Dear Eva,
I’m a 27-year-old woman and have been single for some time. I’ve recently been trying out Tinder, and while I match with people and even chat with them everything seems to be going well, but whenever I bring up meeting IRL, they are quick to ghost me.
There’s one guy I’ve been talking to for a month now; he does live about an hour away. After about two weeks of messaging here and there I gave him my number and we have been texting just about every day since then (again, it’s been over a month).
We have never had any trouble keeping a conversation going and he always makes me laugh.
I’ve recently brought up hanging out and meeting up, we have tentative plans to do so at a sporting event in a few weeks. He has mentioned once in passing about meeting up but never brought up anything further. I’m not trying to get my hopes up though – this is when everything always goes wrong for me. Should I be worried that this is once again going to go nowhere, especially when it’s taking so long to even meet up?
Hey, you.
I’m afraid that this isn’t a great sign. Bad news about Tinder: it’s tempting to many people who are interested in bit of flirting without taking the step of meeting up with strangers. Maybe they’re married. Maybe they’re just shy. But whatever the reason, if someone doesn’t want to meet up with you after a few chatty exchanges, I don’t think it’s a great investment of your time to keep talking in the hopes that they’ll come around to the idea.
The most important thing to remember is this: it’s not about you. They don’t know you! And surely their decades of personal experience and circ*mstances bear far more on their decisions about who they want to date that a few texts with you. Good news about Tinder: there are literally thousands of other options for you to move on to.
Love,
Eva
Dear Eva,
I have recently reconnected with an acquaintance from my college days online and started to have feelings for him. We are both single and in our mid-30s.
He is a successful veterinarian who is good-looking and popular. In the past he has always dated attractive girls who are incredibly successful in their jobs, so I don’t really qualify as his “type”. I am slightly overweight but with a pretty face. I have been successful in the past, but I recently changed careers, so I’m not such a raging success at this point in my life.
Besides all that, I do think we are a good match. We talk for hours, we have a similar humor, and we both have flexible ideas about where we’d like to live.
In the past when I have liked someone like this, I have been too keen for them and put them off. I don’t want to make the same mistake with him. Is there anyway to ask someone to look beyond appearance to the person beneath?
Hey, you.
The subject line of your email was “How do I become his type?”, and so I’ll respond to that first of all: you can’t. By this I mean that to fit yourself into the parameters of what you have identified as this person’s “type” will surely be a fruitless exercise, because you seem to have identified his type as “more attractive and successful than me”.
Whereas in light of the fact that you are talking with each other for hours, I think there’s a strong possibility that you are someone he is attracted to. Which may naturally be hard to believe.
Most of us are harder on ourselves than we are on others. In my case, an aside but cruel remark from a boyfriend of my youth about my eyebrows made me believe for years that any man interested in me must either have poor eyesight or an unusual penchant for Omar Sharif. Eventually I realized that some men simply were attracted to me, even if their previous girlfriends had been more delicate of brow, and there was no point in trying to wax my face into their images.
Now, it may be that you are feeling sensitive about your appearance and career and would like to work on these areas of your life for your own sense of wellbeing. In which case, go for it! But don’t go to that effort because you think it will make this man like you more; instead, put the effort into spending time with him in real life, and see if something wonderful happens.
Love,
Eva
