My objection to the swiping model is neither moral nor nostalgic. It is that the form itself is illiterate. A photograph and eleven words cannot carry a proposition of any complexity, what I am proposing is complex, and so the medium quietly filters for people who want something simple and immediate. Those people exist and are entitled to their evening. I am not one of them and I have stopped pretending to be.
Sixty two, south east, dominant, thirty years at this, which I mention as a fact rather than a credential.
What I want is an arrangement of some duration with a woman who wishes to be answerable to somebody and has thought about what that means beyond an aesthetic. I am formal in writing and a good deal warmer in person, and I am told the gap is disconcerting. I keep a written record of what has been agreed, I revisit it, and I expect to be told when something is not working rather than discovering it inside a silence.
I will not be exchanging photographs first. I will not answer anything that has plainly been sent to twenty people, and it is always plain. I have no wish to be addressed by a title in a message at eleven in the morning.
And if the idea of writing three hundred words about yourself strikes you as an unreasonable amount of work, then the difference between us is not one that charm is going to resolve.