Would you swipe left or right?

I used to be the person who wanted to have nothing to do with Tinder…until I realized that it is not that easy to meet new people if you spend 90% of your time hiding inside your apartment. Sure, you can order food and attempt to trap the delivery guy in your premises, but who would do that (except for my sister)?!

So a few months ago I became a part of the Tinder community. My profile looked a little something like this:

Nothing too fancy, just a few photos to give an idea of the things I like and some photos that could emphasize my most fabulous features. So, yes, just some photos of the things I like basically. I also added my job title, but didn’t really know what to write in the bio section, so I left it empty. I even linked my public Instagram account for shameless promo and added a Biffy Clyro song I like as my “anthem”. Should be enough, right?

Then came the fun part – swiping all guys left without even blinking an eye. No, I’m kidding, I managed to swipe ~ 30 guys right. My main criteria was “if can’t find a reason to swipe left – swipe right”. Thus I swiped 95% of the profiles left (because I’m a judgemental little prick). The first week could be summed up with “Spent 3 hours talking to a dog”. The guy literally had only doge pictures, was named doge, but had a nice sense of humor,  so I didn’t mind talking to him. Turned out to be a 16-year-old trolling the app. We don’t keep in touch these days.

In the next weeks I managed to find quite a few guys with no sense of humor whatsoever (who must now consider me either a pedophile, a psycho, or both), some guys who seemed to find height and weight most important things in life and some guys who considered “Sup?” “Not much, you?” “Same.” an interesting conversation. Charming.

A few weeks later I went to Germany and decided to try my luck there when I wasn’t working in the evenings. The profiles looked good, I got a fair amount of matches and eagerly started conversations with a few people, hoping to get new connections and learn a little German along the way. To my disappointment these conversations either ended as soon as I mentioned that I was in Germany for only one week or when I didn’t speak enough German. Though I did manage to find a someone in Luxembourg to have a drink with and I also got one really nice German friend who didn’t mind the fact that I lived in Estonia and is now my favorite (also my first and one and only) German teacher. I’ve learned three new words in just a little over two months!

After returning to Estonia I disabled Tinder for a month as I had no time, no motivation, and no interest in meeting new people anytime soon.

New year, new me – I got on the app again! Enabled my profile, didn’t change a thing, and swiped right everyone to whom I had something to say…so now we also have a bunch of people referring to me as a grammar nazi or something equally annoying! *Self-high-five*

I had gotten a fairly good overview of how the average Estonian male Tinder profile looks like and thought I might as well share it. As I cannot include any photos by other people without permission, I had to create my own versions of them.

On 1st place we have the infamous “Audi/bmw guy”:

I am not entirely sure, but I think the message behind it is supposed to be either “I compensate with a rad vehicle.” or “Looking for a hood ornament.” or “Want uber?” or “I has car.”.

2nd place goes to something that was a tad bit more difficult to replicate but after switching up my diet a bit, consuming no alcohol, and hitting my HIIT workouts for a few weeks (“ffs, Taisi, just draw ’em on!”), I managed to reproduce “The abs guy”:

In these cases I always found myself wondering how bad the face must be fucked up…

And the third very popular type is known as “The party animal” also known as  “The alcoholic”:

You go, dude! Yeah, you consume that alcohol like there was no tomorrow!

And some other popular picks include “The one expression guy”:

(Could I get one more of these, please?)

“The anonymous”:

(Didn’t really want to see your face anyway.)

“The artist”:

(I’m melting…don’t stop now…please Telve more.)

“The athlete”:

(Ye, you fit, but do you have defined abs tho?)

“The traveler”:

and of course the “I have no idea what I’m doing”:

Having learned all the most important types one could find in this area, I gave it a shot and changed my profile to now resemble more of what the average male values. Why? Mainly for shits’n’giggles and partly for raising awareness by reflecting people their own profiles back. Keeping in mind that some of these types can only exist one at a time, I combined as many as I could. So this is how my Tinder profile looks today:

Would you swipe left or right?