I was out with some buddies of mine recently when I had an epiphany. It had been a typical evening out at a series of bars talking about talking to girls —while burying our faces in our phones every few minutes to play around with Tinder, or tweet about something we thought might garner a few favs — and I finally felt sick of all of it.
When did we start allowing apps to break the ice, or make the impromptu introductions for us? Nights wasted on a "swipe right if it’s real" mentality and afternoons spent absentmindedly refreshing our newsfeeds, hoping for a notification from that one special girl... is this really it?
Girls aren’t looking for guys putting the fates of their romantic lives in the palms of an algorithm-churning techie who gave up on unpredictable in-person romantic pursuits back in high school; they’re looking for men.
They're interested in the kind of men they cross paths with on their morning runs, the early day painted with a golden-tinged sunrise and the soothing silence that’ll fill a city before it wakes to the hustle, bustle, and honk of a modern-day work grind.
They're looking for men who were raised on a principle of "work hard, play hard." Men who get up every morning in hot pursuit of that which only falls within the grasp of the motivated, determined and willing to take a headfirst dive for a chance at catching success. Because living in an era paired with rapid technological innovation is like keeping pace with a running partner who's three weeks' worth of principled fitness routines ahead of you.
It’s teeth-ground, stubborn fortitude, and the work that’s required to beat out the hard workers leaves no spare time for keeping up to date with that social media presence — she recognizes this.
She’s looking for the man who hides a face suggesting "I’m handsome, and I don’t know it" behind a Sunday's edition of the Wall Street Journal, because what would a Sunday morning be without absorbing the latest critiques of an incumbent president’s practically non-existent foreign policy?
She’s looking for a man who’ll walk into a bar and know what he’s having, where he’s sitting and who he’s leaving within moments after a brief survey of the room and all the present patrons because tonight what she wants is a man who knows what he wants.
She already has an idea of the man she’s looking for — he’s not clogging her "newsfeed," and his face isn’t lit up by the handheld crutch of an iPhone that says, "I'm too socially challenged to interact with other humans on a face-to-face basis where I don’t have a few minutes of delay to craft up a worthy type-written response."
He’s the guy she has yet to know anything of true substance about, because he always seems to be "off the grid!" She wants to uncover those quirky tendencies and fleeting thoughts he keeps to himself through personable interaction — not a nonchalant tweet.
An air of mystery will gradually entice a woman to subconsciously make an effort to find out more about you; what’d compel her to exert the effort if everything she could ever want to know was retrievable from a quick click to a history of your 2013-2014 timeline with everything you’ve ever done, ever?
Dispel the growing notion that a memory isn’t worthy if it can’t be filtered in sepia and supplemented with highbrow hashtags — instead, let’s rehash the adventures we’ve lived through with human interaction, and not a virtualized photo album with a cliché caption.
She’s looking; you just have to give her a chance to find you, and it starts with a commitment to spending less time maintaining an aggressive social media presence.