Taming Tinder
I wasn’t exactly sure what I was looking for, but I knew Tinder would help me find it. When you’re a single guy in your 30’s, everyone tells you to date online, as if all traditional methods have failed you and little hope remains. A myriad of online services serve different expectations: if you want a wife, you join eHarmony. Match.com is to find a girlfriend. OKCupid is for young professionals and CoffeeMeetsBagel is for older professionals who are, ironically, too busy to date. But with Tinder, anything is possible. If I didn’t find my soulmate, at least my life would start to resemble a spring break video. Both sounded exciting, so I signed up.
I knew my best friend Mat was swimming in Tinder dates. For hours a day, he was swiping, chatting and meeting women in bars all over D.C. Mat looks like me, so I figured with time and effort I could also fill my calendar up with beautiful women. Coworkers and friends were all doing this, too. Tinder had a magic power of turning even ordinary guys into ladies’ men virtually overnight.
The basis of Tinder mechanics is location. The geo-tracking technology finds your phone and collects nearby profiles that fit your preference for gender and proximity: 20-to-30-year-old women within 10 miles or 50-year-old men within 100 feet. Swipe “yes” on profiles that allure you, “no” on ones that don’t. When you match, a mystical chat portal opens. You can say “hi” immediately or get right back to swiping. Marches are stored in a nifty little inbox.
I brainstormed what to write in my description. Leaving it blank was an option, but could come off as flippant and jaded. Writing a novel could look desperate and overly-invested. I settled on, “All my friends are too busy changing diapers to do karaoke w/ me.” It wasn’t exactly true, but I figured women would empathize with the spirit of it. And I did like karaoke.
I knew exactly what photo I’d use, the one when I was visiting family in Michigan last summer. My sisters and I were on a terrace overlooking Lake St. Clair. The light hit me perfectly, my smile was laid-back and exuded confidence. The photo said, “I’m here, but not taking Tinder too seriously.”
When I first tapped on the orange flame to start swiping, I felt a weird twinge of guilt, like I was about to open my crush’s diary, or access an employee discount for a store I didn’t work at.
It opened, and a perfectly pleasant young woman with blonde hair was staring back at me. She looked content, like a girl who did volunteer work, had rescued a puppy and still confided in her mother. Under her photo was a green heart and a red “X.” I tapped the green heart and her photo happily fluttered away and a new photo appeared, this time of a cute brunette also smiling back at me. I started swiping faster and faster, like I was dealing an endless deck of cards to myself.
I soon got my first match. The screen exploded with joy and set my photo next to hers as if we’d won the romantic lottery. Starting a chat with her so suddenly seemed aggressive, so I went back to the deck where I matched again and again. After ten minutes, I had more romantic options than I’d ever had in my life.
Guilt soon returned. The ‘yes or no’ decision was jarringly quick and permanent. It took less energy than to kill an ant. I had swiped “no” on numerous people, effectively destroying the potential for romance between us. This, coupled with a subconscious prioritization of looks, made swiping feel demeaning and crude, like squeezing for flawless tomatoes at a vegetable stand.
I imagined a female somewhere across town using her manicured finger to flick me out of her future forever. It stung. She hadn’t even met me, heard my voice, gazed into my eyes, felt our chemistry. I couldn’t defend myself or prove that my personality accentuates my overall attractiveness. The court of Tinder had no appeals process.
But it didn’t matter. Swallowing that pill was worth never having to leave things up to fate ever again.
A week later I went on my first date. A pretty, 32-year-old doctor with a zen look in her eyes that put me at ease. We discussed families and compared siblings and strict parents. We shared tapas and laughed regularly. At one point, she put her hand on my knee. As I walked her to her apartment I saw her smiling. We hugged and as I walked away we kept looking back at each other. I told her we’d see each other again, but we never did.
On the ride home, the first-date euphoria all but disappeared once I looked down at my phone. This device held all the potential in the world including women who were prettier, funnier, and better for me than the doctor. This made following up with her feel like a chore and even an irrational use of my time.
My second date did not go as well. She didn’t look like her photos. I did my best not to judge, but her personality did not compensate. I went back to swiping. My third date did look like her photos, but it was clear she felt about me the way I felt about my second date. I went back to swiping, and swiping and swiping and swiping.
I swiped in the car at red lights. I swiped under conference tables and when my dinner date went to the bathroom. I swiped first thing in the morning and a half hour before bed. Swiping became my default activity on public transportation, I stopped reading books entirely. Getting through just ten more profiles became a justifiable reason to be late for anything.
I developed an eagle eye for photo tricks women used to get more matches: If her profile had six photos taken from the same camera angle, it meant she was insecure. All selfies meant she had no friends. Photos only from the neck up meant she was overweight. Heavy filters meant her skin was a mess. Never smiling meant she was totally nuts. Setting up a date with any of these people was playing Russian roulette with two hours of my time and $100 of my funds. I felt like I was mastering a skill, like vanquishing enemies in World of Warcraft.
More than a game, though, swiping was an investment in my future. My swipes shot out to phones all over the city and urged young women to consider me for their future while I went about my day. It was my agent working behind the scenes who delivered a slew of new women to me each day. Swiping was bet-hedging, my grand strategy to outpace the law of numbers and random encounters.
But Instead of basking in a dreamland of gorgeous women, I bounced from one disappointment to another.
One date told me her typical Saturday night was going to a bar with a girlfriend and splitting up to go home with different men. Another date yelled the phrase “He’s just an asshole,” eight times in reference to her ex-husband. Another date got to the brink of tears at dinner after I suggested sometimes people need to cry. She interpreted my statement as a criticism of women for not controlling their emotions, which is not what I meant.
At home, I’d lament the $106 receipt from another spark-less night. A growing pile of similar receipts taunted me from my desk.
I grew terse and irritable. I took silence from matches as personal affronts. I’d fume when my favorite match didn’t respond within the hour. I hated myself for typing whatever I just typed or for waiting too long to reply. Other times I lambasted myself for messaging too soon.
Two days without a match meant my photos needed an upgrade. I’d dive into archives from exotic trips I’d taken searching for a magical, perfect photo. I’d emerge an hour later with one I’d settled on. Women might like this better. Or not. I had no way of knowing except to post it and watch how it affected the quality and quantity of my matches. All I knew was my future fully depended on how good I looked on Tinder.
I was spiraling. I could feel the app bleeding my time and self-esteem. One morning I sat at a team meeting hungover from matching drinks with an Irish girl I’d never see again. My coworkers looked at me but didn’t say a word. Their faces said what I already knew. I was addicted, and had to stop swiping.
Going cold turkey was hard. I experienced regular phantom phone vibrations against my leg, but with time and fortitude, the urge to swipe eventually eased and faded. I started reading again. I found numerous articles on the deleterious effects of swiping. The effortlessness of swiping apps made options too numerous and sent expectations too high. Tying romantic prospects to abstract digital outcomes was a perfect recipe for disappointment.
I finally embraced my loneliness, rather than running from it. I learned there’s a deep wisdom in choosing to be with yourself. A certain fog starts to clear. I realized I needed to put quality relationships and personal development at the center of my life, and let romance just be the bonus. I needed to go to friends’ birthday parties, read novels in coffee shops, take French classes and go to lectures on American history. When you say “yes” to these social opportunities, and open up to the strangers next to you in class or behind you in Starbucks, the Tinder dating revolution starts to lose its luster.
It’s weird how we figure out what we’re searching for only after we’ve stopped searching.