5 Rules For Better Online-Dating Interactions

Kate Sloan

Online dating is a beast. If you’re not careful, it can consume your life, with its alluring promises and gameified interface. This is especially true if, like many of us, you’re just not finding it that useful for its purported purpose: connecting you with people you’ll get along with. Sometimes Tinder, Bumble, and OkCupid can feel like a pit of quicksand that sucks up all your time – and crushes your soul in the process. I often compare it to trying to find a diamond in a garbage heap.

In recent years, I’ve tried to streamline my online-dating habits by imposing a few rules on myself. These make my time on these sites and apps more efficient, by narrowing down my dating pool to only people I might actually enjoy talking to. Here are those rules, incase you want to try some for yourself…

Delete any message which does not specifically reference you/your profile.

I decided to implement this rule upon my most recent OkCupid rejoin, and as much as it is frustrating sometimes (SO MANY people just write “hi” or “hey,” or have clearly copy-and-pasted their message to multiple recipients!), it also simplifies things considerably. I no longer have to pick through every message-sender’s profile trying to decide if they merit a reply; the vast majority of contenders are taken out of the running immediately because they’ve failed to do the absolute bare minimum to even qualify for consideration.

This might seem like a harsh rule, but the more I think about it, the more sense it makes. Whether you’re looking for a one-night stand, a long-term relationship, or anything in between, you want to connect with people who will put effort in. Good sex requires effort; good dates require effort; sustaining any kind of relationship requires effort. If someone puts in almost zero effort from their very first message – when they should theoretically be trying the hardest to impress you – then that attitude will probably extend to other aspects of any potential relationship as well. Hit “delete” and make room for people who are actually trying!

If someone doesn’t ask you any questions or give you anything to ask them about, stop talking to them.

Some people are bad conversationalists. While it’s nice to pick up the slack for them and try to make a convo work in spite of their shortcomings, it’s not necessary. Yet again, this comes down to effort. If they answer your every question like you’re doing an informational interview, and never ask you anything, frankly they don’t deserve the pleasure of talking to you.

There are exceptions, of course. Some people are neurodivergent in ways that affect their conversation style, and some people are just better in person or on the phone than they are via text. If you get the sense from someone’s profile that they might be more interesting than their shitty messages have led you to believe, feel free to give them another chance in a different setting (like a phone call, or an actual date). But you are not at all obligated to. You are an interesting, fun person and there will be other people who are more than happy to have fabulous, engaging conversations with you.

Don’t look at someone’s profile for very long before messaging them.

I would say that on a platform with short profiles, like Tinder, you shouldn’t spend more than a minute looking at anyone’s bio – and on sites where profiles provide more information, like OkCupid, you should give yourself 3-5 minutes, tops. Online dating can be staggeringly time-consuming, especially if you fall into the trap of thinking you have to know you’re into someone before messaging them. Your gut feeling about a person is probably accurate, whether you find them intriguing or boring.

Some people online-date like they’re picky eaters wandering through a grocery store, examining each vegetable for discolorations, carefully reading every ingredient on the back of every cereal box. Others online-date like they’re grocery-shopping while hungry for a particular meal: they speed-walk through the store, mercenarily grabbing each item they need and shoving it immediately into their basket. Research about the paradox of choice shows us that people who spend a long time weighing the pros and cons of each option actually tend to be less happy with their eventual decision. So don’t waste time poring over profiles in an effort to understand the minds of strangers you might not even ever have a conversation with, let alone a relationship. Get in, get out, and then get back to your life.

If someone’s profile makes you laugh or smile, message them to tell them why. (Unless it’s mean.)

Try not to overthink this too much; make like Nike and just do it. Sparks of recognition or excitement while reading someone’s profile are depressingly rare – “Hey, I get that joke!” “I watch that TV show too!” “This picture is so goofy and cute!” – so you might as well chase them when they crop up. These are the types of shallow cues that can lead to a deep connection if pursued, so keep an eye out for anything in a profile that authentically delights you.

