Online Dating should be an Olympic Sport
“Modern problems require modern solutions.”
It’s the most irrefutable, indisputable, suavest, coolest statement ever to pour into the ears of mankind, but who the fuck is going to talk about the modern problems created by these modern solutions, eh?
Preamble set. Now diving straight to the point.
Online Dating — it’s probably the biggest revolution since the internet, right?
It’s liberated our libido and choices beyond the fuckall limitations of locality, caste, religion, narrow friend circles, whitewashed workplaces and parental approval. So hell with Sima aunties and their photo albums, we’ve now deployed algorithms to solve our age-old problems of matchmaking and horniness.
And man the algorithms are killing it! Anyone who’s been on a dating app knows the world is a beautiful place where you can swipe across prospects at a minimum rate of 5 soulmates an hour. Woohoo!
Except that real online dating is a bit different from the libido liberator it seems to be. Unless you have the chiselled jawline and bod of a Greek god, your chances of finding a match are going to be slim. Even after slaving through the apps for weeks and months, and finding a handful of matches is no reason to let your pants catch fire.
Most of these matches are probably going to give you the silent treatment (bringing back the fond memories of all your crushes). Well, being an empathetic 21st-century male, I can totally understand these are women looking for some validation that they’re being deprived of by their boyfriends or whoever. I get it It’s cool!
Now, the rest of them, the seemingly available ones are looking for only one thing and it’s fuckin’ disgusting — “Wit n’ Humour” and “Great conversations”. A bloody deal-breaker this is.
What’s this Shashi Tharoor fetish that everyone’s suddenly gotten into?! That man’s polished his game and charm by flirting with god knows how many women over aeons, while we need to keep pulling searches off Urban Dictionary to make sense of half the things that are being talked about.
And a decent conversation is just the very beginning, don’t get your hopes up yet. It’s only the first of the many fiery hoops you must successfully jump through before anything goes anywhere.
The next step forward on the treacherous terrain of online dating is the exchange of Instagram handles. You can also call it the KYC-check of online dating.
A big step nonetheless because it brings a flood of relief as you discover the person at the other end is real and not someone catfishing with a bait tugging at your feelings. You can relax for a moment, knowing that no screenshots will be surfacing days or weeks from now to blackmail you. Here, your confidence might go up a few decimal points when you realize the girl you matched also has average-looking days. Maybe, maybe, you have a chance.
This is when you transform from a Romeo to a Rhodes scholar. Full research begins into songs, singers, lyrics, books, authors, movies, philosophy, psychology, places she’s travelled to, the geography, economics, culture, cuisine and politics of the places she’s travelled to and any other details that can be gathered from an array of endless photos. (The silver lining here is that if you keep doing this for 6–12 months, even though you might not end up in a relationship, you’ll end up in the list of IAS toppers for sure)
This is also when you prostrate before the friend who continues to share his Netflix password despite you not paying him a single penny ever, as you embark on the journey of transforming into a walking wiki of pop-culture.
(At this point, I also realize the only reason why I remained a 6-pointer in college is that dating apps weren’t really a big thing back then. No way I was going to stay short of straight-As if a girl had professed her love for Numerical Analysis or Heat Transfer in her profile back then.)
So if all goes well, you progress from Instagram to WhatsApp and finally to an actual date. All this while, not only battling other guys, but also every other social media app for her attention. It’s a fight to make sure you get that meme to her before anyone else does, nanoseconds can make a difference. Darwin’s palpitating in his grave, looking at what survival has come to.
Alas, after all this toil, if fate stays cruel as ever and turns out you don’t win her heart, well, surely my friend, you at least deserve to win A GOLD FUCKIN’ MEDAL.
