What Kind of Men Are on Dating Apps?

All kinds, but the men you actually compete with sort into a few groups. There is a large low-effort majority, a group that messages everyone, a smaller group that has worked out how the apps reward effort, and a layer of fake accounts on top. Nobody publishes an exact split, so take the groups as a description of what you will meet, not a count. Knowing which group you are being compared with tells you where to put your effort.

Most men on a dating app do very little. They post a few photos they already had, a line or two of the usual interests, and then they wait.

a dating coach describes the average page as looking like every other page, and the average result follows from that. A man with a plain page and plain photos gets a plain response. This is good news if you are willing to do slightly more than nothing, because a clear first photo and a specific line of writing is already ahead of most of the field.

A second group treats the app as a numbers game and sends the same short greeting to every woman. The greeting is usually "hey" or a variation, and the women who receive dozens a day learn to ignore it.

You will see these men indirectly, because they are why her inbox is full of messages that say nothing. When you write something specific to her, you are standing apart from a crowd that has trained her to expect little.

A third group takes the app seriously. They test their photos, rewrite their words, and learn what the apps reward. a dating coach compares it to online poker, where the weaker players gradually leave or lose and the stronger ones stay, so the average opponent gets harder over time.

He argues that something similar happens on the apps. The men who put in effort get more of the results, and the average man who does not put in effort gets less. Rather than a reason to give up, that is a reason to see the apps as a place where effort pays and neglect does not.

Some men are on the apps for reasons other than a relationship. a dating coach notes that men who are good at online dating and do not want a relationship tend to stay on the apps and keep meeting people, while men who find a relationship leave. So the ones who remain are a larger share of the active field than you might expect.

Women notice this, and many open conversations with a bit of caution as a result. A man who is clear about what he wants, and who shows it by how he writes and by suggesting a real date, has a quiet advantage over men whose intentions look fuzzy.

A last layer is not men at all, or not the men they claim to be. Fake accounts, scammers and bots use stolen photos and warm scripts. If you are a man on the apps you will probably see them in the women you match with, and others will see versions of them as men.

You only need to know they exist so that you check a match who seems too eager, and so that the women you talk to understand why a careful man is the exception.

You are not being compared with an average of all men. You are being compared with the men she has seen in the last ten minutes, and most of them are in the first two groups.

Three things make you different from nearly all of them:

• A clear first photograph. The best photograph of your face you have, in good light, looking like someone she would want to sit across from.
• One specific line of writing. Something about you that gives her a thing to answer, in place of a list of hobbies.
• A real reply. An opening message that refers to something on her page, and that does not sound like it was sent to fifty other women.

Do not try to out-optimize the top group on its own terms, and do not copy the volume of the second. Your advantage is that you can be a real person who is easy to talk to and ready to meet.

Reply quickly, suggest a specific place and day once the chat has some life, and show up as the man in your photos. That alone puts you ahead of a large share of the field, because most of the field never gets as far as the date.