Of course, you can just send a quick note saying [x thing] cracked you up or piqued your interest, but you’re likelier to get a good response (or a response, period) if you add at least one question. If they referenced your favorite show, ask them which episode they love the most and why, or which character they most relate to. If they’re posing with a parrot in a funny pic on their profile, ask them about the circumstances that led to them meeting a parrot. You get the idea.

Suggest going on a date as soon as you’re comfortable doing so.

When I first started online-dating, I only wanted to physically meet up with someone after we’d chatted via text for at least a few weeks. I wanted to feel fairly certain that this new crush wasn’t a serial killer (or an awful conversationalist) before agreeing to hang out with them. I also wanted to learn enough about them to determine whether I was attracted to them. But I realized pretty fast that you can actually gauge all of these things better in person than you can via text. Even the most suave texter can be horrible in person, or at least just not what you were expecting. Better to find that out sooner than later, I say!

The easiest transition into a date-ask is to bring up an activity or event that the two of you might be interested in checking out together. If they mention they’re into improv, tell them about a specific show that’s coming up and ask if they’d like to go with you. If they say they like cocktails, ask if they’d like a date to that cool new cocktail bar that just opened in your city. Whatever it is, make sure it’s specific and soon, ideally within the next week – any longer and you could lose interest, or they could, or both. If and when the date actually happens, you’ll be able to learn quickly whether this potential relationship is destined to soar or to fall flat.

 

Do you have any rules for yourself when you look for dates/hookups online? What are they?

Protocol Diaries: The Airport Pickup

Kate Sloan

Protocol – that is to say, agreed-upon routines and traditions – has been important to me in several of my kink-tinged relationships, but has become especially so in my current long-distance relationship. It often feels like the glue that holds us together when we’re apart, the fuel that helps us power through our long absences from each other’s physical lives.

I am a person who enjoys routines and traditions more generally, as well. I love that my mom makes the same nostalgic dishes on Christmas every year; I love watching fireworks in the park on annual holidays; I love kicking my writer-brain into gear with the same familiar coffee and muffin at the start of every deadline day. These repeated actions lend some structure and purpose to my life, giving me something exciting to look forward to and something comforting to reflect on. So of course I feel that way in my relationships too.

When Matt first started coming to Toronto to visit me, I would always wait dutifully for them at my apartment until they arrived in an Uber. As they neared my building, I would come downstairs and stand outside, glancing nervously at their location on the live map on my phone every few seconds, until they rolled up, got out, and kissed me, suitcase in tow.

But at a certain point, I just couldn’t wait around anymore. Finishing my work early and pacing around my apartment in anticipation often left me feeling agitated and powerless. When you miss someone as much as I always miss Matt, you want to see them as soon as you possibly can. And the soonest I can conceivably see Matt, when they come to visit, is in the arrivals area of the airport.

It gives us the chance to be almost cinematically romantic. The dramatic full-hearted kiss at the airport is such an iconic scene; I can’t help but smile when I see couples reuniting in this way. I notice people smiling at us when we do it, too, as if we’ve reminded them that wholesome true love still exists (though, in private, we’re not exactly wholesome).

At this point you might be wondering, “Kate, why are you calling this a ‘protocol’ like it’s a kink thing, when it’s actually just a romantic tradition?” Fair point, my astute friend. There are three elements that make this activity kinky. First of all, Matt always specifies in advance a particular item I should have ready for them when they arrive, like coffee, candy, or gum. Secondly, sometimes there is some secret sexiness going on under my clothes, in the form of lingerie, a butt plug, or an insertable vibrator I’ve been ordered to wear. And thirdly, anything can be kinky when viewed through a kinky lens. Every time I show up to greet my beloved at the airport, I think of it as not only a romantic gesture but an act of service I am doing for them as their submissive.

I’ve repeated this tradition so many times that my body has started to recognize it at almost a cellular level. When I walk to the subway station, get on the train, and then get onto the airport-bound bus at Kipling station, my brain and guts both know exactly what’s about to happen, and the excitement builds in my belly like the good kind of pre-show jitters. Even though Matt and I have been dating for nearly two years, I still get just as excited to see them in person as I did for our first few dates, and I think this ritual is part of the reason why; it creates a Pavlovian response that puts me into an eager, enthusiastic brainspace, receptive to love and affection.

