Aya was the first woman I met on the app, and I approached the whole thing with the confidence of a man who has never done it and the knowledge of one who never will.

Her photo looked pleasant and not obviously retouched, which I now know is a compliment (some of the Photoshop work on that app could get a job at Pixar). She was 31. Her profile was long – I now know that's unusual; most run to three lines and a heart – and it said, clearly, that she was open to otona (the adult clause) but not on a first meeting. Reasonable. Grown-up.

I messaged her. I mentioned something from her profile, which was correct, and then suggested dinner, which was not. Rule one, which I was about to learn: never book dinner with someone you have not yet met. If the first ten minutes go badly, you have ninety more of them, a set menu, and no exit that doesn't involve a fake phone call.

Neither of us mentioned conditions. This was also wrong. She eventually named a number – 1.5 for a first dinner – which I now know is what a very pretty 20-year-old asks for, and what a 31-year-old asks of a man who has visibly not done his homework. I had not done my homework. I said yes.

I arrived. Aya arrived. Aya was, I would say, in the region of ten years older than her photo, which is to say the photo was real and so was she; they'd just been taken at different times. She was pleasant. She was polite. We had a perfectly nice dinner that went on for exactly as long as I'd feared.

What made the evening worth it – apart from the education – was this:

Aya's profile stats

Here's how to read that, now that I can. Top to bottom: join date, last login, number of men who messaged her, number of men she messaged, her reply rate to inbound, message-board posts, and reports filed against her.

One thing to know: the message counts are people, not messages – each one is a conversation started, not a line sent. So in a little over two years, 706 men had opened a conversation with Aya, and she'd replied to 85% of them. And she had opened conversations with 859 men herself. She was starting more threads than she was receiving.

85%! I didn't know it then, but that number is a Big Deal. Women who don't need to work a wide funnel reply to a third of their inbound, often less, and almost never write first. Aya replied to nearly everyone, wrote first constantly, and had been doing both for two years – fifty-odd conversations a month, nearly two a day. That's not a red flag, exactly… but it is a business model, and I had just been onboarded.

The red flag is the last line. Reports are categorised. Some are mundane: "unpleasant interaction," "late." Some matter more – "no-show," "profile photo doesn't match." Some are immediate disqualifiers: "abusive" and especially "operator," meaning an account that runs many conversations and sends whoever's free from the roster to the actual meeting. The person at the restaurant isn't the person you've been talking to.

Aya had five such reports: two for no-shows, one for profile-photo-related (which tracks – the person who showed up was ten-plus years older than the photo) and two for operator. I've since learned to discount one or two reports – I can picture the kind of man who files one after being turned down for a hotel. And five isn't many against the number of conversations she was running. But it's a lot for one person, and had I known how to read that line, we'd never have had dinner.

I paid what I'd agreed. She thanked me warmly and asked when we'd meet next. I said I'd be in touch, and I wasn't, and I suspect she wasn't surprised.

Lessons from Aya, in order of cost: coffee first, always. Conditions before the coffee, in writing, so nobody has to say a number across a table. And learn to read the stats – they were sitting on her profile the whole time, giving me a reasonably good idea of what her expectations actually were, regardless of what she said in the profile or at the coffee table, but in a language I didn't yet speak.