I'm not a seducer. I'm not a pickup artist. I'm just a perpetually single guy tired of the status quo. I'd probably even settle for a skinny girl I can call at 2AM on weekends when I get the munchies and my friends are all busy - no further requirements necessary. But if I were to make the effort to put an ad on the front page of the NY Times, I would probably be more specific about my requirements:

Single 22 yr old bachelor looking for attractive redhead. Preference given to girls who play instruments or know elementary group theory. I enjoy cunnilingus and will exchange great sex for midnight food-runs and fidelity.

And so on. Not surprisingly, I haven't found what I'm looking for so far. In fact, I have trouble finding dates at all, partly because I'm surrounded by guys all day and partly because I'm a shy introvert. However, after being mostly single for two years and occasionally reading seddit, I decided to finally install tinder. But of course I didn't tell anyone.

My first match was a cute russian geek who lived a few hours north of me. We flirted for a few days and discussed meeting up, but I could never go north and she could never come south. After her I had no more matches for a few days and I became convinced the app had banished me to algorithmic hell as revenge for swiping right every swipe. I even emailed tech support and they assured me the issue was non technical. Ouch. I had to delete my account and create a new account which also got no matches before realizing that my pictures needed improving.

I went on a trip with my little brother taking stupid pictures around town - me imitating a mannequin, me posing for a picture next to an advertisement of a family, and so on. I was very excited and rushed to show my one confidant - a gay friend who I knew wouldn't judge me for using tinder because he uses gay apps to find gay people. But the conversation went like this:

Me: Look! I have funny pictures.

Gay friend: These pictures are gay.

Me: No, they're funny.

Gay friend: Well as long as you like them... But I'm telling you, they're gay.

I didn't know what to do so I admitted I had tinder to an older female friend and asked her opinion. She didn't like the pictures much either. I deleted most of them and found some acceptable pictures of me on Facebook.

Slowly the matches started coming in. I tried out openers:

Hey! Is that picture near [random street name]?

No response.

Hey! You seem pretty exciting. Is your life really full of boats and horses?

No response.

Hey! You have a great smile :)

Ding! Ding! Ding! An American girl staying in Israel responded. (I live in Israel.) We scheduled a date, but the day it was supposed to happen I received the following message:

I know this sounds crazy, but I was asked to do this thing on Israeli reality tv where they take americans and have them pick cactuses... [like a million sentences explaining]... and if we go out tonight I wont get enough sleep.

It was such an obvious lie that I knew it had to be true. So I texted back lol okay and we rescheduled.

The day of the date arrived and I was nervous. My last date had been three months ago with a wonderful girl who dumped me and gave me mono. So I was pretty nervous. I put on a fancy shirt. I looked in the mirror and took it off. I put it back on again - in short, I made a fool of myself for a good fifteen minutes before leaving for the city.

But the second I stepped off the bus my legs stopped shaking. I was in a city I loved. I was going to have fun. Dates are fun. Never mind finding someone long term, I was going to enjoy the night.

When I got the following text:

sry, i'm an hour and a half late. can we still meet?

...I didn't mind. The girl wasn't a geek, wasn't a redhead, and had very little going for her - except for her accessibility and willingness to meet. I couldn't understand what I had ever been worried about. I reminded myself of my own attractiveness despite the random girls on tinder who wouldn't swipe right at me. (Tinder can be an equally big confidence booster and killer.)

I told my date we could meet late and I set off to find a good bar. I had told her to meet me at Dizengoff center, the bar center of Tel Aviv, figuring that I could arrive early and wing the rest. The thing you have to know about Tel Aviv is that people love the word bar. Everything in Tel Aviv is a bar. There are sandwich bars and bistros bars and hummus bars and yogurt bars and tapas bars - you name it. I spent a while exploring nearby bar-bars before finding one I liked.

An hour passed. Then another twenty minutes. Ten minutes before I'm supposed to meet my date I get a text message:

my cellphone is gonna die. can you like name a landmark at dizengoff center where we can meet?

Does this girl really exist? I wondered. I texted back a landmark all the same.

Ten minutes later I couldn't find my date. Fifteen minutes later she was still nowhere to be seen. After sixteen minutes a tall girl stepped off the bus. She wasn't hot, but she wasn't overweight or entirely unattractive. She looked very little like my tinder date, but based on the way she lingered at the bus stop I knew it must be her. Oh well.

I said hi and gave my date a hug. We walked to a bar and a few things become immediately obvious:

  1. My date does exist

  2. My date isn't someone I would normally consider dating

  3. My date is leaving the country in two months

I'm not going to lie. Point number three can be a powerful motivator. Especially if you haven't had sex in a while.

I read seddit now and then so I want to thank you guys for all the tips that helped me on my date. I used the listen-to-the-girl maneuver. I did the upper-right-elbow twitch to build kino... Haha, I'm just messing with you guys. I did keep in mind some stuff I read on here, like leading her by the elbow from bar to bar and making sure I built up to a kiss with some body contact, despite a growing inclination to not go out again.

I'll admit it. I had fun. I had so much fun just getting back into dating that I bragged about it to a few friends and discovered that they all had tinder themselves and were keeping it a secret too. So much for social stigma.

As for me? I'll try and improve my pictures a bit. Maybe I'll write a bio (are those really necessary?). But if I can't increase the number of matches I get on tinder I'll probably just delete it to avoid the stress. I'm not entirely without ways of meeting girls offline. Nonetheless I'm happy I tried.