When Ben Ellman, 26, moved to NYC in 2015 and fired up his Tinder and OkCupid profiles, he was expecting to meet a bevy of compatible women. Instead, the 5-foot-9 journalist was swiped left by matches because of his height — or lack thereof.Tinder makes every Alpha on it considerably more accessible to every woman in the vicinity. So, it should be no surprise that women will raise their standards accordingly. Game theory indicates that whichever sex is more patient is the one that will elevate its requirements, and there is no question that women are less driven to pursue the opposite sex than men.
“It seems like all the women online were going for guys 6-foot-1 and above,” Ellman, who lives in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, tells The Post. He estimates that for every 50 women he expressed interest in, only one would swipe right on him. “People can feel worse when using Tinder because it’s such a meritocracy for hot people … People swipe left or right based on your profile picture, and that can make you feel bad about yourself.”
He’s not the only one who faced a drop in confidence after using Tinder. A new survey at the University of North Texas found that singles who used Tinder are more likely to have lower self-esteem and feel unhappy about their looks than non-dating-app users. When it came to gender, male Tinder users reported lower self-esteem than females.
So, once more, a tool developed by geeks works out a) for the benefit of women, and, b) to the detriment of less-attractive men like the men who developed it.