By the time we get into an Uber that’ll take us back to my apartment, and I lean my head on Matt’s shoulder, I’ve been through an entire emotional journey. This process elevates the mundane aggravation of a long-distance relationship into something almost ceremonial. Love is worth celebrating and getting excited about, and this is one small way I’ve found to do that.

Down Deep (A Hypnokinky Poem)

Kate Sloan

down deep i drop for you
so well down the well
and well i just don’t know
how deep i can go
i’m drifting drooping dropping
flowing floating finding
my way to that deepest place
so lost and lovely, listening
to your voice my guide my love
my tether and my terror
we are journeying together
to a spot at the centre of a spiral
feeling flummoxed, flustered, flushed
i flutter, or my eyelids do
they’re heavy now so heavy
that they do what eyelids do
and close without contention
so i let myself let go
and let you drag me deeper
with the wonder of your words
so rhythmic like a ride
over the rapids, over falls and drops
until i’m floating down the river
of my empty addled mind

 

Author’s note: I wrote this as part of the Smutathon!

Book Review: The Offline Dating Method

Kate Sloan

I receive many press releases per week, and most of them hold zero interest for me. Weird new porn movies. Shitty new vibrators. Swanky events I can’t go to because they’re in New York or Los Angeles.

But recently I got a press release that did pique my interest. It was about a new book that had just been released, The Offline Dating Method: How to Attract a Great Guy in the Real World, by dating coach Camille Virginia.

The concept caught my eye because the realm of “offline dating” advice is usually presided over by male pickup artists. They call it different things – “day game,” “night game,” and so on – but it’s essentially the same idea, just twisted into a different form. PUAs are misogynist manipulators, but this female writer, I gathered, was not advocating the shitty kind of manipulation – maybe just the kind that can get you a date with someone who finds you attractive but who you otherwise never would’ve talked to.

Indeed, while Neil Strauss’s books are guides for men on picking women up, Camille Virginia’s book is a guide for women on getting picked up by men. (Yes, it is painfully heteronormative, so I’m sorry for any accordingly heteronormative statements that follow. Virginia does acknowledge in her introduction that a lot of the tips she offers will work on a broad range of people, not just straight men – and she’s right – but the book is written explicitly through the lens of “You are a woman and you want men to ask you out.”)

Virginia’s central thesis is that meeting potential romantic partners in “the real world” is superior to online dating, for a plethora of reasons: you can make better connections more quickly, and you’ll know much sooner whether you’re actually attracted to and compatible with the person you’re flirting with. In three meaty chapters full of headings and subheadings, she explains how to seem magnetic and approachable, how to start and sustain a conversation with a man you don’t know, and how to transition that conversation into getting asked on a date.

At first, the most striking thing to me about this book was how anathema it seemed to how people my age actually seem to date, and to want to date. I’d recently read an Atlantic article about the so-called “sex recession.” The millennial interviewees spoke about meeting “offline” as an impossibility, an archaic relic, in the wake of Tinder and its cohorts. Take, for example, this sentence where the author, Kate Julian, is chatting with a young female source about Sex and the City: “’Miranda meets Steve at a bar,’ she said, in a tone suggesting that the scenario might as well be out of a Jane Austen novel, for all the relevance it had to her life.” But for all their romanticization of meeting a partner in a bar or a bookstore, these millennials also acknowledge that this type of meet-cute wouldn’t really be welcome in their lives. Julian, who met her husband in an elevator in 2001, writes, “I was fascinated by the extent to which this prompted other women to sigh and say that they’d just love to meet someone that way. And yet quite a few of them suggested that if a random guy started talking to them in an elevator, they would be weirded out. ‘Creeper! Get away from me,’ one woman imagined thinking.”

This is in line with my own experience of dating in a world filled with smartphones and social anxiety. Once, during an extended dry spell in which it felt like I’d never have sex with someone who desired me ever again, I was approached by a random flirty man at a food court while I was reading. After a tense conversation in which I basically politely told him to leave me the hell alone, I tweeted, “Dear men who try to pick me up in food courts: can u not? I’m just tryna eat my General Tao chicken & read my book, bro.” A male friend replied, “Complains about lack of male attention by night, complains about male attention by day” – which enraged me at the time (and still to this day, honestly – hi, Brent), because it implies that all romantic/sexual attention is the same and should be received with the same warmth, whether it’s wanted or not, and that if I ever push back against negative attention, I don’t deserve the positive attention I want.

