Dating – Love in India

Usually, people don’t wonder whether there is a reason why you are still single and just complain about their loneliness and despair to find the right person. In most cases, people are single because they want to be single, they have a certain lifestyle and unconsciously do everything not to change it. They don’t really care about finding the love and saving close relationship. People want to love in their dreams more than to take responsibilities in the real world. There are many different reasons why personally you are single in this period of life, look at the below given cases that can remind you some familiar situations.

You have a tight schedule and almost no free time

Photo by Becky Wetherington You have got a promotion and now you have to work even more. When you have several free hours, you want nothing but to relax and to be in silence or to meet with your old best friends. Serious relationships require huge emotional investing, sometimes not less than climbing the career ladder. Single people get used to having free time that they can spend in accordance with their desire and not to spend it on building a new relationship with a potential partner. If you want to change the situation, you should change your mind about the free time.

You don’t know what you really want

You can be in searching for your own destiny or you are going to emigrate to another continent in the foreseeable future, to change your job and to start studying. You just have no time and desire to add one more challenge to the list, however, you suffer from being single and having no help. Now you need rather a housemaid, a cooker and a lover in one person than a beloved partner. Such a situation cannot last forever and your main goal will change, involving your private life.

You are not self-confident to have a partner

You look in the mirror and make a weird face because you are not satisfied with your appearance, your job and yourself in general. You don’t make yourself change the situation, change a way of life and a work place. You suffer from different consequences of the internal disharmony, starting from having no friends and ending with reluctance to have a close relationship. Maybe you are afraid that you will fall in love and a partner will break up with you. It is necessary to change yourself and take pleasure from the whole life.

You try to teach everyone

Photo by FAFPeople prefer to get pieces of advice only upon request and they hate when someone puts themselves above. Nobody cares about your experience and the success in life. People want to talk, to be heard and not to get some free lessons. Look fairly at yourself. Are you so successful and rich to teach everyone to live a better life? If you are not, stop doing that.

You are searching for a perfect partner

Have you already imagined an ideal person to the smallest detail? In any case, you should understand that this person lives only in your head, they are the result of your imagination. You can try to find them, but you can spend the whole life looking for them. You narrow the worldview and reduce your chances to meet a really good person.

You are a narcissist in the final stage

If you don’t stop considering you the most important person in the world, you will not find a beloved partner because all your love is concentrated around yourself. Stop thinking about only your wishes and look around. People want to get love back.

You don’t watch your appearance

People make their opinion at the first sight at your outfit and someone of them even doesn’t want to pay attention to your sharp mind. Nobody dreams about a bad-looking person. First, love yourself and then other people will love you.

“Yeah that’s right. Don’t let your parents arrange your marriage. Don’t let your auntie/cousin create your matrimonial profile. How on earth am I supposed to get married if I happen to have not been lucky enough to just run into my soul mate accidentally??”

My vehement advocacy of freedom of choosing one’s life partner has landed me in trouble not once, not twice, but several times. To be frank, I kinda don’t mind.

But this was serious. My follower-cum-friend T wanted a real solution to a real problem: What about those who don’t “accidentally” find someone to fall in love with?

“Well, that’s why we have dating.” I offer, as we sip coffee together on a sunny Saturday afternoon. Separated by a few thousand miles. Typing away fiercely.

“Which doesn’t exist in India. Let’s be honest.”

Dating … What?

Well…er…right. Indians do marry for love. But these matches are usually based on people “accidentally” finding each other through work/school/mutual friends and relatives. No nonsense, goal-driven dating is still rare.

“But what about online dating?”

“You try it. The profiles are mostly either fake or of sickos looking for new ways to get off.”

“You’re right. I would probably not go out on a “date” with a guy I didn’t already know and/or like,” I was thinking aloud. “You can’t really trust people you don’t know.”

“See?” I could almost see the look of huffed triumph on T’s face.

The conversation stuck with me. Indian girls are simply put off by online dating. Strange men are usually seen as sources of potential danger in our culture, and for good reason. So what are the options of the young, urban(ized), upwardly mobile singles who’re bored of matrimonial websites and are ready to write the Indian Dating Story?

