u/Pianista1997

I've been reading this sub for a while and noticed men complain the most about:

>Barely receiving any likes
Women not putting any effort into conversation
Being used as an ATM by women who are hooking up with other guys

I just wanted to share my experience as an average man who is looking for a serious relationship, writes personalized first messages, never makes any sexual comments and only dates religious women:

It's day and night from what you guys describe. Women engage in conversation, they ask questions back and put effort as much effort into getting to know me as I put into getting to know them. They never engaged in hookup culture (neither have I) so in that sense I'm not worried at all. In general my experience using dating apps has been very positive and believe it's all about how you swipe.

[...]

If the progressive looks to the future, and the conservative to the past, the reactionary does not measure his yearnings by yesterday's or tomorrow's history. The reactionary does not acclaim what the coming dawn will bring, nor does he cling to the last shadow of the night. His abode rises in that luminous space where the essences question him with their immortal presences.

The reactionary escapes the servitude of history because he pursues in the human jungle the trace of divine steps. Men and facts are, for the reactionary, the servile and mortal flesh that breathes tramontane breaths.

To be a reactionary is to defend causes that do not roll on the chessboard of history, causes that it does not matter to lose.

To be a reactionary is to know that we only discover what we think we have invented; is to admit that our imagination does not create, but only undresses soft bodies.

To be a reactionary is not to embrace certain causes, nor to advocate certain ends, but to submit our will to the need that does not constrain, to surrender our freedom to the demand that does not compel; it is to find the evidence that guides us slumbering on the shore of millenary pools.

The reactionary is not the nostalgic dreamer of abolished pasts, but the hunter of sacred shadows on eternal hills.

(Translation is mine, spanish original in comments)

The small cove with its small beach, cut off from the world by two miniature promontories, was my retreat from myself during those three days of holiday. The beach was reached by a crudely built stairway that began with wooden steps at the top and continued, halfway down, with steps cut directly into the rock, with a rusty iron handrail for support. And each time I went down the old stairway, and especially on the part made of stone, I stepped out of my own existence and found myself.

Occultists say (or at least some of them do) that the soul has supreme moments when it recalls, with the emotions or with some part of memory, a moment or an aspect or a shadow from a previous incarnation. And since the soul returns to a time that is closer than the present to the beginning and origin of things, it experiences a sensation of childhood and of liberation.

In descending that now little-used stairway and slowly stepping out on to the forever deserted beach, it was as if I were using some magical technique to find myself nearer the monad that I perhaps am. Certain aspects and characteristics of my daily existence — represented in my normal self by desires, aversions, worries — vanished from me like fugitives from the law, fading into the shadows beyond recognition, and I attained a state of inward distance in which it was hard to remember yesterday or to believe that the self who lives in me day after day really belongs to me. My usual emotions, my regularly irregular habits, my conversations with others, my adaptations to the world’s social order — all of this seemed like things I’d read somewhere, like inert pages of a published biography, or details from some novel, in one of the middle chapters we read while thinking about something else, and the story-line slackens until it finally slithers away on the ground.

There on the beach, with no sound but that of the ocean waves and of the wind passing high overhead, like a large invisible aeroplane, I experienced dreams of a new sort — soft and shapeless things, travails that made a deep impression, without images or emotions, clear like the sky and the water, and reverberating like the white whorls of ocean rising up from the depths of a vast truth: a tremulously slanting blue in the distance that acquired glistening, muddy-green hues as it approached, breaking with a great hissing its thousand crashing arms to scatter them over darkish sand where they left dry foam, and then gathering into itself all undertows, all return journeys to that original freedom, all nostalgias for God, all memories (like this one, shapeless and painless) of a prior state, blissful because it was so good or because it was different, a body made of nostalgia with a soul of foam, repose, death, the everything or the nothingness which — like a huge ocean — surrounds the island of castaways that is life.

And I slept without sleeping, already straying from what I’d seen through my feelings, a twilight of myself, a ripple of water among trees, the peace of wide rivers, the coolness of sad evenings, the slow parting in the white breast of the childhood sleep of contemplation.

I am curious about how often male users receive roses (the hinge ones, not IRL).

People are overfixating on incoming yes/no, but due to different swipe patterns amongst genders I don't think this is as useful. However, the stats I'm asking about could provide valuable information in order to know how many intentional swipes are you receiving, iirc in order to be placed in the 'Really into you' category the person must swipe right less than 10% of the time.

