As I’ve been working on this book, I thought I’d post chapters on my portfolio website to share with people. Specifically, I posted a link to it on my dating app profiles to share.
One thing I’ve learned or observed in my dating app travels is that there’s very little trust in men (and, I must confess, my organization (men) isn’t doing much to help our cause). I know I can be trusted, but women who don’t know me don’t know that. So I try to be as transparent as I can in my profile.
Some women do background checks, while others just want to find out about you online to feel more comfortable, so I like to help them along with my full name, marketing portfolio website, and my phone number where possible.
When I started writing this book, I figured I’d share that, as well. Anyone who reads any of the chapters will not only learn more about me, how I observe things, and what I think, but they’ll understand the flavor and purpose of the book. (They may also find some humor in it.)
In this sense, I guess it also becomes somewhat of a weed-out mechanism. If someone reads it and doesn’t like what I wrote, they’ll self select and ignore me. But if they do like it, that’s just one more sign we may be compatible. That makes is a win-win for me.
But what I didn’t count on was the number of people who just see it as marketing, or worse, that I’m not really trying to date and am just collecting stories.
While I may use a story now and again to illustrate a point, the purpose of the book is to share the patterns and behaviors I’ve witnessed in my time on dating apps. For example, I created a “Dating Battleship” game to help people weed out incompatible people, established that you can’t text your way to a relationship with someone you’ve never met, and identified that the apps exist solely to facilitate meet ‘n greets… so meet already.
The core lesson I’ve learned from sharing the link to my chapters is that everyone is different. As many people there are that look at that link or what’s in it is the same number of reactions and interpretations there will be about what I wrote or why I even shared it in the first place.
Some will be suspicious while others will enjoy it. Some won’t notice it because they’re just looking at profile pictures while others will deep dive into it.
And that’s one of the points of my whole book. There’s no formula to this. We’re all different. And if we’re just nice to one another, and have grace, hopefully, we’ll all meet our match.