I (M) graduated from uni about two years ago and have been using CMB for quite a few months since late last year, hoping to find “the one” to spend the rest of my life with.
To speed up my search because I’m not getting any younger and my friends are mostly all attached already, I got myself a premium subscription (which isn’t quite expensive if you divide it out). To give some context, I’m average looking and have a decent career with above average salary (albeit less than ideal hours).
To date, I’ve went on a few dates (around 4 ladies over the span of 5-6 months), but decided not to take things further with these dates because it just didn’t felt right/suitable. I must say that they were all nice people, of course, but things don’t always work out the way one intends.
I read about people getting married after meeting their significant others with whom they eventually embark on long-term relationships with on dating apps, but my journey with dating apps hasn’t been very eventful, to say the least.
In fact, I’ve started to feel exhausted with using dating apps. The repetitive process of liking someone, matching, starting a conversation, and trying to find similarities is draining.
While I’ve had a decent number of matches (not fake accounts, because my matches do respond and some of them are even friends of friends), not every lady I’ve matched with is equally sincere and genuine.
Some of them take hours to reply, notwithstanding that their average reply time as reflected in CMB is much lesser (benefits of premium – knowledge is power, why waste time with matches who aren’t interested?). Of course I do appreciate that people get busy and have their lives outside of dating apps (because I don’t reply immediately as well), but if one is really interested to take things further, he/she would definitely take time out of his/her schedule to respond to messages – I frequently end work at unearthly hours but still try to respond after work.
There are also other matches who are just… interested to talk about themselves, and don’t reciprocate in terms of asking me questions. Suffice to say that I’m a good texter (i.e. I know how to keep a conversation going, chat about interesting stuff, and I always initiate conversations), but with people who only respond to what I ask without asking me back anything, the conversation becomes very one-way and one-sided in nature, and I really don’t see the point in continuing the conversation any further.
Maybe it’s me being fussy, but I’ve come across matches who are equally interested to know more about me and have great active listening skills, and to that extent, they have set the bar rather high. But, isn’t it ironic that there are ladies who “appreciate when my date is a good listener / can hold a conversation well” when they themselves cannot quite satisfy that criteria themselves?
For obvious reasons, I’m not even going to start on bagels (not matches) with descriptions like: appreciate when my date “lets me pet his doggo” or “brings me on a night ride”.
But before this becomes a rant, I would just like to express how exhausting it is to use dating apps, and ask all you lucky folks who found your S/O whether it is worth the trouble and effort to continue using the apps and conversations, notwithstanding my exhaustion, and how long did it take for you to find your S/O on a dating app? I can really do with some positivity.