Relationships Talk

Life Style
Posted at: Sep 29, 2018, 12:02 AM; last updated: Sep 29, 2018, 12:02 AM (IST)

If there is one thing that holds true about relationships is that no two people have the same experiences. Bollywood stars – Kriti Sanon, Malaika Arora and Radhika Apte got candid with Anaita Shroff Adajania, the host of Feet Up with the Stars while talking about dating, Tinder and their biggest turn ons. Malaika Arora Khan shared, “No one’s ever given me dating advice, even my mom hasn’t.” When pressed about how she’s navigating single life. As for passing down dating tips to her son, “just stay safe.” 

On the other side, Kriti Sanon’s advice to everyone is to make sure you’re wearing a good perfume, since it can be a big turn on and the wrong scent can be a big turn off. She says, “A good smell is definitely a turn on.”

Radhika advises that you just have to go out to meet the right person. A self-appointed advisor to all of her friends, she says she never judges and she therefore expects no judgement in return. 

Online dating, whether through a website like OkCupid or PlentyOfFish, or via a mobile application like Tinder or Bumble, leaves some users unsatisfied in finding meaningful relationships. Tai Tran, 25, Jesse Salas, 24, and Benna Iqbal, 25, saw the shortcomings of these applications and websites and together created the app called Blue. Blue aims to make dating more conversational both online and offline through innovative and creative features like smart icebreakers and relationship literacy. Tran is a Forbes 30 Under 30 in Media and former marketer at Apple.

Frederick Daso: Seeing that you’re entering a crowded space being the dating market, what was the driving factor in developing Blue? Was it through a realization that there were unmet needs in the dating market, or did you look to improve on a competitor’s features in their product?

Tai Tran: The driving factor behind Blue was to have a human-centered focus in online dating. Speaking to a lot of young adults, they told me that they have become jaded with online dating just because it is so easy to turn people into only profiles and not to see the people behind them. These unmet needs and common complaints that we get from users of dating apps, such as prioritizing looks over compatibility and interest, motivated our app’s design.

One of our core features to rectify these problems is Instant Match Live, where we ask three fun questions to users at 7 P.M. If you and another member respond the same way, you both will receive each other as an Instant Match.

Daso: You looked at the current state of how people interact on dating apps, and you’re designing features such as Instant Match Live to help encourage particular behaviors or diminish other norms that are not conducive to genuine conversation. You’re trying to shape consumer behavior. How can you ensure that you’re able to do that with the features that you’ve implemented?

Tran: That’s an excellent way to describe it. How do we suppress bad behaviors and promote good ones? When it comes to online dating, a lot of the users we spoke to, especially female users of dating apps, told us they get bombarded with many messages. To help more promote more positive behavior, we introduced a “smart ice-breaker” mechanic. The new tool gives users more control over how conversations start. Until both members answer the icebreaker, you can’t begin to chatting with your match. My philosophy is that even though you match with someone, that shouldn’t permit you to start bombarding them with messages, especially any that are vulgar and suggestive.

Daso: That makes sense. We hear stories all the time about individuals sending certain suggestive messages to others, which is not appropriate or fair to the receiving person. However, don’t you worry that by introducing these artificial mechanics to promoting good behavior, there may be some unintended behaviors to emerge as a consequence?

For instance, the smart icebreakers, one could come up between to matched people where one knows the topic well, but the other doesn’t, so they aren’t able to establish a mutual interest from the beginning.

Tran: That is true in a sense. For us, a “smart ice-breaker” is not meant to get both users to answer the same way. It’s really for both members to have a starting point for the conversation. One of the common concerns we’ve seen is that no one wants to make that first move to chat. With Blue, both people answering the ice-breaker provides a start point for any subsequent conservation.

Daso: Great. Last question here. For another founder in a college student or recent graduate who’s working on an app for social interaction (not necessarily dating), what advice would you give to them to build an app that can promote positive, pro-social behavior that allows for humans to connect?

Tran: We talk a lot about good and bad behavior, but I think it’s all about community-building. You want to build that community flow but focus on quality and group norms. Specifically, these soft rules of expectations and actions that you want them to follow and abide by in their interactions with others via your app. By focusing on setting these norms in place first versus gathering a bunch of users, you’ll be able to cultivate that community rather than struggle to get all these new users on the same page about how to interact on the app.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and readability.

If you enjoyed this article, feel free to check out my other work on LinkedIn and my personal website, frederickdaso.com. Follow me on Twitter @fredsoda, on Medium @fredsoda, and on Instagram @fred_soda.

If you’ve been online dating for more than a hot second, you’ve probably encountered a range of joys and horrors. On the positive side, dating apps have introduced me to some pretty great men. On the depressing side, I’ve also matched with men who have said inappropriate things to me, sometimes before we ever met. At worst, I’ve — briefly, thankfully — feared for my safety.

Such is the burden of being a woman, looking for connection online. Alexandra Tweten knows this well. Her popular Instagram account, Bye Felipe, outs creeps for their bad online-dating behaviors. For the unfamiliar, she posts screenshots submitted by women who have been harassed by men on dating apps. Propositioning for sex, lashing out when they’re turned down, sending pictures of the male anatomy (or requests for racy photos) and calling women a slew of names are all-too-common online-dating scenarios. Since Bye Felipe’s creation four years ago, Tweten has amassed nearly a half-million followers.

A journalism major, Tweten never planned to be a “Feminist Tinder-Creep-Busting Web Vigilante” with a popular social media account, as she was originally hailed in 2014. Now, she’s back to her writing roots, exploring online dating and lending her best wisdom in a new “Bye Felipe” book, which is an ode to understanding and taking it all in stride.

