I've read out there that the ratio between men and women on dating apps is pretty awfully skewed. The estimates I've read, from a variety of sources all claiming inside insight, put it somewhere at 10:3 men:women on the high end and about half as many women on the low end. Let me tell you, I sure do feel it. I've been using some combination of Tinder, Bumble, and Hinged on and off for more than half a decade now and I've had two dates total. The first one didn't have a second date because she sexually assaulted me, the other because she just didn't feel any chemistry. I can get maybe 5 matches in a month if I'm maxing out my free likes on two platforms every day. The chance they even respond to the first message is like 1/10. So on, so forth. I think I'm a decent catch. I take care of myself. I have a job, hobbies (even ones that aren't video games/TV!), open myself up to plenty of new experiences, try to listen to others, and was lucky to be born with some conventionally attractive features. Hasn't helped very much.
This all sucks, but this is nothing that anybody who has used a dating app could tell you. What really kills it all is A) the way this shitty feeling is monetized to sell $30/mo dating app subs that I will not buy on pain of death B) the white-knuckled grip half the women in the south (where I live) seem to have on outdated gender roles C) the lack of any alternatives
Elaborating on that last point, I live about an hour outside of the nearest city of any decent size. I'm in maximum old-white-people-exurb territory. There's basically nothing for me to meet people my own age, let alone women my age, without an hour's drive. All but three of my friends are guys, and they aren't really positioned to introduce me to anybody either. Out of my ~10 closest friends, only one of them has even been in a relationship in the past 5 or so years. I can't move because I'm at my parent's house right now and it feels super hard to justify moving out when you're making less than 50k/yr and have a stable family situation just because I'm sexually frustrated. It's been so long I feel like I wouldn't even know how to flirt or recognize flirting even if I landed in a miracle situation anyways.
What do yall think? Am I making too much out of it?
This is your main problem. The platonic ideal of a dating app is going to struggle if you live in a crap place.
The for-profit garbage apps (all of them) aren't going to do good, either.
I live in a city and as an older guy that doesn't date men can usually get a date a month without paying.
I'll second this - I live in a Midwestern college town and I can get about a date every two weeks if I put the effort in.
I will say that I do pay for one app at a time - the last one I used before my current relationship was Hinge - and the percentages of response do seem pretty accurate. Maybe 1/4 of matches message back, 3/4 of those just have boring uninteresting conversations that go nowhere, and about half you do make a date with will cancel/ghost before it happens. So all in all, maybe 5% of matches turn into dates.
And that's a big investment - if you want a date a week, you'll have to be sufficiently entertaining twenty matches, which is a big time commitment on top of the subscription charge.