Don’t lose the countless hours curating your profile. Don’t over-exercise your thumbs. Someone decent is not going to appear on the next swipe. It is all a total waste of time.

Your future partner is not on an app. They’re not in any of the hot-ish photos of people you matched with. They are a real person, living and breathing out there, somewhere far beyond the screen you’re reading from right now 🙃

In the 4 ½ years I used dating apps, I swiped on thousands of guys, and only met up with one that I wanted to go on a second date with. That guy turned out to be a complete f*ckboy. My logical mind was no match for this location-based game of pictures and false appearances. I came up with a strategy, and would only swipe right on guys who:  

1.    Had attended an excellent college. For example, they were Ivy League educated 🎓

2.    Were really ambitious. They were the CEO of a startup, or something as ridiculous as that 🌠

3.    Were at least 6 feet tall 💂🏻‍♂️

4.    And maybe if they had a cute cat 🐈

Shallow? Yes. Did it work? Hell no, and painfully so. When I met up with these people, we never hit it off. If they were nice, I didn’t have sexual chemistry with them. Otherwise, they were so up their own assholes that I got irritated just talking to them. If a guy is too obsessed with himself, he will never make time for you. He will never cook you dinner 👨🏻‍🍳 That is who I met from the dating apps.

First dates, by the way, are always awful. Whether it was going out to dinner or casually exploring the city together, it always felt like an interview. Out of awkwardness I opted for “So, what do you do?” or “Where did you grow up?”. I could never bring myself to relax into a spontaneous mood for love. Drinking alcohol just made me want to get out of there and walk home, pondering the world somewhere else on my own.

I’ve found that the best way to meet your future partner is to live your own goddamn life as you please. Let them miraculously appear to you IRL. Yes, real life. I know it sounds scary, but it is the only way. Getting to know them first is actually very useful. For one thing, you know if you already find them attractive, and you won’t waste all your time and money meeting up with everyone else.

I met my current boyfriend in the office kitchen at my previous company. By the way, he is not Ivy League educated, he is not obsessed with becoming a CEO, and he is not 6”0 tall. It turns out that my arbitrary standards for dudes on dating apps didn’t matter at all when it came to real life. At the end of the day, it was all down to good old-fashioned chemistry and pheromones 🧪.

So, delete the apps. It’s time to surrender yourself to the only algorithm that has worked for millennia: real life. Let the magical laws of the universe show your ovaries (or testicles) the way 🔮.