Online dating rant, revisited.

A couple of months ago, I had a bit of a rant about online dating. I mentioned that, had I lived somewhere else (I think London was used as an example because I'd been reading the 30 Dates Blog), then I really wouldn't be stuck in the rut that I am.

I had a chance to put that to the test this weekend when FP and myself were briefly in London. Obviously, this isn't the world's most scientific experiment, but I think the results do kinda raise an interesting talking point. The experiment was that I Tindered. For those of you who are unaware of Tinder it's a dating/hookup app for smartphones that uses your Facebook profile. You simply swipe left (no) or right (yes) when you see people you want to meet. Should you both swipe right, then you are given the opportunity to message the other person.

At home, I swipe right maybe two or three times out of ten. In London, I was swiping right nine times out of ten or even more frequently than that. And they just kept coming. I was only in London for a couple of days, but when I had five minutes to myself, I'd idly browse through Tinder, swiping appropriately and being impressed by the standard on Tinder (attractive women writing interesting things and not resorting to clichés or "duck faces"). While it's doesn't given any indication of the numbers involved, you could argue that there's a better class of singleton in London (and Brighton as I was also there for a day).

Or maybe it's because I've seen the same faces pop up on Tinder time after time. I assume they delete their Tinder profile and reactivate it a few days later.

Since I started using Tinder, I've had about three mutual hits - two of which were women swiping right after I had (i.e. I was offline when the match alert happened), but they never followed it up with messages. One was me being online when the alert happened, though when I went to send a messge, the person was gone. I wasn't around in London long enough to see how many mutual matches and subsequent messages would be generated... I should definitely do that the next time I am in London for any length of time though.

And if I learned one thing from all this, it's that I find pictures of attractive women paddling in the sea wearing flowery summer dresses very sexy indeed.