Was this really all there was? They want to date year-olds. Still, there had to be a few decent, desirable, monogamous men out there who wanted the same things I did and who wanted them with a woman in their own age group. I was convinced I was missing something about how to make these apps work in my favor.
None of the advice I read online made any difference in helping me to find my needle in the haystack. The answer — the way you find an actual needle in an actual haystack — is to burn the haystack to the ground. I knew this had to be the key. All this picking through pieces of hay to find one needle was too tedious and it took too damn long. I wanted to burn the whole haystack down and find my needle. I went back to the apps and started applying a few simple rules more on that below.
It changed everything. Five days later, I found my needle. We both shut down our dating app accounts after the first date probably not advisable, but what can I say; we did. He was everything I wanted: kind, funny, stable, family-oriented, professionally successful, and inherently monogamous like me.
But I still wanted a partner. When it was time for me to try again, I decided I was going to formalize my haystack-burning method and share it with others. Gen X women were made for this disaster. We bring a stick-to-it-ness possessed only by those who spent our latchkey years figuring out how to do things without the benefit of YouTube.
All these attributes align perfectly with the process of burning the haystacks in dating apps. We refuse to be pen pals, and we refuse to fight with men or to waste any of our time and energy putting them in their place, even if they deserve it women still take a lot of abuse and aggression on dating apps.
