Nothing says you’re single quite like the holiday season. Beginning with Halloween and all the way to Valentine’s Day, single people are constantly reminded that life isn’t so sweet when you’re alone.

As embarrassing as couples costumes are, you wish you had someone to dress up with on Halloween. Thanksgiving means you have no one to help you put the fork down, Christmas gifts are from your parents and grandma, and forget about an intimate kiss on New Year’s unless there’s a little liquid courage involved. And Valentine’s Day is basically the worst.

Now that the holidays are long gone, I thought it was time to finally put myself out there. After realizing it’s impossible for me to meet a guy on campus, in bars or at a club, I decided to join Tinder and meet a few potential bachelors online. Boy, was I in for a big surprise.

After running into a few bumps along the road, like egotistical jerks and terrible first dates, I found that dating on Tinder is foolish, mostly because of the small pool of potential prospects that come forth and their personal attitudes toward relationships. Most users are in it for the short-term dating experiences, something I found out the hard way.

Tinder is really just one big game. It’s more of something people do to pass the time and act like children until someone genuine comes along. As much as I hate admitting to it, I was a fan of the game.

For those who have yet to join the dark side, here are there are five steps one must face before finding your match made in Tinder heaven.

Step one: the inattentive first search. Your standards are high in hopes of stumbling upon your knight in shining armor, or Birkenstocks if you’re into that sort of thing. You hope that you’ve picked the right photos to display and those embarrassing Facebook pages you liked back in high school don’t come back to haunt you.

Step two: you lower your standards when you realize there are way too many guys who think sharing photos at raves and posting more photos of their dogs or cars is more interesting than their own face. This is when you debate actually dating the bad boy you have always wanted. Better late than never?

Step three: you actually start paying attention to bios, because before you weren’t really interested in what they had to say. After setting your sites on a new pool of men, you hope that you can at least try and find someone funny.

Step four: finally finding a guy who doesn’t have any photos with children or other women because there’s nothing more damaging to your self-confidence than his best girl friend who is more attractive than you are. This type is considered a Tinder angel.

Step five: If he has already swiped right, then you consider whether you want to message him first or see if he will. If he hasn’t swiped you yet then you hope he swipes right too. Most tinderships end here because both parties are too afraid to message each other. In my opinion, it doesn’t matter anymore.

Then, the magic happens. You either get stood up, sent a very creepy message, or realize that there’s no placement test for Tinder, because even though that guy is funny, he’s dumber than that kid in your RWS class. Thanks for the fun Tinder, but I’ll go back to dating the old-fashioned way: waiting around for the right guy to eventually find me.