Hello world!!! Syd and Lara here, and we're both single and on dating apps. Like, how else do you meet people? Whatever. Anyway, we're here today to discuss a very important issue.
We're tired of people** making this same mistake over and over again in dating app culture, so we made up a term for it. (Yanno, so we can publicly recognize what a plague on society it is.) We call it "expe-dating."
Let's set the scene: You've just matched with someone on a dating app. They message you, you exchange approximately three texts, but there's no real connection found through text yet. You haven't even smiled yet. You haven't laughed!!!!! You barely remember this person's NAME!!!!!!!!!!
Then, just two or three measly texts in, they hit you with the:
WHAT. THE. HELL. IS. WRONG. WITH. YOU. PEOPLE.
Look — we can *obviously* understand wanting to see if you click in person instead of just over text. Duh. But let's take a second and think this through.
Has your conversation thus far made any effort to convince *literally anyone* that they should take time out of their week to meet up?
millennial dating u: hey wyd wednesday them: working to survive. wyd saturday u: being tired from working to survive then laundry them: nice
And if you're already asking someone to meet up without having any sort of ~real~ conversation, that makes it pretty clear that you just wanna meet up based on their pictures.
Also, all of the aforementioned doesn't even take into account our perspective as two heterosexual women...THIS SHIT IS DANGEROUS!!!
But don't be mistaken — most of the time, our end goal is also to meet up and go on a good date! That's why we downloaded these apps and spent hours of our lives building a profile and swiping! We just wanna put an end to expe-dating by making sure we feel pretty good about our dates going into them. Sue us??
So please, muster up the decency to have an actual convo with your matches about yourselves, your interests, and what you have in common before just asking them to meet up. Or literally just ask us what kind of peanut butter we prefer. SOMETHING. ANYTHING.
i’m sick of men on dating apps being like “hey lol wanna grab a drink?” right off the bat. No, DEREK, I don’t wanna fucking grab a drink. Wanna know why Derek? Because I don’t even fucking know you and you can’t bother to send more than two texts my god at least TRY
And next time you think about expe-dating someone, do us all a favor and please just don't.
