Is AUTHOR wrong in the post ? POST : I'm 'in the closet' as being an ace publically, for context. I've only ever admitted it online to randoms, and only came to the conclusion about 9 months to a year ago. I'm not the biggest 'people person' to begin with and a less than fun childhood means I'm very particular about my personal space.

So this starts about a year and a half to two years ago, housemates conviced me to install tinder, we lived in a university town so I figured I'd just upload some decent pics, write something pithy and be away with it. And after 6 months or so of not getting anywhere, barely getting any matches and when I did try making conversation it was more of an uphill struggle than I thought it was worth, so I promptly uninstalled the app when I had to move at the end of the university year and forgot about it.

Fast forward 6 months or so, with some therapy and counselling sprinkled in, I'm back at my home town spending a lot of time in my room depressed due to moving back to a small shithole in the middle of nowhere, when i noticed I never actually uninstalled tinder, I just moved it off my home screen, so I boot it up and flick through just to see what was out there now I was back home, having a laugh with my mate about spotting people we knew back from school etc.

He's pretty much the polar opposite of me, out every weekend, over 100 matches, etc so he looks over my profile, changes a few things and tells me to take some better pictures, so we do. I went from bad angles, poorly fitting clothes and a rough beard to me looking smart in my work uniform and a few casual shots of me sat in a pub garden in summer, work my way through my swipes again and going to bed, only when i woke up I had two (2!) whole new matches, more than I got in a month in the university town. I was too shocked at actually getting a match to say anything to them, so I just left them.

Then I just sort of carried on, playing about with the settings to get the best coverage, turned it almost into a game with me telling my mate every time I 'got one', and we even joked about setting up drinking game rules after reading the same copy/paste biographies time after time. 

The question I have is, am I the asshole for matching with these girls and then never opening a line of communication with them? For a while after the initial rush of actually getting attention I'd only swipe left, but my mate told me that swiping too much one way or the other causes the algorithm to think your account is a bot and limits what you're able to see and do, so I turned back to an average/random swiping pattern which means i still get a match once in a blue moon.


But obviously being the person doing the deed means I can't judge myself from an outside perspective, which is where you lovely people come in.

TLDR: Use tinder for an ego boost and people spotting despite having no intentions of commiting to anything. Should I stop?