But as misguided as that feedback was, it also, in some ways, captured the same millennial dating contradiction Julian’s interviewees talked about in her article: we romanticize offline “meet-cutes,” but, at the same time, we find them scary, annoying, or just plain weird.

This is the somewhat hostile context in which Virginia’s writing her book on how to get picked up in public. There’s very little acknowledgment in the book that people might think you’re odd or creepy for trying to talk to them on the subway or at the grocery store – she just says that women are rarely perceived as creepy, and that if someone gives you a weird look for talking to them, they’re not a good match for you anyway and you should just shrug it off and move onto the next person. She does acknowledge that there are certain places and cultures where it might actually be unsafe for a woman to initiate a conversation in public with a man she doesn’t know, but for most women, she seems to think it’s a perfectly normal and acceptable thing to do. I had to suspend my disbelief a little to accept this premise that underlies her entire book, but I’m a socially anxious introvert, so of course I did.

Even if you’re not a straight woman trying to get a straight man to ask for your number, there’s still lots of valuable stuff in this book about general social skills. It contains a lot of practical advice about sparking and maintaining conversations, building confidence, and developing a natural curiosity about your fellow (hu)man. When I read some sections aloud to my extremely extroverted partner, they said all the social tips were fairly obvious to them and almost go without saying, but I didn’t feel that way at all – I think a lot of people who are as socially awkward as me, or moreso, would find these tips illuminating. They give you a blueprint for developing your relational skillset and having meaningful (i.e. not small-talk-y) conversations with people you just met.

So, yes, this is a useful dating book. But I actually found it to be a fascinating read on an entirely different level as well, and here’s where this review gets really weird. As this book picks up steam in the middle, it starts to read like – there’s no other way I can say this – conversation fetish porn.

Hear me out. I’d never heard of a conversation fetish before that phrase popped into my head while reading The Offline Dating Method, but I’m sure it exists. My friend Bex often talks about having a “flirting fetish,” being turned on by witty repartée and double entendres – and that’s what I thought of as I read Camille Virginia’s rapturous magnum opus.

I’m not saying that Virginia necessarily has this fetish, but the way she writes about good conversations is genuinely erotic at times. “You’re going to become addicted to how fulfilling it feels to make other people feel good,” she warns in a section about committing “random acts of kindness” as icebreakers in public. She colorfully defines a “meaningful connection” as “a genuine conversation that feels natural, not forced in any way, and gives each person a feeling of deep fulfillment… being completely present in a conversation and co-creating a shared experience.” After an example conversation in which a man tells her that his cufflinks bear his English family’s coat of arms, Virginia writes, “Boom! You just went from the topic of cufflinks to talking about his family’s 300-year-old estate in Cornwall in less than ten seconds” – profound conversations are as compelling and exciting to her as “number closes” and “kiss closes” are for pick-up artists, and she writes about them with the same slick sensuality. “I’ll admit it: I have an addiction to connection,” she says; “I absolutely love it.”

Virginia talks with reverence about hallmarks of human kinship like sustaining eye contact, making relatable jokes, exchanging compliments, and creating intimacy through authenticity. “Conversations will become an experience that are ten times better than any movie, TV show, or book because you’re not just observing; you’re living the story with another human in real time,” she effuses. “This will not only feel incredibly fulfilling for you but everyone you create that connection with, which means people will naturally want more of you and the good feelings they now associate with you.” She could literally be talking about sex or kink here instead of conversation and the sentiment would still feel true. I’ve never seen someone describe the simple act of dialoguing with such carnal enthusiasm.

