Update 2: At least Apple was kind enough to refund my money. I’m glad I learned my lesson the easy way. No more dating apps ever again for me!
Update: Thanks all for your overwhelming support. I really needed these words of comfort. Besides this, I live a very lonely isolated life and it's difficult to meet new people. Regardless of being very active, working out a lot and doing a lot of social activities. I will try to reply everything, but I have definitely read everything!
I’m 33M and last night I downloaded Tinder again after deleting it for the 100th time. In a few hours I got 16 likes, but not a match. So I decided to go ahead and pay for one week to see these matches. Literally all of them were fake accounts. Not a single one of these 16 were real.
I broke down in tears, because my dating life hasn’t really been good. As a POC it’s even more difficult. Then, as the idiot I am, I went ahead and spent money just to find out all of it is just a scam. I don’t know how to deal with this anymore. Meeting in real life is basically non existent in this day and age.
I’m just so over with life itself. My self esteem is completely down the gutter. I wish there was an easy and painless escape out of this life.
Listen. Are you familiar with the carnival game concept of a 'crowd seeder'?
Carnivals rig their games, and they get players to come to the booth by letting one person win a huge prize at the start of the night. They walk around with that giant stuffed animal, and people think, "Wow! I want a giant stuffed animal! If this guy won one, I could win one too!"
And then the carnival game owner just sits back and lets the stacks roll in as suckers pitch ball after ball at targets rigged to the lever under his foot.
It's a confidence scam. Dating apps are built literally the same way, with a really insidious twist of getting you hooked by sinking its claws into your very sense of self-worth and worthiness to be loved. It's sick.
And, yeah, ngl, whiteness as default and Euro-centric beauty standards fuck with peoples' heads too, especially if they haven't taken a good hard look in the mirror and tried to see past the shampoo and aftershave ads and see the truth about human connection.
Fuck the dating apps. My last girlfriend, I met at a protest. She was wonderful. Things didn't work out for pretty normal reasons. We connected because we shared the same passion. That's kinda a built-in dating profile by itself. So, go out and engage in things that make you happy. Really, genuinely, truly happy. Online or offline, doesn't matter. You increase your odds for free just by interacting with new people every day, by trying to be friends first. The old classic is the local bar or coffee shop with the vibe you like. Worst case scenario, you got a dry spell for a while and you have a new hobby.
As far as wanting to kill yourself? Buddy. Been there. Hell, I'm still there most days, and I'm on meds rn. It's easy to hate yourself. I hate myself too. There are just days it's easier to forget about it than others, and then days where I get reminded how much I hate my own guts and want to delete my save file. But it's more than sex that I live for. And I had to choose it. I had to choose it for every pair of eyes that would be red at my funeral. I had to choose it for the traumatized 20-something EMT who'd have to zip me up. I had to choose it for every person who's ever counted on me, even once, even if I hadn't seen them in years.
There is more to life. It's worth so much more than a rigged carnival game.