Mine:

30M, straight, 2 months of app usage. I currently have 89 likes waiting in my stack, out of those 53 are in the "Really into me" category.

If you don't know the exact number, sharing the approximate (i.e 50+ in one category, 150+ in the other) would be enough.

[...]

If the progressive looks to the future, and the conservative to the past, the reactionary does not measure his yearnings by yesterday's or tomorrow's history. The reactionary does not acclaim what the coming dawn will bring, nor does he cling to the last shadow of the night. His abode rises in that luminous space where the essences question him with their immortal presences.

The reactionary escapes the servitude of history because he pursues in the human jungle the trace of divine steps. Men and facts are, for the reactionary, the servile and mortal flesh that breathes tramontane breaths.

To be a reactionary is to defend causes that do not roll on the chessboard of history, causes that it does not matter to lose.

To be a reactionary is to know that we only discover what we think we have invented; is to admit that our imagination does not create, but only undresses soft bodies.

To be a reactionary is not to embrace certain causes, nor to advocate certain ends, but to submit our will to the need that does not constrain, to surrender our freedom to the demand that does not compel; it is to find the evidence that guides us slumbering on the shore of millenary pools.

The reactionary is not the nostalgic dreamer of abolished pasts, but the hunter of sacred shadows on eternal hills.

All of a sudden, as if a surgical hand of destiny had operated on a long-standing blindness with immediate and sensational results, I lift my gaze from my anonymous life to the clear recognition of how I live. And I see that everything I’ve done, thought or been is a species of delusion or madness. I’m amazed by what I managed not to see. I marvel at all that I was and that I now see I’m not.

I look at my past life as at a field lit up by the sun when it breaks through the clouds, and I note with metaphysical astonishment how my most deliberate acts, my clearest ideas and my most logical intentions were after all no more than congenital drunkenness, inherent madness and huge ignorance. I didn’t even act anything out. I was the role that got acted. At most, I was the actor’s motions.

All that I’ve done, thought or been is a series of submissions, either to a false self that I assumed belonged to me because I expressed myself through it to the outside, or to a weight of circumstances that I supposed was the air I breathed. In this moment of seeing, I suddenly find myself isolated, an exile where I’d always thought I was a citizen. At the heart of my thoughts I wasn’t I.

I’m dazed by a sarcastic terror of life, a despondency that exceeds the limits of my conscious being. I realize that I was all error and deviation, that I never lived, that I existed only in so far as I filled time with consciousness and thought. I feel, in this moment, like a man who wakes up after a slumber full of real dreams, or like a man freed by an earthquake from the dim light of the prison he’d grown used to.

This sudden awareness of my true being, of this being that has always sleepily wandered between what it feels and what it sees, weighs on me like an untold sentence to serve.

It’s so hard to describe what I feel when I feel I really exist and my soul is a real entity that I don’t know what human words could define it. I don’t know if I have a fever, as I feel I do, or if I’ve stopped having the fever of sleeping through life.

Yes, I repeat, I’m like a traveller who suddenly finds himself in a strange town, without knowing how he got there, which makes me think of those who lose their memory and for a long time are not themselves but someone else. I was someone else for a long time — since birth and consciousness — and suddenly I’ve woken up in the middle of a bridge, leaning over the river and knowing that I exist more solidly than the person I was up till now.

But the city is unknown to me, the streets are new, and the trouble has no cure. And so, leaning over the bridge, I wait for the truth to go away and let me return to being fictitious and non-existent, intelligent and natural.

It was just a brief moment, and it’s already over. Once more I see the furniture all around me, the pattern on the old wallpaper, and the sun through the dusty panes. I saw the truth for a moment. For a moment I was consciously what great men are their entire lives.

I recall their words and deeds and wonder if they were also successfully tempted by the Demon of Reality. To know nothing about yourself is to live. To know yourself badly is to think. To know yourself in a flash, as I did in this moment, is to have a fleeting notion of the intimate monad, the soul’s magic word.

But that sudden light scorches everything, consumes everything. It strips us naked of even ourselves.

It was just a moment, and I saw myself. I can no longer even say what I was. And now I’m sleepy, because I think — I don’t know why — that the meaning of it all is to sleep.