I’ve resisted it for as long as I could, but I finally caved: for one month, I’m going to use Tinder in Denver.

But to make this month truly special, I’m giving you full transparency.

I want to document my ENTIRE Tinder experiences: the eccentric profiles, the matches, the messages, and dates. How did it work? What were the obstacles? Any successes? Failures? Mistakes?

So, on 28 June, I kicked off my Tinder account and got to swipin’! One week and a sore thumb later, I’ve looked at hundreds of profiles in the Denver area and saw a few ladies I thought I could vibe with. Great! Right swipe!

But after these seven days, I’ve noticed one GLARING problem. One that could jeopardize the entire viability of this article series.

I’m not getting matches.

My Current Performance

After roughly 350 right swipes, I’ve gotten two legitimate matches.

TWO.

That’s a 0.57% match rate.

According to STATS Inc., that ranks me as the worst batter in the Live Ball Era. (That’s a baseball joke, by the way.)

My first question was, “How was that possible?” (I mean, I made sure NOT to swipe right on EVERY girl so that Tinder would recognize me as a human, not a bot.) Take a step back and ask yourself that as well.

A simple confounding factor is the long, July 4th weekend — people are out of town, in the mountains, at barbecues, or drunk off their asses (which might actually INCREASE my match rate). As a result, they might not be swiping.

But regardless of the date, 0.57% still isn’t good.

Perhaps it was my image.

Now, everything in Tinder relies on the main (first) picture. But that instantly caused problems — since the end of 2013, I’ve only uploaded about 20 photos of myself onto Facebook, which is where Tinder pulls images from. Damn my self-effacing personality! As a result, I had to borrow images from 2012 and before because it gave me a far larger pool of images to pull from.

I cycled through these main images:

…and I settled on this image:

As for the rest of my profile, I also noticed a few mistakes. But before I jump into what I did wrong, it will make more sense if I explain what I saw from the profiles of women FIRST and THEN transition to my mistakes and current profile.

What I Saw From Female Profiles

The first thing I noticed on Tinder was that a lot of women say the SAME thing. In no particular order, I frequently saw women in the Denver area post these ten specific hobbies/interests/passions:

• Travel
• Dogs
• “Adventure” (whatever that means)
• Craft beers
• “Outdoors”
• Yoga
• Skiing
• Hiking
• Reading
• Food (usually sushi)

As a result, girl usually had the following photos:

• A photo of them dressed up to go to the club
• A photo of them skiing
• A photo with a dog
• A photo of them drinking beer
• A photo of them hiking
• A photo of them with their girlfriends
• A photo of them wearing some type of costume
• An artsy, professionally done photograph as they look away from the camera, laughing

But here’s a truth I learned from the world of marketing:

When everyone tries to be different, everyone looks the same.
(Same goes for guys.)

This is a marketing phenomenon addressed by Youngme Moon in her book, Different, which discusses the evolution of branding and competition into the 21st Century. Basically, this is the equivalent of walking down the aisle of your grocery store, looking for cereal — there’s, like, 30 different brands of cereal, each different… in the same exact way.

Now, some might say, “Well that’s because it’s Denver.” (And, thus, that’s why a lot of people move to Denver in the first place — to partake in these activities.)

I agree that it’s a huge part of Denver life, but I HIGHLY doubt each of those girls feel like they came to Denver to be like everyone else. It would be more likely that each girl constructed their Tinder profile to highlight, in their mind, some of their “unique” attributes — the things that made them different and special — so they could stand out from the Denver crowd, not bury themselves in it.

Some might also say, “Well, what if I really like skiing, hiking, and traveling?” A-ha! Let’s talk about the difference between showing and telling by using MYSELF as the guinea pig.

During first few days, I scoped online and found different articles with Tinder advice for guys. Common wisdom said this:

Your photos should be fun, interesting, and different! Your profile should be funny and witty!

Okay. But if I post a photo of me wearing a cool costume… how is that different from all the other guys posting photos of themselves wearing a costume? We might not be wearing the same thing, but it equates to Costume A vs. Costume B. Or Cute dog photo A vs. Cute dog photo B. Or Eiffel Tower photo A vs. Eiffel Tower photo B.

And if I make a witty remark and say I “like sarcasm” (which I see in a lot of profiles), how is that different from everyone else’s witty and sarcastic comment?

Why compete for marginal separation? If you play the “I want to look like an outdoorsy guy” game, you’re going to get outdone by someone with even BETTER outdoorsy pictures.

