Yesterday evening, to avoid trawling through the usual crap on TV, I downloaded Tinder. The dating-come-pick-up app has been circulating around my friends iPhone screens for months, but I have dampened my curiosity to right swipe because 1) I have a significant other, and 2) the fear of being spotted in the flesh by a match around campus proved to awkward to be worth it. However now I’m home for reading week, so: what the heck!
With the excitement of indulging in something so superficial fresh, I proceeded to waste half an hour (an entire Peep show that it is) swiping through hundreds of faces. Without sounding up my own, I was surprised at how few 20 – 26 yr olds I wanted to right swipe. (For those Tinder free beings, right swiping equals ‘yes’ and left swiping equals ‘no’). Naïvely, I thought with its popularity and addictive nature, this ‘Tinder’ must be a pandoras box of god-like men. I was mistaken. But then it came… My first match. Bizarrely, even though I am in a very happy and loving relationship of four years, I did get a strange buzz from the flattery.
This excitement was soon followed by a twinge of guilt at my own hypocrisy in presenting myself as a single gal. I reminded myself I had downloaded the app as a means of entertainment and social observation: just because I matched with someone did not qualify adultery. I continued to swipe. After the initial novelty wore off, I realised how callous the whole thing was. I was shocked at my own superficiality and it struck me how many of these faces I was flicking through might indeed be a catch if you met in a different situation.
However, I do think apps like this provide an interesting social insight. Like many others on Tinder, I download the app as an ego massage: just a quick and superficial boost. A questionable motive indeed! Like me, a number of my friends in happy relationships use the app openly as a flattery seeking device, having no intention of following the matches up. But isn’t taking delight in the momentary attention of someone other than your partner, looking down the cheating path just a bit?
It struck me as strange how some men had wedding photographs as their Tinder pics, what type of woman are they trying to attract and what for? Surely, they can’t be seriously looking to cheat if they are so blatantly advertising their own smiling matrimony!
This begs the question: What is Tinder for?
There is no arguing the app’s intense and self confessed shallowness. However I would like to think there was something more significant to right swiping than just a quick fix of flattery or sex. I applaud the use of it for busy working singles looking for love: the app takes out those accidental meetings and seems more viable than a drunken encounter. But I can’t help but feel it is a bit sad that university students have to resort to something so transient to find love.
Perhaps Tinder is the zeitgeist of future dating, a natural development in our every more digital culture that should be celebrated. If so, I wonder why there still is a stigma around online dating when we are all happy to share out thoughts / photographs / daily lives online. A friend and active Tinder user said if she ever met someone on Tinder she would be embarrassed to admit where they had met. So what is the point of the app if people will never commit to those we encounter? Are we such an insecure generation we need strangers to randomly indicate how attractive we are? Surely not…
freyasthought 