I don't consider myself particularly interesting, but I would say my interests are vastly different from the average guy on dating apps
I don't know how to say this without sounding pretentious, but I prefer intellectual conversation over nights at the bar or whatever. I just want to be able to share the thoughts I have floating around my head with someone, ya know? When I'm not on hexbear.net, I play guitar, draw, write and enjoy analyzing different types of media and digging into the meaning of stuff
Stream of consciousness slop, I know, but I'm super high and my thoughts are firing off. Can anyone relate or see where I'm coming from?
I don't know, but I'm not convinced they're worth using for most people.
There are ways to tell the truth about what's important to you without scaring them away. Say left politics instead of communist or whatever. Mention hobbies, take pictures that show you enjoying those hobbies(if possible). But yea, i think with any kind of dating, online or not, you can't be totally yourself right away. You have to ease them into it. You have to get to a friendship level before you can let loose. Nobody should act totally the same around a new person as they would a long time friend.
:this: It's important to be yourself. That way you'll attract people who are compatible with you
I guess I never had to deal with these sort of issues when I was younger. Now that I'm living alone and have a bit more time for self exploration, I'm realizing what I actually enjoy is vastly different than whatever charade I put on when I'm out in public.
youll still need to be mostly honest, but you gotta massage the truth sometimes with a new person. And i didnt know shit about dating until quite a few years after high school but online dating made it much more comfortable to have an intro. Plus I wasnt going up to people in bars for random conversations. Bleh.
Also, and i hate myself a little for recommending this, but Tinder works wayyyyy better if you pay for it. You can superlike someone and it will notify them and you dont have to wait for them to match with you and they can choose if they want to respond.
Alrighty, appreciate the advice! I have some money to spare, so I might go that route :shrug-outta-hecks:
Yeah that's a really good point. I guess this side of me only really comes out when I'm drunk or high, so who knows if my friends even know the "real me"
I feel like having to mask to appear "normal" has been a net negative on my life 😔
I dislike dating apps or dating in general for that reason. I don't believe that people can be their authentic selves in that situation. Love shouldn't be a job interview, it should be a natural relationship with a friend that becomes more over time.
I understand why some people might like it though and I mean no disrespect to people who like dating, you do you.
Let me put it this way, if you lie and get a date, you're eventually going to have to be yourself eventually, why put that extra pressure on yourself? Just be you and if no one is interested then you're probably better off finding love a different way.
Love shouldn’t be a job interview
:this: :this: :this: :this: :this: :this: :this: :this: :this: :this:
Magic?
don't be absurd. alchemy and haruspicy have the best romantic applications
you can talk with a person irl before you start dating them you know. Do stuff together as friends first.
Except dating apps you first make a profile with pictures and a bio and then directly compete with other "candidates" for the privilege of... meeting a random person. Next you both lie to eachother the first couple meetings because that's what you are supposed to do apparently, much like with a job interview. Then finally, if you both like the fake personas you constructed for eachother, then you can act truly like yourself and discover all the things you should have figured out when you first met the person. After this you probably break up but hey maybe you like eachother's true selves too and it works out.
In comparison you can just meet someone irl and act yourself immediately because there's not the same competitive pressure to do the stupid online dating dog-and-pony show. Then if you have good chemistry you can advance at your own pace from there.
That's another thing: It genuinely feels like dating apps are an extension of the a la carte economy
All the streaming services, healthcare, phone plans, and now relationships. The most universal part of the human experience commodified? Cool!
this is absolutely correct. Online dating loses the element of spontaneity that sanctifies a romantic relationship with the "chance of fate." The event of falling in love with another person is forces you to reevaluate your whole life, even retroactively, to explain your coming together with this person. That can be a traumatic process for a lot of people (including me btw) so people would rather just pick from a menu.
We are almost returning to pre-romantic times where person love is a matter you put in the hands of other. Except now instead of it being your dad or uncle deciding who to marry it's "dating agencies" and apps who select people on a very similar basis (connections and wealth). What these apps offer is is precise love, love without messy business of falling in love, which are what makes up normal unpredictable romantic encounters. It's sad, I think a lot of people are afraid of these encounters nowadays because they can hurt a lot but they can also be so nice and we are losing it. It's like most of the treat-addicted West: we want the pleasures without having to pay any costs. Soda without sugar, beer without alcohol, sex without love.
Love shouldn’t be a job interview, it should be a natural relationship with a friend that becomes more over time.
i 100% agree, but that approach hasn't been very fruitful for me lol do you have a different experience?
Also, I have no evidence to back this up, but I would say on average NDs have trouble on dating apps because there aren't that many
Honestly. Nothing beats meeting people in real life through friends or doing something fun.
There was somewhat of a "golden age" of dating apps before they figured out how to "properly" calibrate the monetization of them.
That ship sailed in like 2014 and now they are largely vectors of psychic damage.
Get involved in a handful of routine social groups and you'll meet people organically.
Yeah one of the things that keeps me from using apps like tinder is a feeling that it's all fake, it's all crafted to some degree. I feel like if I put out an honest bio that I would sound like a weirdo. I just want to hang out and have some drinks maybe with another cool commie.
I also grew up during a time when dating online was a topic of ridicule.
Exactly. Like I feel as if my political views greatly shape my outlook on other things as well
Throw in the fact that I'm ND and it becomes a total mess
You know it might be cliche but I think this is where "just be yourself" is the sound approach. Would you really want to waste your time trying to be intimate partners with someone who's got shit politics or doesn't know how to dignify or respect your neurodiversity?
