Tinder Will Fall (2017): Part II

Why do I like Tinder so much when the anecdotal evidence is so gruesome?

Well, it’s not for the results (obviously). They’re fucking awful. If I was results-driven and morally limber, titty bars and brothels would be a much cheaper and more efficient option.

Again, I remind you not to mistake online dating for Tinder and other social apps. Online dating (like real dating) can be fun because both parties arrive with matching expectations — or at the very least, similar, in that they both want to be there. Half the time, Tinder dates feel like job interviews that you spend a lot of time, money and effort on, all the while knowing you have no chance of getting the job.

In other words, if online date sites and Tinder were live venues, the online dating sites would be the exclusive cocktail clubs with entry fees and exorbitant drink prices, while Tinder is the free-for-all public house. And I like public houses. Public houses champion diversity, and don’t discriminate, especially with the most obvert and underhanded tool of discrimination — membership fees!

Like the quintessential watering hole, Tinder at least is trying to preserve the quixotic feeling you should always charge at earthen windmills, because occasionally nature or the windmill will let you feel like you won.

I must admit, I’m also a sucker for lists and most comfortable in situations of low expectations.

I also like the chase — I don’t mean chasing women. That’s really socially unacceptable theses days, and way too exhausting anyway.

I’m talking about the Tinder Race — the competition to be the first to uncouple and unmatch after a Tinder date. Often it’s a race to get home because you can’t legally use your phone while driving. However, I regularly let my mobile phone credit lapse and without wifi I can’t compete on the train ride home after a Tinder date. Both of these fixtures are fiscally determined (which I appreciate can contribute to the reason I’m single and on Tinder). So I can’t even compete in the race, which is also a bummer. Usually, I text to ask if they got home safe – half the motivation for this is to generate a digital date-stamp for an alibi; and the other half I can chalk up as chivalrous gesture.

When I wake the next morning, check my phone and realise the person I spent three hours developing a healthy rapport with the night before has become a ghost, with barely a digital footprint proving their existence beyond the memory is common (at least in my experience). And it is little wonder such experiences conjure latent bouts of depression and self-doubt, which leads to negativity and blame, and push-button rejection and deletion of dating apps like Tinder (at least for a while).

However, rejection is part of life. I mean now that it is performed surgically and remotely, isn’t it kind of better?

Well, yes and no. We are now no longer subjected to those insufferable marathon breakup sessions full of clichés, euphemisms, vague transformative self-discoveries and wildly irrelevant analogies. But surgery can be pretty fucking messy too. So now that our opposable thumbs smite connections with swipey gestures and drag-and-drop features based on the welter of the heart, or some preordained transfigurative idea of romance and a spark means there’s also lots more rejection in many peoples lives – often outweighing the good shit. Gone are the days of yore where courtships then marriage were class-driven, convoluted and corralled by social norms and expectation; where olden-day folk probably only ever got rejected once or twice in their lives.

I think it’s feelings of manipulation and lack of closure people resent when grappling with social dating apps (which is why everyone hates HR departments). But if we all had lots of exuberance, intense interaction, brutal honesty, and closure people would probably start to resent these things too.

Personally, I enjoy predicting outcomes — and the satisfaction of seeing a circumstance unfold or connection dither then vanish (as I envisaged) vindicates my agile instinct and intuition. Believing in bad luck is stable ground — as long as you don’t go too far and stop appreciating once in while how lucky most us fuckers out there are (especially if you can see and hear yourself out loud point and count out all of your fingers and all of your toes).

However, in the end I think the reason Tinder, and other social dating apps are peril is because of our old friend…

Timing.

And while mobile connectivity is a dynamic behemoth; it’s also a sly charlatan, a gimmick, a trick, that’s very good at exploiting a chief humanistic quality – we’re organic and as such slaves to ludicrous organic concepts of timing and calories. So we’re all kind of lazy unless there’s enough persuasion, incentive or reward; so rather than finding a good fit whether it be socially or physically, we have a limpet tendency to grab onto those within reach and hitch a free ride. In other words we try to make whatever is in our lives work, no matter how ill-fitting rather than seek out a more tailored or compatible fit – like a toddler bashing pieces together in a jigsaw set.

We did it with Tinder, corrupting a hookup app into a dating site with a strong majority seeking abstract shit like “spoons that fit” and “partners in crime” instead of uncomplicated one-nighters and no-strings-attached affairs. In the same manner we find it very easy to identify and appreciate what we don’t want; but we’re ratshit at doing the deep mental excavation to reveal what we do want. Even our entire speech centre goes batshit when confronted with anything remotely resembling what we might want. We revert to our most primitive selves, offering up monosyllabic salutations with a pixelated wink or smirk or high resolution snapshots of our genitals (while our profile pictures remain wide-angled and out of focus). 

So to make it easier, I’ve included a few handy blokey Tinder Tips below because let’s face it — consistent and continued failure can occur in real life too. And without a social dating app like Tinder to blame you could end up a litterbug and pariah of quaint villages in the UK like this guy.

Finally, don’t give up y’all. And look I get it — it’s tough out there, looking for meaningful connections in a world soaking in connectivity – where meaning seems to have less density these days, or we struggle to attribute the correct weight to it. Like basic literacy and reading habits such as skim-reading and glossing over words — it’s not that words have less meaning, we just ponder over them less and don’t give a shit about good grammar, leading to gross misinterpretations and inferences and insinuations. You just got to pivot, lean, roll-n-rock and adapt; to learn how to extract it from between the lines, in the spaces, the pulsating ellipses, the subtle placement of an emoji, real-time versus delayed reactions, and most of all don’t take shit too seriously and have some fun.