Tinder is nothing more than a loading dock for the female vagina, and a caravan park for the male penis. Users of the service try and tell you that there’s more substance to its red and white facade, but using Tinder for dating or casual friendship is like using Matchmaker.com to find a new player for your soccer team.
Tinder has gone wayward over the past six months. The service has grown old, and most of the legitimate catches on the platform have siphoned off into the real world, where they have real conversations following real social constructs. Left behind are men and women battling for each others affection via tacky pick up lines and dates at bars cheap enough to warrant buying vodka lime and sodas for people who are as sad as themselves. Warney’s still there too.
For the purpose of journalism (I’ll flog that sentence until I’m dead), I decided to jump back on Tinder for a week. For me, it was like wandering back into a ruined city, turned bankrupt by a neighboring metropolis (real life). What was once a relatively prosperous stream of individuals had now become a blend of girls who were on there for a laugh, and girls suffering from Female Tinder-Eyes (FTE: eyes that have seen so much verbal destruction they’re immune to natural conversation, taught to only pick up on the horrific social cues blokes they talk to think are funny).
Here is my definitive experience of people still using Tinder.
Tinder Experts.
Male or female, some people cant move on from Tinder. Around 80% of the girls I talked to during my one week stint on the platform fell into this category. They’ve been in the soulless Tinder hellhole for so long that conversation has dissolved into a self-perpetuating discussion of the platform. I heard Tinder hell stories, success stories and every other tale you’d imagine comes with the territory of fucking people you meet on an application for your phone. The rest of the conversation felt like a recital, as if they’d practiced what they were saying on roughly 1000 people before me. Which they had.
I can’t feel sorry for Tinder veterans. I know the kind of people they are. The girls sit on Facebook and say things like “Why am I still single!?” and “I’ll never find the right guy” with that grinding-teeth emoji. The guys are likely sexist, or at least spend time complaining about girls promiscuity. Perhaps both.
People who want to screenshot their conversations and share them on social media.
These girls are easy to spot. They have a witty, comical bio and the zany photo that suggests they’re something ‘new’ and ‘fun’. I’m fairly convinced their comical exploits are just a cloak to hide the fact they’re on Tinder and actually a tiny bit ashamed. Maybe I’m wrong, but being baited into letting them get a screenshot worthy of The Lad Bible grew old fairly quickly.
Lonely/socially inept people.
Some people just came across as lonely. This category of Tinder user is the reason I didn’t completely rubbish the platform, because if it’s making life easier for them and taking away the anxiety of saying hello to someone face-to-face, it’s doing a little bit of good (at least). These people would talk about their weekends spent inside doing nothing and the fact they had zero prospects on the horizon for Valentines Day. Instead of telling them they were looking in the wrong places, I just chatted to them for awhile, let the conversation fizzle out and didn’t open the convo again. I have a feeling these people aren’t looking for sex, but rather interaction.
Overall, Tinder is pretty terrible now. At least from what I experienced. I used it for awhile a year and a half ago, and I’m sure there are still some gem users amongst the rough, but the majority of people have a skewed perception of what dating is actually like, all thanks to a swipe right mentality that replaced a good old fashioned introduction in a bar or at a party.
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Written by Jake Delvo. Photo by Dennis Bocquet.
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