IDK, I think that it depends how you approach it and such. But I will say that a few things I have found, first pictures of you doing your hobbies go a long way to make yourself interesting and stand out without having a potential match wade through a bullet point list before finding anything interesting or unique about yourself. Even if you think your hobbies are not extremely unique, this will help more than the standard profile pics (shirtless abs, being with attractive friends, catching a fish, etc.)
I will repeat what others have said of saying "leftist politics" works well for getting matches since people can project whatever they want onto it. And I still think it does work out well, because there is also issues with just how people identify and posture, where a potential match can still take things that would seem more specific and useful, like communist, anarchist, or feminist in many varying ways. Even trying to "hide my power level" I ended up with a lot of matches that would chastise me for still listening to Democracy Now because they have "moderated", even if I just use it for a general run down on current events only.
Though, TBF, if I toot my own horn, I am very conventionally attractive so YMMV. And even just trying to describe my job, "I build astronomy instrumentation for studying distant galaxies" does easily attract certain types of women.
That does sound like a pretty neat job, how did you get into it? And do you have a degree in something like physics or engineering, if you don't mind me asking?
Yeah, physics. I was mostly interested broadly in electromagnetism, optics, and engineering. And a professor at the school I am at, that is now my thesis advisor, works on developing instrumentation for niche astronomy applications. Which also required a lot of custom device work, which seemed fun. It seemed like a good fit, and not what I initially thought I would do going into grad school.
Yeah that sounds really neat. I'm in an engineering program atm and while the professional opportunities make me feel generally optimistic, the material in the physics major just seems a lot cooler, you know?
I'm going for a physics minor as well but also I think about changing my major at least once every two weeks, lol. Open to any thoughts you might have about that.
Well, it depends what you want to do. You can do more with a Bachelors/Masters with engineering and you should have some freedom to take some interesting physics classes. If you do well enough in undergrad and get some contacts and practical skills you can still get some STEM/office job that will at least pay the bills with the physics degree, but probably not be that related to your physics degree and making less than with an engineering degree. If you are thinking about grad school/Ph.D. then I would say you would be better off going physics, because then you want to be doing something you find interesting and if you are not going into academia, most of the Ph.D. jobs will be more focused on your research skills and ability to "investigate" than the exact thing you studied in your thesis, though there is still a wage gap between engineering and physics Ph.D.s
Something else I would recommend looking into is an applied physics or "engineering physics" major/program depending on what your university offers. That seems to align with your interests and at least from anecdotes of my friends that did that, it seems to have a lot of the job opportunities of engineering while still taking the core physics classes. And applied physics can be pretty broad, from mostly electrical engineering (e.g. making lower noise electronics, with some insight from solid state physics) to building devices for quantum computing, or stuff like my work making detectors for astronomy.
Yeah, I wouldn't say I'm ugly (it's not like I'm not getting matches) the problem is finding actual "matches" so to speak
Myself having a very niche set of interests (some of which are odd obsessions) probably doesn't work to my advantage. And my job if very pedestrian, so not much going on there
Well, I would say that making the interests very obvious, like in the profile pictures I mentioned, could help. Even if they are niche or odd, your matches will be into or accepting of them if you are able to show them in the app. And, in general, part of attracting people is standing out and being unique. So unless they are really weird and off-putting, showing your interests will help even if the potential matches' attitudes are more of "that is interesting" or "I could accept that" rather than "I share all of those interests/hobbies exactly".
And just because you listed things like "deep conversations", you do need to be more specific since there are a lot of people trying to seem smarter or more interesting than they are that will use vague things like "deep conversation" or "sapiosexual" to seem smart. This is one of those things where being specific helps because whatever your current obsessions are, whether it is organic gardening, symbolic logic, late modern era French history, etc. It will come off more genuine than random person trying to sound smart like "I like intellectual conversations and the Oxford comma" even if the potential match doesn't share the exact same set of obsessions and interests.
I guess I should've clarified earlier that I'm not straight lol
I've tried grinder and stuff (and those other very desolate queer dating apps) but seems like most people are looking for hookups sadly
Be honest. If you choose to not be honest on a dating profile/first date then you're only setting yourself up to have to live up to your lies.
If you're boring and like to read books and talk then say that, trust there are lots of people who like to stay home and do their thing over going to the bar. Last thing you want is for some cutie of your dreams to not hit you up because you made it sound like you're really cool and into going to the club or whatever and they'd just want to stay home and be a homebody with you.
Becoming romantically invved with a new lerson is one of tbr most damgerous activities some kinds of people can do. You being able to put on a societally acceptable mask and play the role of a person they should want to date is a common attempt at a first test of your viability. It doesn't work well, but we all kinda internalized it.
I really don't like this take. You're judging a person on max 500 characters and a few photos. You can't adequately show off your personality on a tinder profile. It's straight up just a meat market. "it must be your shit personality" is just offensive.
You want to make a good impression, so you make yourself look good. You don’t open with “hey I’m a communist” but with something more smooth, like “Should Stalin have stopped at Berlin?” People look down on dating apps for making you present yourself in a certain way, and though dating apps can be more awful for it, that’s just dating in general.
I kind of hate this advice. I don't particularly see the improved dialogue as better than the first. It seems like rather common advice and not to seem like a hater, but most people aren't that funny. Dating apps seem to encourage the Joss Whedoning of all dialogue.
...
Nowhere did I say I my "personslity is great", so I'm curious how you came to the conclusion.
That's part of the reason why I thought I'd ask this q in the ND com, because I recognize that what I find interesting doesn't appeal to most people with a neurotypical brain structure
You play guitar, you draw, you have more than half a brain, you s'mow queed, you like to talk about movies and music and art... how is any of this an impediment?
You're a catch, comrade.
