Hot off the heels of my last post, I bring to you this special post about my online dating process! And yes, I need a process.
Poly is hard. Online dating is hard. Online dating as a poly person is insanity. And yet, I persist. Truth be told, as frustrating as it can be, it’s also pretty fun in its way.
As a woman, I have the luxury of a plethora of matches to sort through. On the app I use, Feeld, there is a “feed” section and a “likes” section to look through. The feed consists of profiles that match your search parameters, based on things like distance and interests. The likes section consists of people who have already liked your profile, giving you an opportunity to like them back or pass (or do nothing). I mainly focus on my feed because people in my likes section are rarely within my desired parameters. Anybody can like me, and people tend to spam the “like” button just hoping for a single match.
When I’m browsing, I have a number of things that I look for to determine if I want to “like” somebody else’s profile. First, I have a list of things that are immediate disqualifiers.
Currently those disqualifiers include:
- They’re not local.
- They have little to nothing written on their profile.
- They have no pictures of their face.
- They have pictures of their dick (including through underwear, pants, etc.)
- They have sexually explicit pictures. Why put that out there for just anyone? This is a clear indicator that they’re just fucking around.
- They have multiple pictures of themselves flexing.
- They are extremely chiseled. Frankly, I prefer a softer “dad bod” over a super buff aesthetic. In my experience, men who spend that much time on maintaining an aggressively masculine image usually aren’t the kind I want to date.
- They have pictures of themselves smoking or drinking. I don’t mind if they use cannabis or drink, but it shouldn’t be their whole personality to the point where they’re using it as a profile picture.
- They say they want a “low-pressure” or “no expectations” connection. This is code for being unable to meet even minimal expectations, and not wanting to try.
- They say they’re “here for a good time, not a long time,” or not looking for anything “serious.” Once again, this indicates that they do not want a real relationship, just easy sex. Not for me.
- They use vague phrases like “looking to meet people and see where things go,” or “looking for like-minded/open-minded individuals.”
- They mention the size of their dick, or describe themselves as “hung.”
- They call themselves a “bull” or “daddy.”
- They only talk about sex in their profile, and/or their focus is on BDSM.
- They have comments in their bio that indicate a lack of body positivity, such as stating they are looking for “fit” individuals, which is code for “not fat.”
- I can’t see myself being attracted to them.
- They say they want to leave politics out of their conversations. That means they’re conservatives, and that means we can’t be friends; ditto for saying they don’t care about your vax status.
- They have an inordinate amount of grammatical and spelling errors, to the point that I need to question their intelligence and maturity.
- They’re straight. (Okay, I let this one slide usually but it does deduct points). I will definitely ask questions to make sure they’re not toxically straight.
- Their name is Josh, Brandon, Jake, or Alex or any variation of it. (Mostly kidding…)
The survivors of that round of screening can then be assessed for overall attraction level, personality, and common interests. I need to reject profiles for people I don’t feel at least a little attracted to, as well as those with interests that are vastly different than ours. I also look for a sense of their personality, although it’s hard to tell with just a profile and some pictures; I often reserve judgment on this until we’ve started chatting.
After I like a profile, I have to wait for them to like me back. Sometimes they do and sometimes they don’t; there is no way to see your liked profiles, so no way to easily track who you’re hoping will like you back. In 99% of cases, I don’t remember anything about their profile when someone likes me back and we connect, so I have to review it again to help me with our conversation.
Once we are connected (both liked each other’s profiles), I almost always wait for them to message me first. This isn’t a principle thing, it’s a practicality thing. I have dozens of connections and I don’t want to waste my time talking to every single one of them. I’d rather wait to see who’s motivated enough to message me first.
In our chat, the first thing I’m looking for is the “secret phrase” from my profile, which lets me know that they actually read it or at least skimmed it. If they don’t use the phrase, I don’t respond. If a chat gets going, I’m looking for kindness, clarity, and banter. I’m evaluating their communication level and consistency. I’m giving them time to disqualify themselves, if they’re the kind of people who need to be disqualified. Unsolicited dick pics, requests for sexy pictures, jumping into sexting too quickly, or just acting really fucking weird are all reasons to say goodbye.
I also use our chat to get to know them and decide if we could be compatible, at least on paper. I have an FAQ PDF that gives prospective partners information about us and our approach to poly, which is required reading. If they have positive things to say about the PDF, I ask them a bunch of questions. I ask about their schedule to see if ours aligns. I ask about their intentions, which unfortunately many of them lie about. I ask about their sexual interests and more importantly, their sexual safety practices. If they are able to answer all of my questions satisfactorily, I’ll offer to move our chat off of Feeld and try to schedule a time to meet.
One new rule I have is that I like to wait at least a week after connecting before meeting up in person. This helps screen out any people who were just looking for a quick thing, and aren’t going to be consistent long-term. If they show me that they still want to keep talking to me after a week, then we can meet. They also need to provide their most recent STI testing results, usually before we meet but sometimes we’ll wait to ask for this until after the first time we’ve met.
If a guy or couple gets to the stage of actually meeting, you’d think that we’d be off to a pretty promising start. Unfortunately, while only a very small proportion of connections get through to this point, even then I have found that the majority won’t last.
When we meet, I’m mainly looking for chemistry. Are they easy to talk to? Do we have things to talk about? Do they seem into me, and/or Romeo? Am I still attracted to them in person? Usually, people do pass this stage, because I’m really open-minded about dating and I don’t usually reject people unless I have a good reason. Sometimes there’s just no chemistry here, and I have to call it, but that’s pretty rare.
If there’s some chemistry, I’ll usually kiss them the first time we meet. Ditto for Romeo if there’s a woman or a bi/pansexual guy involved. But we try very hard not to give in to temptation to do anything sexual on the first “date.” Occasionally (looking at you, Dylan!) the chemistry is just too overpowering and we break our own rules, but this is also very rare.
The second time we meet, we are open to being intimate, but only “soft” activities (no intercourse and definitely no oral, which we reserve for long-term partners). The third time we meet, we are open to having sex, as long as we’ve continued to feel positive about the relationship. In order to feel positive about a relationship, I need the other person to be reciprocating and at times initiating conversations, being emotionally supportive when needed, and continuing to progress our friendship as well as our romantic relationship. I need to feel good things from them, basically.
Our process has grown and evolved significantly over the past weeks and months. My hope is that by setting higher standards, we will get better results and not so many unpleasant incidents.
I consider myself open-minded, kind, considerate, and a good communicator. I don’t ghost people, period. I don’t stand people up. I don’t lie about my intentions, or try to pressure people into anything. I feel like these are just the ingredients for basic human decency, and yet so many of the people I talk to in the online dating world do not have those characteristics.
It’s a jungle out there, and I really am not exaggerating when I say it sometimes feels like I’m wading through a swamp.
To illustrate my point, I present to you my latest Bottom of the Barrel connection. Usually I put these at the beginning of my posts, but this one felt like a great finale for this particular post.
I started talking to this guy the other day and it quickly got… weird. At first I thought maybe he was just a little awkward, but it quickly became apparent that it was much worse than that. I’m not entirely confident that this profile isn’t just a bot of some kind, but I’m not sure what the purpose of that would be. It felt as if his responses were a bit random and unrelated to what I had just said. Ultimately, he got really gross and I think you can all join me in collectively agreeing that this conversation would be best described as “ew.”
I wonder, does this method ever work for this guy? I sure hope not.
Jude, I suggest that you go learn how to talk to humans before attempting to date one. Because, this? This is gross. Please stop.