Photo credit: Julien.Belli via Fair / CC BY
Note: Please see the message at the bottom before getting all worked up.
There are a few things that are true of every girl on any dating app. Every girl is vegan. Every girl loves cats (if they don't have a cat in their profile pic, it is startling). Every girl is looking for someone real.
But there are 10 distinct "types" backed up by an overwhelming amount of scientific evidence (I created an okcupid profile and looked around).
Here they are:
1. Girls with 10 sepia filtered selfies of them showing off their cats, tats, and piercings. They like smoking weed.
2. Girls that are way too fucking hot to be on a dating site, that say they're modeling and "just looking for someone real." 99% of these are dudes that used a stock photo of a model as their profile picture. You really should have suspected something was amiss when they wanted the first date to be in a gas station bathroom. They're looking for someone real so that they don't end up meeting up with another fake person like them and getting brutally murdered themselves.
3. Girls that are so innocent, sweet, and Christian, you wonder if they had to get their parents' permission to go online. These girls are also looking for someone real, presumably because having one sexless relationship for eight years is the equivalent of exhausting the whole real-world guy population, so it's time to go digital. For Jesus.
4. Girls that are clearly actually guys showing cleavage that is actually silicone. Ironically, these are some of the most real profiles out there.
5. Girls whose profiles have expanded my feminist vocabulary tremendously. Cisfemale. Pansexual. Sapiosexual. Genderqueer. Heteroflexible. Most have purple hair and play rugby. Most have some sort of explicit warning to guys to clean up their messaging behavior. Apparently these girls get frequent requests to "3way w/ me and my gf?" Or questions like: "lick box yo?" I sometimes wonder if the guys posing as girls (#4 above) are doing so out of desperation because they got blacklisted from okcupid for sending out too many perverted messages to rugby playing pansexuals, and have had to resort to transvestism to start their online dating presence anew.
6. Girls that are among the five needles in a haystack of 30,000. (This may reflect only my taste). They are smart. They are kind. They are ambitious. They have interesting hobbies and cool friends. They are beautiful. By the time you find their profiles, your scrolling thumb has been winnowed down to a scrawny bone that no longer has enough body heat to activate the message icon on the touch screen, and is merely scratching the surface. You switch hands and try to message them, but their inbox is full.
7. Girls that are actually guys--not guys posing as girls, but guys that look like "typical" cismales (credit to a feminist profile for the new word). You wonder why they're listed as a girl, but then you feel guilty for not being more progressive and welcoming with respect to the cismale's identity as a woman. Then you scroll through his pictures and see that they are all of him passed out with sharpie dicks drawn on his face. Then you notice his profile name is "Chadlovessuckingdicks." Then you notice his about me section is just his phone number with a note to "text me about gettin ur dick sucked bro." You feel a little bad for Chad, and text him to get new friends.
8. Girls that are sassy. Their pictures all feature alcohol prominently.They start off their about me section by saying that they are too complicated to describe in a profile, but then make a valiant effort for the next 3,000 words. They frequently mention how good they are at sarcasm, but how do you know if they mean it? They use the word feminism a lot but they only seem to have heard about it once, or talked to someone who heard about it, because instead of realizing that it's about achieving gender parity, they thought it meant to match the assholeness of the biggest assholes of the male gender. So they have achieved parity in a sense, but only with the fratty douchebags who got Chad super drunk and posted pics of his sharpie dick face on his okcupid profile.
9. Girls that are dromomaniacs. They've traveled every nook and cranny of this big world, and preach that everyone needs to learn about the rich diversity and nuances within every culture. Especially you fat Americans listening to country music while you graze from a trough of KFC before you drive drunk to the polls in your Chevy Suburban to vote for Donald Trump.
10. Girls with kids. These girls usually also mention in the same sentence or the surrounding sentences that they also have a dog or something, as if to try to camouflage their child in a litany of innocuous factoids about themselves. (I have a goldfish named Jeffrey; three lizards: Terrance, Mr. Bibs, and Eddard Stark; a kid; and an absolutely gorgeous cocker spaniel named Bundle of Joy). If you have a kid in any of your pictures, even if the kid isn't yours, or even if the kid isn't related to you, or even if the kid is way way in the background of the picture and is a complete stranger, you can rest assured you'll get a message in your inbox asking you if you like kids.
Note:
If you’re upset, I get it (I think): putting people into groups isn’t cool, right? You could complain that I am being sexist, misogynistic, or patronizing, but all of these "types" could just as likely be men. But, alas, I am a straight male and only have my own experience with online dating to draw from.
One of the many things that online dating has taught me is that it's really hard to be original. It's hard to come up with something interesting to say in a message, for example, but it's especially hard to come up with an original profile. I found that there were some patterns among the profiles of women looking for men (which are the only profiles that I, as a straight male, could see).
I would love to see people of all backgrounds make similar lists. Women, the lgbtq community, people of all sorts of ethnic and cultural backgrounds: what were some of the patterns you saw on the dating profiles that an app curated for you? I'm not pandering. I only saw a fraction of the profiles out there, and I'm curious about the rest.