Internet Dating Without Dating Apps

You realize you don’t have to use dating apps, right?

Of course. But if you delete your accounts on OKCupid and Tinder, what will you have left to persuade yourself you’re trying to date? Minus all that time you spend perusing profiles of people who claim they couldn’t live without sex, you might have to advance your career or spend time at the beach with your friends.

Never fear! We have a list of other ways you can find potential Internet dates without having to put down your phone or use any weird dating apps:

Google

Type into the search bar: [name of a member of the sex you want to date] [city you live in].

Example: “Matt Chicago.”

Send a message to the first 100 results where you find an e-mail address.

Arguably, most people listing an e-mail address on a website in 2015 have an inbox flooded with spam. Just make sure to differentiate yourself by putting something in the subject line that catches their eye. For instance, “Join My Network on LinkedIn.”

LinkedIn

They say you shouldn’t mix business with pleasure, but you only succeed in business by breaking the rules. Your fondness for cliches like these is exactly why you’re finding LinkedIn so useless. But now you can unlock all the potential to channel your dynamic synergy: Explore your 3^rd-degree connections and message anyone who appears to have a job so bad they will willingly accept a date with you to escape from it. Your Psych 101 classmate’s frat brother’s sister lists herself as a “Copy Editor” at a vanity book publisher. You’re not just S.O. material. You’re her hero.

Uwe Boll IMDB.com Message Board

Sure, there’s a lot of hate here for Uwe Boll, the film director whose movies average a score of 8% on RottenTomatoes. But dig a little deeper and you’ll find incisive takes on the director’s oeuvre like user watchinglotsofstuff offers in his thread “Uwe Boll should be considered a philosopher, not a filmmaker”:

While I feel [Boll] has yet to really expound his own original philosophical ideas, he clearly has a deep insight into the work of Nietzsche and Heidegger. It's rare to see such a profound exposé of contemporary thinking in the nihilist/existentialist schools of philosophy.

Were we all too busy mocking Boll’s tone-deaf exploitation to appreciate the genius of lines like “Your mother’s wrong, kid. Being afraid of the dark is what keeps most of us alive”? Hell, no. Watchinglotsofstuff is a troll.

But given the relative number of true Uwe Boll fans (just Uwe Boll?), watchinglotsofstuff might be the biggest Uwe Boll fan by virtue of being the only person who has analyzed his films closely enough to find any narrative thread at all.

Con of dating an Uwe Boll fan: Having to watch “Alone in the Dark”

Pro of dating an Uwe Boll fan: Will tell you how to find fame and riches by capitalizing on loopholes in the German tax system

Songmeanings.com

A potential partner’s taste in music can tell you a lot about them. But even on OKCupid, where you can list your favorite bands, it’s easy to find yourself wasting time on a conversation with someone who says they too appreciate Dead or Alive when it turns out they just had the “You Spin Me Round (Like a Record)” singers confused with Duran Duran.

Solution: Search for your favorite album on songmeanings.com. For instance, say it’s Nas’ Illmatic. Every time you listen to the literate, acrobatic closer “It Ain’t Hard to Tell,” you discover something new in lines like: “I kick the skill like Shaquille holds a pill / Vocabulary spills I'm Ill / Plus Matic, I freak beats slam it like Iron Sheik / Jam like a tech with correct techniques.”

User humanjudge, too, understands the complexity of “It Ain’t Hard to Tell.” He says:

Only certain individuals will understand the meaning.

Want to date someone who thinks you’re special? Look no further than humanjudge.

1-Star Yelp Reviewers of Restaurants with 4.5+ Star Average Reviews

Remember the fairy tale “The Princess and the Pea”? Refresher: The moral of the story is that if you have more people trying to sleep with you than you know what to do with, you should pick the one who makes insane demands. Anyway, it probably doesn’t apply to you, but you can still get something out of it.

Find the best-rated restaurants in your city on Yelp. For instance, if you live in Chicago, check out Girl & the Goat, a restaurant that 3,853 patrons have awarded an average of 4.5 stars.

But Anthony P. of Evanston, Ill., doesn’t buy into the acclaim. He gives this dive one star and offers the following reason:

Metra anybody use the metra train???

I see metra is increasing their fares why?? the don't callect the fairs on the train i ride they have no security the station has no cover for the cold or rain they now want you to purchase a card to swipe but nowhere to swipe hte card except at certain stations so you have to go downtown just to swipe a card,how stupid.This is set up by an overpaid RTA board that never rides their own trains,hey metra look at cta at least it works

Though it would be easy to dismiss Anthony P. as a man simply confused about the entity he’s reviewing, he shows here that he has a lot to offer. Enough income to ride the Metra, a quiet home in the suburbs, the gall to take down too-big-to-fail government bureaucracies.

But where to take such an epicure? As long as it’s not a Metra snack stand, you should be fine.

Yik Yak

Have you heard that millennials are the most self-absorbed, entitled generation? “Why don’t they put down their selfie sticks and ingest lethal amounts of cocaine?” says someone on time.com as he queues up a Pink Floyd song on Spotify.

But that Gen-Xer in a Nirvana shirt has some ammunition when it comes to Yik Yak, the app whose value is that you can anonymously share 200-character quips with anyone in a 10-mile radius. Mostly braggadocio about sex, drugs, and scatology that you’d ignore if overheard, the other bulk of the app’s content is users asking whether anyone wants to meet up to exchange sexual favors.

If you thought OKCupid and Tinder were giving you too much information about potential partners, this is the strategy for you. Even though your sexual history points to casual sex being almost universally bad, that shouldn’t stop you from going through with it so you can brag about it on Yik Yak.

“Are Yik Yak hookups leaving millennials too shallow for intimacy?” a writer will ask next week in a think piece crafted to cultivate pageviews.

Just remember: No contraception is 100% safe in preventing the birth of a think piece.

If none of these Internet options work... there’s always the dignity of getting shot down in person. Maybe it’s not that bad?

Amanda Lowry (@amandajlowry on Twitter) is a writer and stand-up comic living in Chicago. Ask her out face-to-face, if you’d like.