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Sure they can, if you pick the right pictures. One of mine for example was a picture of me cooking. Another was of me helping a friend build a wall. In your profile, put that you are taking cooking classes and ask to swap recipes. Make a joke that you're only on Tinder to steal secret family recipes.
It may require different tactics, and you can't rely on meeting them and being charming while you are both half-sloshed but if a chubby old bastard like me can do it, then there is no reason most people with a lick of sense who want to date for marriage and are looking for someone the same can't. But you have to work at it. Spend time on your profile, and your pictures, stage em if you have to. Swipe, swipe, swipe. Have 5 or 6 openers ready to go, and check the profile and pics if you do get a match so you can come up with something witty.
Sure you might not match many and then 50% won't even respond and another 25% will peter out after hellos. But that 25% is still more than you get through by being introduced by friends in the old days. It's a numbers game in a very different way than traditional dating was when I was a lad. There the issue was finding someone available and getting close to them in the first place. But you only need one.
Thanks for the advice, but.
Very naive of to assume anyone ever reads bios. Countless experiments with literal pedophilic shit in dating profile bios have shown to still work if the pictures are sufficiently good enough. You are correct about the pictures that a lot more gets extrapolated from them than they should.
Sure. My match rate was 3/100 swipes, message reply rate 2/10,message -> date rate 0. Realistically this is still less time consuming than how it was done in ye old days. But it feels extremely degrading, just going window shopping and being rejected by 97% of the people. I settled on not working up the mental faculty to not let that get to me. Btw, the women I match with online are much worse than ladies I saw in real life. It's really not worth it.
And I don't want to. I plan on just trying irl after I am done with graduate school and can get a higher-paying job, which should improve my prospects. I don't want to put on a clownshow and have ready made lines and stage shit just to be considered worth having gone out with, that is not how humans operate. I am not ready to dispense all my sense of self-respect.
I think this is just an update of how we used to have to do it pre-mobile phones. You think you just approached a girl you really wanted on a wing and a prayer? You thought about what you wore, what you looked like, had some good lines, hell, maybe you brought a wingman to make you look good. None of this is new. It is exactly how people operate. You leveraged everything you possibly could. Sure if you just want to pick a girl up in a bar, for sex, then whatever, low pressure, though even there if you were going out with that in mind, you would definitely dress and plan accordingly, but we are specifically talking about looking for your marriage partner.
Your one job at the start is to get your foot in the door. And that means putting your best foot forward. Especially if you are aiming for someone high-value who therefore would have had a lot of approaches. The beginning stages of flirtation and courtship are all about making yourself look as good as you possibly can. If you're not willing to do that, then you will probably lose to the people who are. With my first wife, I fell for her the day I saw her, so I found out she was going to a mutual friends party and then I found out everything I could about her, talked to a couple of female friends about her, had my buddy there to wingman. A person to love is unlikely to fall into your lap. Working for it is going to increase your odds.
Now there is another option, after my first wife passed, I met my second wife through a group of friends and we were friends first, and dated second. That way your foot is in the door in a different way. That is a much lower pressure situation, but it's much less certain. It's a more passive approach (at least at first). But requires you to be able to tell when someone is interested in you (or hope she will take initiative which is a gamble). It's definitely still workable.
But OLD is a replacement for the first method, the cold pick up where you don't know the woman in advance, and that largely hasn't changed in how you have to get that first yes as far as I can tell having had experience of both. You have to work to signal you are someone worth paying attention to. And yes, being conventionally attractive reduces the amount of work you might have to do for sure, just to be clear.
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