It's about 10AM on a Sunday, and I am sitting on my balcony, scanning the dating sites.  "You have a new Match!" pops up on Match.com. I take a look. I'm pretty sure I have not seen or "liked" this woman, so I am not sure how we are a "Match". Maybe I liked her after a few too many Manhattans. "Swiping" or "Liking" seems very mood dependent. Some are a no-brainer, but others I could be on the fence about. If I'm feeling pretty good at that moment, I will pass on them; if I'm not, I might just take a shot.

With the exception of Bumble, either party can initiate an in-app chat. Bumble gives that power exclusively to the women, which I originally thought was a good idea. But some women have told me that there is no way they are going to initiate. Regardless of the app, guys have to do more work. We have to do all of the clicking, swiping and liking, and women get to sit back and react... or not. It's not that guys don't get the occasional ping from the other side of the wall, but it's rare, so we swipe and like.

"Hi Vanessa! I see we are both into cycling :)" I initiate. Bing! "You matched with Vanessa!" "Hi Steve, yes I loooove cycling!" she replies. "Awesome! Where do you like to ride?" I send. No reply... ever. It used to annoy me, back when I first started, but I now realize it is just the nature of the ecosystem. Each of us in this world have our own lives, and we are all at different stages of interest around dating. More often than men, women may have a few bad experiences and then drop off. They usually pop back up later... a little more jaded than they were before.

Communication seems to suddenly end, for no apparent reason, at all stages. Was it something I said? No, I would never say anything that would cause a woman to stop talking to me. I know many men do... probably because many are just fishing for sex. I think Tinder probably lowered the conversation level, even though it has since been homogenized to be like all the other apps.

I find myself adopting the communication etiquette of women, which seems to be primary based on not wanting to look too eager, or desperate. For example, if you were the last one to send a message.. you should not be the next one to. If it goes unreplied to... you probably have your answer. The exception is the machine-gun texter, which is me.  I am the opposite of what I call the cannon texter. I was chatting with a woman once, who would send single texts that were four pages long. She obviously took her time to think about a lot of things to say at once. Maybe she did not want to be interrupted, or sidetracked. I'm the opposite, I click send at the end of each thought, then realize I had another thought, usually about four times in a row. It's always fun when you have two machine-gun texters going at it, the conversations tend to get jumbled up. "Darn, my flight is delayed! :(" she texts. "But, I get to see my daughter when I get home :)" she texts. "Well that sucks :(" I reply. "Why did you say that?" she texts, "I was responding to your previous text." I reply. So you see how that goes.

Conversations abruptly ending is part of the natural order of dating. I'm not really complaining, if none of them ended, I would be on my phone non-stop. You ultimately learn that you need to have a certain number of them going on, knowing that most will stop, but enough won't, that you can actually meet people. But abrupt endings don't stop once you meet people. Nothing really matters until that first meeting, everything else is just bullshit leading up to it. That first meeting can go well, or end in a "He/She is just not that into you". While I have heard about it happening, I have not yet been on any date that ended in the middle of it. I will take that as a good sign. But I have been "ghosted" a couple of times afterwards. I'm a gentleman, if I did not feel any spark, I don't just ghost, I will more likely send a message like, "Hey, thanks for meeting last night. I think we can both agree that neither of us felt the spark we had hoped for. I wish you luck in your search." Regardless of how she may have been feeling about me, I want to let her save face as well.

Match keeps all your chats until you delete them, and I was looking back at some of my first initial messages from 3 months ago, when I started. I have clearly improved on my initial message skills since then. But still, lots of unanswered messages. The funny thing is, those women are all still here...