The Love Files No.19 // Online Dating

After burning bridges with the ex I joined the bizarre world of online dating. In September I signed up on Tinder and I was there for only 5 days. In the beginning it was fun and a great distraction but truth is Tinder is a very strange place. If you are interested in sex and hook-ups, then Tinder is your thing. I got countless messages from men asking me to come to different cities in Germany just for the sake of a shag. No thank you is all I can say to that. I am so not interested. So, after 5 days my Tinder account got deleted because I dared to put the link to my blog into my bio stating that I blog about dating, love and relationships. Hey I thought it was just fair to mention that so guys will know that I am doing some research on Tinder in order to write about it afterwards. I thought being frank is just fair but what I did not know is that posting the link to your website violates their terms and conditions , so after putting the link into my bio my account got banned. What should I say! I did not mind it at all because that day I already thought about deleting Tinder all together. I got from it what I wanted, distraction, one date and a fling with an Italian and I was not interested in meeting another guy from Tinder.

So, fast forward to November - since that Tinder fling did not work out very well and I got sick of dealing with another man-child, I thought I will give online dating a new try. I signed up at Badoo which I had used before many years ago when I still lived in Spain where at that time Badoo was the platform to be to meet new people and to have dates. At this point I can say that I have been chatting with a few guys through Badoo and also met up. I find it very interesting how different the men are that I have been writing with and on one hand it is also super interesting because I get to meet so many different people with different backgrounds and so on. Some are just utterly desperate, some are just looking for a shag and there are also a few normal ones who really just want to meet women and see how it goes.

I live in a small city and sometimes I work as a language teacher in different schools. Well, lately a guy who was in one of those courses where I taught a while ago, found me on Badoo and messaged me so we met up. I am not surprised that this happened for being honest, that someone who was sitting in a class I was teaching, will pop up in the online dating world since like I said before, my hometown is small. We met up and I have to confess that it felt a bit odd to sit in my kitchen with a guy drinking wine who I only knew from the context before that he was my student and I was his teacher. But okay, same people and just a completely different setting.

Online dating is very time consuming I have to say and lately I think it is time to step back from it, to delete my account and to focus again on what really matters to me; achieving my goals, opening the shop, doing more creative work, earning the money that I can move to Spain again. When being distracted online doing whatever, it is easy to lose focus of what really matters to you, because let’s face it…you are just effing distracted. Also it gets boring after a while since most conversations with men there are not leading anywhere and besides some cool blokes, in the world of online dating you will also encounter lots of dickheads. Just like in real life, there are good people and others who are not so good. So, I think soon the day will come that I will delete my Badoo account, I think last time in Spain I also was using it about one month and then I got sick of it.

I would not say that online dating is a bad thing but I would say we can call it odd or bizarre. Also nothing good can be forced in my opinion while online dating has a lot do with people feeling pressured to find ‘the one’ and pressure and desperation are certainly a no-no when trying to find real love. This is just not how it works. Yes, it is a good way to meet new people but only for that. Best thing is to have absolutely no expectations because then there will not be any disappointments either. Just have your eyes open and go with the flow and take it with a grain of salt…that is the only way online dating works for me.