finding friends on dating apps
The explanation I send to people I friend-zone (oops)
“heyyy i’m looking to be friends only1. hope that’s not too disappointing 😅”
That is a frequent opener of mine on dating apps.
Naturally, some people get confused by this. Some target the semantics of the word “friends”. “Like, friends with benefits?” No, I mean your traditional, platonic, friends without benefits. Just. Friends. A handful of them quietly assumes that I’m being coy or cautious, wanting to begin as friends where it’s comfortable before deciding whether I want something more. No, I’m actually quite a forward and decisive person. Although to be fair, they don’t know that yet.
Of course, many decline my friendship offer, flashing their disappointment at me since “dating apps are for dating — I don’t need more friends”. Ouch.
The remaining bunch inevitably question, “Why are you looking for friends on a dating app?”
The truth is, I’m not. I am what I call ✨actively single✨ If I were a romantic, I’d probably poetically sigh that I am searching for my lifelong love. I’m not quite a romantic, so more realistically, I want a partner-in-life, a teammate with whom I can grow and start a family and experience the turbulence of existence.
So, then, “Why?”
Because at the core, *people* are important to me. Relationships of any kind are my raison d’être. If you’ll let me ramble a bit…I do what I do for people, in that a deep part of me desires to change the world for the better so that people can find their 幸福 [xìng fú], or what I roughly translate as their “unadulterated bliss”. And I live to experience the reciprocal joy of understanding the infinite-dimensional aspects of people. *cough, sorry a bit too cheesy, cough*
In romantic relationships, we see that mathematically, my odds of finding “the one” is 1 in 7.96 billion (at least in the year this was written, assuming monogamy and some version of ily4eva). I don’t believe in “the one” — although I am quite picky when it comes to relationship commitments — which means the numerator increases marginally, and I will never meet even close to 8 billion people, so the denominator decreases dramatically2. However, this still means that thumbing through the indefinite list of eligible dating app users, I experience the Poisson Process of Finding Interesting People I Don’t Want To Date But Want To Befriend.
Hinge does an especially good job of suggesting such a class of people since I always have access to the selection of candidates interested in me. This design decision ensures that I pay attention to someone to whom I might never have sent a “like”. And if I asked to be friends with you, the unfortunate truth is that I probably find us romantically incompatible, but this mechanism led me to discover your profile, which I probably found quite charming.
To be frank, I find it especially difficult to match “properly” with someone. But don’t trust me; trust my data. I recently downloaded my Hinge3 app data for the past four years. Without getting into the actual numbers, let’s say 10⁴ is the order of magnitude of people who have interacted with me in some way: liked, commented, or matched. Among these “interested” people, I’ve matched with several hundred, or roughly 5%. Among these connections, I’ve only been on “dates” — more aptly named “eventually non-platonic excursions” — with four people, approximately 1% of connections and less than 0.04% of “interested” people. The numbers are infinitely worse on other apps, by the way, through which I’ve gone on absolutely zero “dates”.
So while I do still try, I no longer expect to find my next romantic interest. But seeing a profile of someone I’d especially like to befriend feels like the rare light from above in the midst of a seemingly endless tunnel. And in moments like this, I strongly believe it would be a shame to remain strangers. Also for the record, I only ask to be friends with about 5% of my connections and ghost4 the rest.
That was probably a longer-than-necessary and an around-the-bush response. The tl;dr is: I want to be friends because I want to get to know you.
I have to admit, the “friends only” part instead of the usual “only friends” is subtly genius; I stole it from this guy who friend-zoned me.
Among other reasons, e.g. age difference, yada yada.
Not to mention, I’ve also been on pretty much all the major dating apps. Part of it is market research for my own dating app idea~
There are lots of false negatives, and I’d love to get to know more people, but unfortunately, my time is a finite commodity… If they messaged me again out of the blue, I’d engage!