The twists keep coming in my online dating adventures. But this one was one I never thought about and was shocked when it happened. As the title states, I got banned from Tinder. I still don’t feel like I did anything wrong, but I guess that’s not up to me to decide.
This story has a bit of back story in it. I actually briefly mentioned the guy this involves before. Right in the beginning of my online dating adventures, I matched with a guy and was chatting with him on Bumble. We had even started texting each other and I thought maybe we’d be meeting up soon. Our texts were pretty innocent and silly. We were talking about our jobs and the pets our families had. But the texting ended and I figured he moved on so I deleted his texts and didn’t think much about it.
Then several months later, we matched again on Bumble. By this point I had already dealt with finding several guys who lied about being single and I was much smarter about doing a bit of research on who I’m talking to. When we started chatting again, I did a quick search on him and discovered that he was a newlywed. He had only gotten married about 4 months before the first time we had talked to each other. I was disgusted by him and used his wife’s name in a message to him (I said something like, “does your wife so-and-so know you are on here”). He unmatched with me, but I took screenshots of the messages and sent them to his wife on Facebook.
This was almost a year ago and I really hadn’t thought much about him. On Bumble you can pay to see who swiped on you before you swipe on them, but I’ve never paid for it. Tinder has the same option and I’ve done it on Tinder just because I’ve found it’s easier to weed out who I’d actually want to meet (Bumble seems to have a higher ratio of quality guys). And when I was looking through who swiped on me on Tinder, I noticed this guy again! Clearly he either didn’t remember me or was swiping on every girl just to get a match. I was furious that he was still being a cheater and decided to match with him and message him.
In his bio, it said that he was looking for a hot and sexy girl. So I wrote to him how we had matched on Bumble previously and asked how he was. Then I used his wife’s name again and asked if she knew he was on Tinder looking for a hot and sexy girl. I might have been a bit aggressive by doing that, but I was angry. Within seconds he unmatched with me and then I got logged out of my Tinder account. I couldn’t figure out what happened so I decided to google the error code I was getting. And that’s when I discovered the error code meant my profile got banned.
I emailed their support to find out more, but this is all I got back.
I have looked at all the policies and the only thing I could even remotely think would fit would be that I sent a harassing and threatening message by using his wife’s name. I really don’t know and the support team said they couldn’t tell me what I did wrong and there was no more information that they could give beyond that I got banned.
I was pretty angry that this cheater got me banned, but I’m not mad that I did what I did. He needed to know that people can easily figure out that he’s married and that he should make sure he tells his wife (I did message her again after this, but since my messages are likely being filtered on FB I know she hasn’t seen them). As much as I would like to believe that they have an open marriage and she knows, his behavior would lead me to think otherwise.
Since my profile was banned, there is no way to go back and talk to anyone I matched on there unless we had already started texting. And at first that bugged me, but the more I’ve thought about it it’s probably a good thing. I had a few hundred matches on Tinder but was only really talking to 4 guys on there (2 of whom I’ve texted with so I could always text them if I wanted to talk to them again). There were maybe 100 or so guys I had matched with but never messaged for one reason or another. And over 100 guys that I started conversations with that died off or they never responded to my original message.
I’ve set it as a weekly goal several times that I wanted to do a purge of my current matches on the various apps, but it was tough to let go of a potential date. This forced me to do that and it feels pretty good so far. I did create a new account and started over, but I haven’t really been using it. But it’s there for if I want to. If I catch cheaters on there again, I might send them the message and then unmatched with them quickly before they can report me. But I’m not sure since I still believe I did nothing wrong.
Just like all the other crazy stories that happened in online dating, at least this one will make another interesting story for my book.
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