But first things first: What was my internal Tinder hotness score? I didn't get one. Gutted. Why are we even bothering with this? Other vital statistics include 369 active connections. (Other stats point to more than 450 matches -- not sure if that's a braggable score or not.)

The most fascinating part was my chat history. It sounds exciting, until you realize that it's only your messages that you get to peruse, disconnected from the context of two strangers trying to flirt -- whether the other party responded or not. ("Sorry" = 71 uses.)

Since my history with the app stretches back to when I first came out (and first started using dating/hookup services), the logs got more embarrassing the further I went back. In some chats, I was excessively needy, other times too aggressive, too... horny?

My word choice demonstrated this awfulness. I threw that one-sided chat history into a word-frequency tool, hoping to unearth some insight into how I flirt. Outside the pronouns and connective glue of a sentence (is, on, the, not, here), what exactly did I talk about? Did I mention my job a lot? That I can speak Japanese? My black belt in judo? My efforts to land a backflip? I even got some unwanted insight into my text-based flirting technique.

Context-free, I used the word "horny" 23 times.

As a writer, I have a degree of confidence in my missives. As a tech writer, I even prefer texts and emails to phone calls and bar-based flirting. That said, it seems my internal editor is lazy when it comes to serious dating, or finding someone cool to flirt with in a new town. It's not that my communications were riddled with typos or grammatical messes: The problem was that most of my Tinder messages were just insipid.

In early Tinder chats, I used some mildly explicit words -- nothing too racy, just enough to make me hate myself. Context-free, I used the word "horny" 23 times. I used the word "classy" five times. Fortunately, Tinder is generally less explicit than the LGBT-dating-app competition, thanks to the lack of a picture-sending option.