when they're patient about non-relationship matters. It takes work, and I believe in you, grasshopper.
Unless you're a hungry grasshopper that likes cliff bars. Then please stay away.
