Yes, I am shallow. Yes, I have a Tinder. No, it's not for hookups, but because I live in the armpit of rural Minnesota there's no real place to meet other single people -- unless you give that title to the local Walmart.

I will say that, for the most part, this app has been a waste of my time. I've been on exactly one Tinder date and, lo and behold, absolutely nothing (not even a lasting friendship!) happened between us.

But Tinder has shown me the differences and similarities in the way men and gay women reached out to me over the app. When I first started the app, I thought I was bisexual, so I got both sides of the equation in my inbox. Months later, upon discovering that men really didn't do it for me, I matched with exclusively women, and maybe some nonbinary folk here and there just to chat about shared interests.

I have thus dealt with both poles of the gender spectrum, my friends. I figured recounting my experiences would be properly eye-opening, especially if you're attracted to a single gender and are wondering what the other side is like.

Here are a couple similarities I've noticed.

1. "Hi :)"

This is actually the very first message I received on Tinder-- just this gif.

The amount of men and women who just decided, after reading my stupidly extensive bio, to drop those two letters into my inbox-- it drove me insane. All genders do it, and when I matched with mostly dudes, I thought it was a man-exclusive thing. It's really not.

It's worth noting that I almost never replied to these messages.

2. Small Talk About Interests

One's from a girl, one's from a guy. Can you even tell the difference?

If the conversation progressed to shared interests, I found that talking about stuff like music didn't really have any relation to gender. Talking to guys about playing my guitar was exactly the same as talking to girls about it. No awkwardness, no sexual innuendos. A genuine desire to get to know somebody over text, I found, can be present regardless of gender.

Of course, along with similarities, different genders use Tinder differently too. I've noticed variations in:

1. Frequency Of Pickup Lines

(For context on that second one: one of my profile pictures is a shot of my pet chicken)

Yeah. Men and women are both great in the small talk department, but these nightmares both come from dudes. I have never had a woman come at me in an overtly sexual way over DM. So much for the predatory lesbian stereotype. I have had one overly-enthusiastic message from a woman-- but it was more cute than anything. She was just excited to get to know me!

It's important to understand that these are all just differences that I have personally noted; by no means are they indicative of how all women or men behave on dating apps. There'd be lots of scientific problems if we drew any conclusions from a single person's observations! In my case, though, a male gender did seem to go along with a greater degree of boldness (and sometimes this boldness was a little, uh, awkward), while a female gender seemed to correspond with a lack of such.

Maybe all this is pointless, though, because-- let's be honest-- we're all on Tinder just for people to tell us we're cute.