A Promised Discussion: Tinder

I've mentioned in several posts that I'm not really a fan of Tinder and other dating apps, but I've never really explained why. I've been promising a post on the subject and it's finally here. I'm going to go ahead and make the comment that I have deleted Tinder at this point since I'm happily with my current person.

To me, there are both good and bad things with everything. For example, driving my car to work every day means that I get there faster, but it also means that I have to spend money on fuel. I get work done sitting in the library, but I have to fight everyone else for internet access. The list goes on.... The same is true with dating apps. My only experience was with Tinder, so I can only speak on that experience. Therefore, most of this post will focus on my opinions of Tinder.

To start this discussion, I must first explain why I downloaded Tinder in the first place. In the summer after my second semester in college, one of my best friends and I were sending each other the terrible things we saw on dating apps and on the internet in general. She was on Tinder at the time and would send me things that guys said that were either funny, annoying, or just plain weird. We both got a lot of laughs out of them, especially when she matched with the cat that lives outside of one of our buildings on campus. One day, I decided that I wanted to join in on the fun, so I downloaded Tinder.

One major thing with dating apps is that you have to be careful. I'd always been taught to be overly cautious when it comes to meeting people or talking to strangers, so I tried my best to be careful. I didn't swipe right on anyone that didn't have an actual biography and was less likely to swipe right if I could tell that they hadn't put much thought into their biography. Usually the people I swiped right on had bios that did their best to capture a genuine person in them. I tried to be careful and kept my normal standards for the guys I was looking for. I'm not into hookups, so I had to be even more cautious because I wanted to attract the right people with my profile. All of my pictures were tasteful and my bio was as well thought out as I could make it. The same was true for the people I swiped right on.

I wasn't looking for a hookup or even a relationship when I joined. I was looking for a friendship at most. After all, I'd mostly downloaded the app as a joke and wasn't actually looking for anyone. I was perfectly happy being single and able to keep money in my wallet and spare time in my pockets.

Within three days, I'd managed to match with several guys fitting the entire spectrum that you'd find on Tinder. I hadn't spent that much time on it since I was with family and wasn't really on my phone, but somehow, I'd managed to find several matches despite the fact I'm not the prettiest person out there.

The first guy spent a lot of time trying to make sexual advances. He asked me to send him pictures of myself over Snapchat. If I didn't, he'd try to convince me to and would get angry when I said no. I decided to have a little fun and torture him because he was being so terrible and disrespectful to me. I live in the South, the swampy South too. It's almost too hot to sleep with clothes on in the summer, so I usually slept in either a tank top or something like that because it was cheaper than turning the air conditioning up. I was just trying to get by, but he took it a different way. He only wanted sex from me and would try to talk me into things I wasn't comfortable with. He'd get mad at me when we talked and I was only wearing a tank top. He'd try to convince me to take it off or try to make sexual advances at me. I actually enjoyed making him angry to a certain extent because he was disrespecting me and trying to coerce me into things I was uncomfortable with. He kept asking me if I wanted to see him naked and I kept saying no. He almost never had on a shirt when he messaged me. Needless to say, that conversation ended with a game of Cards Against Humanity with my roommates where the combination of "Just saw this upsetting video! Please retweet!! #stop______" and "Taking off your shirt" got played and a picture of it was sent to him. He got angry, flipped me off, and I never heard from him again.

The second guy I met was reasonable and a pretty nice guy. We had a lot in common and talked a lot about where we grew up and things that we enjoyed doing. We both like cloudy days more than extremely sunny days and whenever it was slightly dreary outside, we'd show each other. It was actually quite nice. However, we lived several states apart and it just wasn't reasonable for us. We drifted apart after deciding to remain friends because we both got extremely busy with our own lives.

That cycle has continued since then, but if a guy makes me uncomfortable, I just block him. I've actually met some interesting guys on Tinder and made a few friends that way. I find other people's stories fascinating. My relationship with Tinder has basically been that way, regardless of how cautious I am with it. Sometimes, I'll find a reasonable guy and other times, I find total creeps.

However, that's not my main issue with Tinder. I've met plenty of reasonable guys that way. I've made a few friends and met my current person through Tinder. It all depends on how you use it.

One thing we always have to be cautious about is whether or not people are who they say they are, whether that means that they're making themselves a fake personality or an actual fake person. We all know there are bots out there and people that are not who they claim to be. It's the internet; we definitely have to be cautious. If you look through Reddit, there are plenty of posts about people finding bots on Tinder. We also have to be cautious of those people that say that their intentions are one thing, but really aren't. Those are frustrating as well because sometimes, you'll get to know someone and think that they're okay and then 3 dates later all they want from you is sex and they don't actually care about you as a person (aka Creepy CompSci Guy). We're all on Tinder for different purposes. Not everyone wants to get down with you.

The main issue I have with Tinder is the way we all perceive it. For a long time, meeting people online was almost considered dangerous (and still is in a lot of ways). If someone met their partner online, they were usually thought of differently. I'll be honest, I wouldn't tell everyone in my life that I met my person on a dating app. I would simply be judged for my decisions. Usually, I tell them that we met using the story of meeting up with them in person for the first time. I usually tell people that I met my current person at a coffee shop downtown and we started talking from that point.