I did my research. I was surprised to find how many Indian dating portals and apps exist. While each was unique in its own cool ways, none of these apps answered my basic question: Am I sure I’m not wasting my time?

In other words, how sure am I of the quality of the member community?

One of the apps which stood out is called Woo – A cool mobile meeting platform for interesting, young, progressive singles.

Keeping it real

So what’s Woo’s answer to my question? And why is it special?

The answer is simple – a flat rejection of my sign up request. And it’s special because it irked me and wowed me at the same time.

What characterizes Woo is its commitment to keeping things real – creating opportunities for you to find a person you can actually go out on a date with. The platform intends to actively discourage “casual” flirting and thrill-seeking by people not looking for a serious relationship. For starters, when you try to sign up it screens your Facebook profile to check if you’re married or in a relationship, and politely declines to have you on board if you are. Woo rejects a substantial proportion of the sign up requests that it gets. It calls itself a “curated community” of real singles, looking for a real connection.

But being single on Facebook isn’t your sure-fire ticket on to Woo-land.

Woo auto-creates your profile photo album from Facebook.

Woo pulls in what you do for a living from Linkedin.

It even auto-populates your interests (in the form of pages you subscribe to) from Facebook.

That’s how real your Woo avatar would be once you’re past the sign up stage.

This approach isn’t free of its glitches though. I, like most of you, subscribe to many pages on Facebook, without giving a lot of thought to it. Like humour pages, friend’s photography pages etc. Woo picks two pages out of those under “interests” and shows it to one’s matches, which may not at all be representative of one’s actual interests. (In my case “Neha G Photography” showed up as one of these two. What the ….?)

However, the bottom line remains – no faking customizing of interests in order to attract people you like. No “enhanced” profile pictures for dating purposes. No padded up resume. Just the real you. That’s all you get to bring on to Woo.

Liar liar…

Between you and me – the rejection didn’t feel great. That ensured I was all the more curious to find out what exactly Woo offered me in return for demanding such high standards of authenticity.

Here’s what I did. I signed up through the Facebook profile of a single friend. :D

First surprise after you’re past the profile creation stage – it’s telling you to turn on your GPS.

My GPS?? I almost checked again to make sure I was not on Google Maps.

This was wow. This was truly unique. In keeping with Woo’s commitment to “keeping it real”, it gives you match suggestions of people only in the same city as you – people you can date in the real world. True to its principle of accepting nothing but the truth, Woo doesn’t trust you with disclosing your true location. It would rather believe your GPS.

Woo sometimes takes this mistrust of its users to a pesky level. For example, you can’t write what you want about yourself in the “About me” section. Users are allowed only to pick from a list of pre-defined adjectives which describe them, such as “wanderer”, “music maven” etc. Trolling-proof as they may be, standardized interests for everyone with no scope for expressing oneself freely takes a whole lot of the fun out of a dating app.

The final move

When it comes to match suggestions, Woo takes into account your mutual friends on Facebook, which increases credibility. If you like someone and are too shy to just kick it off by sending them a message, you can even ask mutual friends to introduce you.

You can open up a chat only if the attraction is mutual, i.e. if you confirm that you like someone and they return the favour. That takes care of spam. As a further measure against spamming, Woo also lets you “hide” your profile from being displayed publicly, if you want use the app to chat only with your existing matches.

You can continue to chat on Woo’s plush red-and-wood themed IM platform till you’re comfortable to take things to real life. (Oh btw, Woo’s Indianized humour emoticons are the coolest I’ve EVER used. And that includes Facebook. And Whatsapp.)

So if you’re a young adult, out there looking for a real relationship, Woo might just be your perfect start. If you’re a woman, with the whole suite of security tools from anti-stalking to anti-spam features, this is also one of the safest it’s going to get on a dating app.

Real matches. The real you. A real connection.

Disclaimer: This is a sponsored post.

Tag: Dating

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