Why don’t women send the first message? Why are their bios empty? Why are their responses only a few words? As a human of the female variety, I’m here to (somewhat) defend our behavior.

Online dating is an entirely different experience for women than it is for men. For a lot of men, you’re trying to get matches and responses... but most women are drowning in a sea of them. I’m not denying that it’s easier for women to date online than it is for men, because it is - but it’s also pretty overwhelming.

A peek behind the curtain

Ok, so as a female who regularly uses dating apps, here’s how it works for us. We get a shitton of likes, and swipe our lives away while eating breakfast, when we should be studying/working, and when we take a pee break.

The swiping never ends, especially when we first sign up for an app. We don’t even know how many matches we have because the apps just say “50+” and we have no idea how close we are to the end.

Then come the messages. Literally hundreds of messages, and they all say the exact same things: “Hey cutie, how are ya?” “What are you up to today?” What are your plans this weekend?” “Doing anything interesting this week?” “Can i c ur tiddies?”

How fun. Now we get to have the same conversation over and over and over again with 50 different guys. It’s tedious, it’s work, and it turns us into frazzled crazy people trying to sort out who we could have a genuine connection with.

Why waste time say lot word when few word do trick?

She’s probably not waiting on you to message her first as a power play - she just hasn’t caught up with her unread messages yet and sending out initial messages to new matches isn’t even on her radar. And when she does reply, her messages to you are short because she’s trying to juggle 50 different conversations while narrowing down who she’s most interested in.

Her bio is empty or lazy AF because she knows she’ll get a crapton of matches either way and she’s realized that most of the men who match with her haven’t read it anyway. I’ve done a lot of experimenting with my bio to try and narrow down my matches and I’ve discovered that most of my techniques don’t result in any discernible change - and it’s because most of my matches haven’t actually read my profile.

First, I tried listing my favourite hobbies - but less than 5% of matches mentioned or asked about them. Then I added a blurb asking that we skip the small talk and have a real conversation, but that didn’t alter the messages I received at all. As a final attempt I decided to be cheeky and added, “If your 1st message is ‘hey cutie’ or asking how my day, week, or weekend is going, I swear by all that is unholy you’ll never see me naked” - which affected a whopping 7% of the initial messages I received.

Love and orgasms

Every woman has her own strategy for online dating, because without strategy we’d either give up altogether or we’d have to commit to making it our full time job.

Unfortunately, our strategies generally entail the very things men hate about online dating. It’s not intentional - we’re just trying to make this feasible for ourselves. I’m not saying that women are innocent victims of online dating, or claiming that we haven’t become lazy and ghost-happy, but we also aren’t the game-playing puppet masters that we’re often assumed to be. We’re trying to find love and orgasms with someone we’re into, just like everyone else.

Be big, be bold, stand out in a positive and approachable way. Get her attention by sending a unique message based on her interests. It’ll be a huge breath of fresh air for her and it’ll dramatically increase your response rate. Hopefully we can find a way to meet in the middle, and then it’ll be love and orgasms for all ;)