I’m not at all saying this to shame her, whether or not this is actually a kink for her, or for anyone else. I actually find it fascinating to observe how eroticizing a particular act, and/or fitting it into a kink framework, can help me look at that act with new eyes and feel invigorated to include it in my life more often. It’s like how thinking of comedians as reaction-soliciting tops has helped me enjoy comedy even more. Understanding that conversations unroll with electric and pleasurable interpersonal energy, just like sex or kink, has made me more jazzed than usual to engage people in conversation, even people I don’t know very well or at all. I enjoy the process more now that I’m specifically chasing the fulfilment and connection Virginia writes about so descriptively (and erotically). I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: kink is magic.

There are some problematic things about this book, as you might imagine. Safety concerns aren’t acknowledged enough. Every reader is assumed to be a woman who wants to date men but doesn’t want to be so forward as to initiate a date herself. (“Asking a man out myself has never turned out well for me,” Virginia mentions. “I’ve been told by many men that they prefer to ask the woman out and plan the date.”) Most vexingly – and pretty typically, for the dating self-help genre – the author uses herself and her own stories as examples of how easy it is to meet potential dates IRL, without particularly acknowledging that she’s conventionally attractive, thin, white, able-bodied, and socially capable in ways that many people are not. Advice that amounts to “Be yourself!” rings pretty hollow when your self isn’t as traditionally desirable as the advice-giver’s self. I will say that her conversational suggestions don’t necessarily rely on you being attractive, but their positive reception might.

Overall, though, while I went into The Offline Dating Method expecting a light and frothy dating guide that reads like cobbled-together Cosmo tips, it is actually so much more than that. It’s an ode to the beauty of human connection, and a road map to help you get there. It’s a brave stand in a world that has increasingly digitally anesthetized us to our fellow people. It’s also – most surprisingly of all – some of the most explicit and satisfying erotica available for a subculture I’m not sure even exists: conversation fetishists.

 

Thanks to Camille Virginia and co. for supplying me with this book to read!

Equality is Not Necessarily Symmetry

Kate Sloan

Tristan Taormino writes in her legendary non-monogamy guide, Opening Up, “Some people have confused equality with symmetry.” She’s talking about open relationships, and how sometimes it can cause tension between partners if one of them goes on lots of dates and the other doesn’t. But this insight jumped out at me when I first read it, because it applies to so much in relationships, especially non-normative relationships.

Take, for example, Dominant/submissive dynamics, the likes of which are discussed in salacious detail on websites like OMGKinky and, um, this one. From the outside, those connections may look completely imbalanced. The Dominant tells the submissive what to do; the Dominant might have more freedoms and options available to them, while their sub might have more responsibilities and limitations; it might appear that the Dominant always gets their way. But on the inside of this relationship – provided it is healthy and ethical – both participants know that they each have an equal say in what happens between them. The lending and borrowing of power is powerful for them both because it was and is a voluntary decision, made from an even playing field.

Another area where the “symmetry =/= equality” concept works is in relationships between people whose mental health situations differ drastically – whether one partner struggles with mental illness and one doesn’t, or they each have a different diagnosis. Partners in these situations will simply have different needs from one another, and that’s fine. Sometimes I feel bad that my partner takes care of me more than I take care of them, but they don’t need the amount and types of care that I need, because they don’t have my issues. Not only that, but they’ve explicitly told me many times that they like taking care of me – so our “asymmetrical” relationship isn’t inequitable at all.

Even something as simple as differing temperaments or love languages can make a relationship asymmetrical-yet-equitable. Maybe one needs a lot of alone time and the other doesn’t; maybe one loves receiving oral sex in the morning but the other hates having their sleep interrupted; maybe one feels loved when their partner sends “good morning” and “good night” texts but the other doesn’t need the same in return. Whatever the case may be, as long as both partners are able to figure out an arrangement that works for them, they both need not get exactly the same treatment from each other. It’s fine if your needs and wants are different from your partners’.

What this all boils down to is internalizing the simple human truth that we’re all different people, with different preferences and needs and boundaries and desires. It doesn’t work to impose exactly the same everything on both people in a relationship; that’s not a flexible enough strategy for the vast complexity and randomness of human personalities. What’s ultimately important is that you’re both getting equal amounts of what you want. That’s a metric you can use to test your relationship’s equality – so that you can get back to your delightfully asymmetrical activities together, guilt-free.

 

This post was sponsored. As always, all writing and opinions are my own.