The Trouble with Curious Men

I’ve been using my dating profile on the app Feeld as a little test. It’s not just to see who’s interested, but to see who’s actually curious enough to bother swiping far enough to reach my final photo—an image of my Sex Advice for Seniors podcast logo. It was a technique I borrowed from another podcaster I found while browsing the app; my first thought was, how clever to find a way to attract new listeners and perhaps find a partner. Talk about multitasking.

I told my best friend, Six—an ex-boyfriend from a decade ago—about my tactic. “If a man is curious,” I said, “he’ll actually read the whole profile which will involve having to swipe through five pictures. He’ll then go off and do a bit of research. He’ll look properly. If he’s not curious, he won’t even get that far.”

“And that’s your filter,” he said, with that resigned tone in his voice I have come to recognise as his way of saying I can do better than that.

“Exactly. Because I can’t be bothered with men who just want to talk about themselves. Which is fine, I suppose, if what you want is a one-sided conversation with a man who thinks his personality is the main event.”

“They’re just looking for an audience,” he said.

And that’s exactly it. I’m not looking for someone who just sees a face and swipes right. I want someone who notices things. Someone who thinks, oh, this is an interesting woman, let me actually find out who she is. Because the ones who are curious tend to be curious in all the right ways; they ask questions, they want to know what I do, and they come prepared.

There is, however, one gaping hole in my plan to find a curious man who then reaches the final image on my profile: they end up oversharing about their own sex lives. I should have anticipated that, but I now realise there is nothing that screams “Free Therapy” quite like a woman posting an image that includes the words Sex Advice.