Now there's nothing wrong with online dating. I'm not knocking that. If I were against it, I wouldn't have actually started taking it seriously. I'd have continued by trying to meet people on campus or in the surrounding area. However, if the internet exists, why not use it to my advantage?

The major downside to using Tinder is the fact that we have a seemingly infinite pool of matches. If you're in a small town, your numbers may be limited, but for anyone in a city or college town, It takes a while to get to the point where Tinder has to calculate more profiles for you. With a seemingly infinite number of potential matches, we have a seemingly infinite number of swipes. That means that we fall into a habit of swiping and don't necessarily pay attention to who the person really is. If you spend a fair amount of time swiping at once, you basically go into information overload. We're trying to take in an entire person in roughly thirty seconds. That's a little too fast to try to take in so much information, let alone doing it with a large number of people at once. How can we really figure out who that person is? After a while, we tend to swipe without actually paying attention. I'll admit that I'm guilty of it as well. I get into the habit of swiping left and accidentally swipe left on someone I didn't mean to swipe left on.

At the same time, we want to find the one, but even when we swipe right, we always feel like there could be someone better out there: the paradox of choice. When we have so many choices, we struggle to make a choice. If we have infinite people, we have infinite choices, ultimately making it harder to make a choice. Ultimately, that changes our idea of dating to the point that we want to fall in love, but are constantly worried someone better is out there and don't let ourselves fall for the person right in front of us. In a way, this changes our culture, making us unable to really fall in love and constantly wonder how others have done it and how they're happy.

Another huge downside to using Tinder is your own profile. There are so many people out there telling you how to write your profile. Ultimately, it dictates who you match with in a way. Like I said earlier, for me to swipe right, you have to have a bio, and a good bio at that. However, bios can be misleading. They might only show one part of the person at hand if anything at all. My bio (I don't remember what it was when I deleted the app) told people that I was an Electrical Engineering major, that I liked to build/craft, and that I wasn't into hookups or sex. My pictures were various selfies that I'd taken and a picture of my dog. That's nowhere near all of me as a person. Being in the computer age, we want to reduce everything to an algorithm. We want to be able to minimize time searching and find a match faster. However, in order to do that, we're limiting ourselves to a set number of pictures and characters. Sure, Tinder allows you to link your Instagram and Spotify, but those don't really give a full picture either (future rant). It's hard to completely capture a person in such a limited amount of information. How do we reduce a person to 6 pictures and a few hundred characters? We don't. We lose a lot of information that way and like all of our social media, our profiles are subject to personal bias.

In addition to that, we're all on Tinder for different reasons. Some people want hookups, others want friends, and there's also a group of people out there looking for information. We all want different things, but sometimes it's hard to convey that information in our profiles. For example, right before I deleted Tinder, my bio said that I was only looking for friends and that I'd already found a special someone, but I was still being super liked by random guys (usually creepy guys) that were looking only for hookups. I can't say that they didn't just want to be friends, but at the same time, I don't really need more friends. I have a few close ones, some not so close ones, and for the time being, I'm good. I don't need any more people trying to flirt with me (unless it's my person).

I was listening to DTR - The Official Tinder Podcast at one point this year. I only made it through the first season because they were actually talking about content instead of redoing profiles, but I encourage you to give it a listen, especially one specific episode: Unexpected Places. In this episode, the host discussed two stories where Tinder had been used to do something unexpected. The first story was about a guy that was trying to find a temple that was apparently lost among most. None of his friends or anyone he knew had heard of it. He wondered if it had been lost in translation, but ended up using Tinder to find someone that knew about it. He used every match he made to ask if that person knew anything about it or how he might find it. Eventually, he found someone, but I don't want to spoil the rest of the story. The second was about a woman who went on a date and ended up finding out that her date's friend needed a kidney and how the woman eventually worked through the process to become a donor for basically a complete stranger.

I wish I could say I used Tinder for a purpose like that. Unfortunately, I'm not quite that impressive. I'm just your run of the mill girl. However, once I found myself in all of the drama I faced earlier this year, I found myself on Tinder looking for a distraction. I wasn't really looking for any sort of relationship or hookup, I just wanted to be able to meet someone new to take my mind off of the fact that the guy I liked was so confused by his feelings and wouldn't talk to me about them. I needed a distraction so that I wouldn't cry at my desk while at work. I ended up meeting two people that day: one good and one bad. The first one tried to tell me that his friends were ragging on him for being a virgin and then assumed that I was a virgin too and said that we should lose it together. I said no and he unmatched me, saving me a few menus to block him. The second guy on the other hand, was actually a genuine person. He ended up accidentally causing more drama, but in the end, he stole me away and is now my current person.

My point with this rant is not to say that dating apps are a bad thing. I don't think they are necessarily a bad thing. I think the bad thing is how we use them. We swipe too quickly and may or may not actually get a reasonable feel for who a person is by a few pictures and a possible bio. However, I believe that if we slow down and see fewer people at once, maybe we'd change how we date and want to find "the one" and maybe eventually find them. Maybe my feelings on dating apps would change at that point, but for now, I'm in love and happy so I'm staying away from them.



Written: 04 April 2018