We've seen a lot of interesting strategies deployed on Tinder in an attempt to garner more messages from potential matches — but few of them have been as risky as Jake Chapman's: He texted a bunch of his ex-girlfriends at one o'clock in the morning and asked them if they would write a review of him for his Tinder profile. Genius? Insanity? Somewhere in between? You be the judge.
Chapman recently took to Reddit to detail both his experiment and its results. "I've been taking dating a little to [sic] seriously lately," he wrote, "so I decided to ask my ex-girlfriends at 1 AM to write a 1-2 sentence review about me for my Tinder profile and rate me 1-5 stars." His exes apparently responded pretty much the way he expected — according to Chapman, "One ex won't stop texting me now, and the others hate me even more then [sic] when they left to begin with." He provided proof in the form of screenshots, one detailing a text exchange between himself and one of his exes:
And another showing his Tinder profile as it currently stands:
I'll confess that I'm not entirely sure what he hoped to get out of the experiment. From what we can tell from the reviews (which, granted, is a pretty limited amount of information), his relationships don't generally seem to have ended on good terms; I can see how it might be valuable to go right to the source to ask what you may have done wrong, but why then put those perspectives on your actual profile? Maybe it's a transparency thing. I don't know. Maybe it's even a hoax, like everything else on the Internet is these days. Whatever the case, though, it seems to have worked; Chapman reported in his Reddit post, "But hey, at least my matches are blowing up."
For the curious, the Daily Dot did a little bit of digging and found some more information about Chapman via his social media accounts: According to Instagram, he lives in Seattle and works as a Web Engineer; he likes to "stay active and fit"; he cooks; he drives a Mustang; and sometime in the first few months of 2015, he's planning on going skydiving. If that whole package appeals to you and you're on Tinder as well, now you know what to look for.
But you may want to wait to find out what the next installment of the story will bring before you go swiping right on Chapman: He updated his Reddit thread as his story started to go viral, and one of his exes, Taylor, actually broke up with her then-boyfriend and bought a plane ticket to visit Chapman in Seattle (she herself lives in Southern California). Chapman hadn't initially contacted Taylor for a review, but when she spotted his story floating around the Internet, she reached out with a review of her own:
"Taylor gives a 4 1/2 star review. She says, 'He's got a job, condo, dog, fast car, can cook, good with his hands :) and is a complete sweet heart. The only thing keeping me from trying to be with him is 1,155 miles.'"
And then after he made an attempt to convince her to visit him, he woke up to this:
Soooooo... there's that.
But don't worry; as the Daily Dot noted, Chapman may have even inspired a trend, so there are probably plenty of other people out there trying the same thing now. Another fellow by the name of Adam, for example, has since hopped on the "Reviews from My Ex" train:
Do with that what you will. Happy dating, everyone!
Images: Wayan Vota/Flickr; Imgur (4)
