Tinder and Conversations

How does one initiate an interesting conversation? And more importantly, how does one manage to keep it engaging and entertaining unaffected by the trials and tribulations of what we know as time? I am sure a lot of us who are active on social media platforms and dating networks are constantly trying to come up with everlasting solutions to these problems, trying to reduce as many problems for the youth as possible. But then, how many answers do we really have? And are they viable across different age-groups?

I have been on Tinder, and trust me, as a below-average looking guy in India, where the guy-girl ratio on the app is almost 8:1, getting a match is almost equivalent to moving mountains. And not everyone is a John Henry or a Dashrath Manjhi. As such, it becomes immensely necessary to have the ability to convert as many matches as one can, if and when they get any. And what do you do when you neither have a chiseled face nor an interesting physique to convert those matches to dates? You speak. You go ahead and start-up a chat with the person hoping that all will be hunky-dory from there.

Except that, it really does not work that way. More than half the time the few matches that you get disappear in under five hours, sometimes without you even having sent them a message! And therefore, it becomes all the more important to become a master conversationist – for words reach places where the body can’t. But then, the question that arises is – how really does one do that?

It’s not that I have not tried. I have looked for solutions, here and there and everywhere. I have scanned through tens of self-help books, hundreds of timeless YouTube tutorials, asked a lot of friends and cracked at least a fifty thousand terribly bad jokes – to no avail. And then I have seen people go on a string of dates – or find their “the one” – on the very same platforms where I haven’t even been able to secure enough matches. And that has only kept me wondering more. How does on initiate an interesting conversation?

If you guys know the answer, please do tell me.