I asked her why she originally started Bye Felipe, how she got the idea for a book and how online-daters can maintain a positive attitude through all the ups and downs. (This interview has been edited for clarity and length.)

Jenna Birch: Where did you originally get the idea for Bye Felipe?

Alexandra Tweten: It was October 2014, and I was in a Facebook group for women in L.A. One woman posted a screenshot of a message she had received on OkCupid. She didn’t respond, and 12 hours later, she’d gotten a second message, [an insulting expletive].

I thought it was funny, and I’d gotten messages that felt similar before. There was one guy who’d messaged me for months and months, over and over, on OkCupid. When I finally turned him down, he said, “Why would you even respond?” You learn that you can’t not respond; they freak out. But if you do respond, they also yell at you. You can’t win.

So, we had an inside joke in the Facebook group that when something like that happens, we’d say, “Bye Felipe” — which is a play on “Bye, Felicia.” I started the Instagram as a joke just for me and my friends to make fun of these guys. Two weeks later, Olga Khazan at the Atlantic found it and asked to interview me. After her article came out, it blew up from there.

Birch: Tell me about some of your personal online-dating horror stories. How did it compare to other women’s?

Tweten: When I first started online dating, I received a handful of hostile messages. And the first thing I thought was, Is he a stalker? Is he going to come after me? You just don’t know. It can be scary putting yourself out there on the Internet. I got a lot of thank you messages from women who don’t feel so alone in that experience now. I felt the same way when I saw the messages that other women were receiving.

Birch: Do you think “toxic masculinity” plays into the Bye Felipe phenomenon?

Tweten: Yes. It’s definitely related. But we probably need a nicer name for it. Men hear the phrase “toxic masculinity” and think, “Wait, we’re not allowed to be men anymore?” That’s not what we’re saying when we talk about toxic masculinity. It’s really about redefining the social norms of what it means to be traditionally masculine.

Currently, “real men” aren’t generally allowed to step outside of a very rigid set of gender roles that basically say they should be strong, dominant and unemotional. Anger, violence and aggression are some of the only approved emotions men are allowed to have. They can’t be sensitive, sad or show any softer emotions. We expect men to be sexually aggressive, too, and this is a big reason that women experience so many hostile messages online. It’s ingrained in our society.

At the end of the day, a lot of the guys perpetuating these behaviors just have personal issues, too. Online dating is hard for everyone; however, the stakes are just a lot higher for women. Women experience it differently. It’s often a safety issue.

Birch: Have you ever found success in online dating, personally?

Tweten: Yes, I’ve met a lot of really great guys online dating; I was in a relationship with someone I met on OkCupid for 2½ years. I’ve met a lot of wonderful guys who turned out to be friends. I also have lots of couple friends who met online and are now married or engaged.

The point of Bye Felipe has never been to encourage women not to do online dating. The real message is that our society and culture are really broken; the evidence is that we have all these examples of men acting completely entitled, objectifying women and becoming aggressive. It’s not only in online dating, it’s everywhere: on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, gaming apps, message boards — it even happens in real life on the street or in the bar.

I think that online dating can absolutely be successful. We spend so much of our time online, so why shouldn’t we use it for dating? The fact that this behavior is coming up so often [online] is because it’s so easy to document.

Birch: Let’s talk about your book. How did you approach creating a book from an Instagram account?

Tweten: I got the idea for the book pretty shortly after the Instagram took off. It took me two years to finish the proposal, and then another year to write and publish it. Whenever I got submissions, I’d put them in folders in my inbox: mansplainers, fat-shamers, “nice guys” and so on. And then I analyzed them to see if they had anything in common to figure out what the best ways of combating them would be.

I wanted to create a handbook for how to handle any situation when you’re online dating as a woman. It ended up being an anthology of the best — or worst, I guess — Bye Felipe submissions, a guide to the best ways to respond to trolls, a collection of funny stories from my own dating experiences and then partly dating advice.

I also tried to answer the question “Why do guys do that?” It’s basically the book I wish I would have had when I first started dating, especially online.

Birch: What did you want your big takeaway for women to be when they finished reading?

Tweten: Don’t take online dating too seriously. Have fun, and let it go. You’re probably going to meet a bunch of jerks out there, but have a sense of humor about it. Make fun of them.

The number one key to not letting harassment get to you is having self-confidence — which is really the most radical act of resistance.

READ MORE:

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How tough is the dating-app scene? HBO’s documentary ‘Swiped’ paints a bleak portrait.

Bollywood stars – Kriti Sanon, Malaika Arora and Radhika Apte got candid with Anaita Shroff Adajania, the host of Feet Up with the Stars while talking about dating, Tinder and their biggest turn ons

If there is one thing that holds true about relationships; is that no two people have the same experiences. Bollywood stars – Kriti Sanon, Malaika Arora and Radhika Apte got candid with Anaita Shroff Adajania, the host of Feet Up with the Stars while talking about dating, Tinder and their biggest turn ons.

Malaika Arora Khan:

“No one’s ever given me dating advice, even my mom hasn’t” says Malaika when pressed about how she’s navigating single life. As for passing down dating tips to her son, “just stay safe.”

Kriti Sanon:

Shroff Adajania and Kriti Sanon

Here’s what works for Kriti Sanon on a date, and you can thank us later – perfume. Her advice to everyone is to make sure you’re wearing a good perfume, since it can be a big turn on and the wrong scent can be a big turn off. And we quote “A good smell is definitely a turn on.”

Radhika Apte:

Shroff Adajania and Radhika Apte

Radhika advises that you just have to go out to meet the right person. A self-confessed advisor to all of her friends, she says she never judges and she therefore expects no judgement in return. Where do we sign up for a sit down on our relationships with Radhika Apte?

Also Read: Malaika Arora: First Man I Started Dating I Actually Ended Up Marrying

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