And that’s EXACTLY what I did wrong with my profile.

Sure, I’ve done a few unique things during my life — and YOU have too — but it just wasn’t coming across in my profile. I was like Clipse in their song, “Mr. Me Too.” In my attempts to SOUND unique, everything LOOKED vaguely similar to all other guys.

Here’s a summary of my previous profile:

Writer. Traveler. Ambitious. New to Denver and I’m enjoying the blah blah blah…

Accurate? Yeah. But how is that different from what every other guy says?

“But Anthony, I’m a writer too!”

HAVING A TUMBLR DOES NOT MAKE YOU A “WRITER.”

That’s why I got more specific and grasped some more emotion.

Here’s a summary of my newer profile:

Writer, etc etc. Lived in Asia and Australia for two years. Making my way through North America and trying to meet an awesome girl that does [some cute, vulnerable thing], write a book, and move to Montreal in 2016. Wanna join?

I don’t have all the answers, but if you’re unique, show it! Don’t tell me you “like reading” — tell me you read all volumes of War and Peace. Don’t tell me you “like yoga” — tell me about your retreat to India.

Here are a few of the other photos I added to my account (they look better cropped):

Here are things I could possibly include (your thoughts?):

• Getting kicked out of Taiwan
• Defiling a national monument
• Being honked by a Seoul subway train
• Appearing in two major magazines
• Hosting a “podcast”

Other Confounding Factors: Race

I’m not going to lie: going into this experiment, I knew I was facing an uphill battle. Why?

Online dating is notoriously difficult for Asian men and Black women.

From a tremendous amount of data from OkCupid (LINK 1 and LINK 2), well… let’s just let them take the mic:

White women prefer white men to the exclusion of everyone else—and Asian and Hispanic women prefer them even more exclusively. These three types of women only respond well to white men. More significantly, these groups’ reply rates to non-whites is terrible. Asian women write back non-white males at 21.9%, Hispanic women at 22.9%, and white women at 23.0%. It’s here where things get interesting, for white women in particular. If you look at the match-by-race table before this one, the “should-look-like” one, you see that white women have an above-average compatibility with almost every group. Yet they only reply well to guys who look like them.

Q: Are people on OkCupid just racist?

No. I mean, not any more than anywhere else. All the dating data I’ve seen fits OkCupid’s pattern: black people and Asian men get short shrift. For example, below are the numbers from DateHookup, a site that we acquired a few years ago (but that still operates independently.) DateHookup has a distinct userbase, a distinct user acquisition model, a distinct interface, yet their data reflects the same basic biases:

It’s surely not just OkCupid users that are like this. In fact, it’s any dating site (and indeed any collection of people) would likely exhibit messaging biases similar to what I’ve written up. According to our internal metrics, at least, OkCupid’s users are better-educated, younger, and far more progressive than the norm, so I can imagine that many sites would actually have worse race stats.

“Well Anthony, maybe Asians guys don’t like to date outside their race.”

One, according to empirical data, that’s completely false. (Also, you must not know many Asian dudes.) Two, according to the same data, White people are actually far less likely than Asian men to prefer dating outside their race.

This will be something I’ll keep an eye on because the vast majority of the girls on Tinder in the Denver area — 25 miles radius — are White. Maybe I can accentuate the fact I sometimes look “half-Asian.” (Is there an Instagram filter for that?)

But I don’t bring this up to EMPOWER outside factors; I bring this up because it’s RELEVANT to this article.

If I do poorly over this month, the correct conclusion might not be “Tinder is broken,” “my profile is shit,” “Denver is tough,” etc. for EVERY GUY. Thus, it’s important (I think) to raise awareness so readers will take my experience with a huge grain of salt due to factors beyond my control.

Next Week

Next week and the week after will be tricky because I’ll be in Portland for seven days. Here’s my plan: I’ll right swipe exactly 100 times throughout Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday and see how many matches I get before I leave.

This is purely to compare my performance in Denver versus Portland. Same profile. Same photo. Same age range and distance. (Hopefully I won’t have to move because of the results.)

Also, we’ll see how it plays out with my matches. They seem cool, but I’m not, like, crazy about them. Here’s a sample dialogue:

And Finally… The Crazies

The moment you’ve all been waiting for! The following profiles stuck out to me for reasons that will soon be all-too-apparent:

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Want to read the rest of this experiment?

• Click HERE to see Week 2 and 3
• Click HERE to see Week 4

Thoughts? Feedback? Am I full of shit? Do you want to swipe right? Let me know! I read all comments.