January 14, 2024 - Dating App-titude

Age 25

Out of sheer curiosity, sheer boredom, sheer disappointment from a bad weekend with a bad person who spoiled my idea of wholesome romance, I downloaded Tinder.

I haven’t had an active account since before the pandemic. The concept of using an app to meet a partner has always felt counterintuitive — I'm already poor with decisions, a chronic sufferer of FOMO and what ifs — but if I'm honest, I didn't have many earnest intentions in reactivating a profile I first made before I could legally drink. I just wanted a distraction, maybe some vague hope that there is better out there waiting. After swiping through a thousand eligible bachelors in a fifty mile radius, I'm left with the realization: quantity and quality only look the same when you squint.

To put it lightly, the field is brutal. Stacked with hideous and charmless mines. Most are derivative, some are illiterate. They're all looking for wives or hookups or the Pam to their Jim, and while there's no crime in those aspirations I can feel myself drooling from the boredom of reading the same dozen openers, flipping through faceless profiles of infidelity, numbing to the dreary pickup lines of repulsive confidence.

Libertarian. Non religious. Will tie you up.

Can keep the freezer full and the fridge stuffed.

Please be at least somewhat in shape.

You're new daddy.

I want to like these men. I want to be open-minded and blind to my preferences, but the razor's edge separating that with general standards is sharp enough to slice a heart in half. After a certain amount of swiping left, rejecting and rejecting and rejecting, I can feel how anxious my thumbs become to go opposite just to soothe the boredom of having an empty match list. Settling is the easiest way to stay entertained.

My friend Lin suggested speed-dating — a real in-person affair, no anonymous horniness or tooth-whitened photos of whiskered fish trying to hook me. According to her, nobody worthwhile is on the apps. Even if I migrated to one of Tinder's more polite and better-dressed siblings — Bumble, Hinge, even Raya — I would be accosted by the same gory disappointments. I'm wasting my time, my energy, my youth, my et cetera. She's probably right. But there’s no harm in a distraction — a lighthearted game of hot-or-not that almost always ends in one unanimous answer.

Speaking about romantic love almost always makes me feel like an imposter. I think it's why I end up writing about it so regularly; every time I get near the feeling, it feels misplaced. Misunderstood. I'm urged toward deconstructing and dissecting every fluttering heartbeat to see if it was really earned — if the passion that sparked in my chest was one of genuine emotion, or if it was a subconscious expectation for what I should feel when I kiss a symmetrical face with a kind voice. I'm constantly assuming I should be feeling more — more passionately, more naturally, more inclined to being less afraid of a committed and optionless future.

I have loved, but I'm not sure I've been in love. Just the same — I have been loved, but I'm not sure anyone has ever been in love with me. There has never been a person I've shown my entire soul to and known, without any hesitation, that the ugly, secret corners of my personality would have no effect in the outcome of their feelings. A near dozen people have told me they loved me in the reddest, most romantic sense. In their reasoning, they spoke of looks and charm and qualities so curated that, when recited back to me, barely felt like my own. I can't discount words they thought to be the truth. But as I sit in the glow of a dating app on an empty, freezing night, it's difficult to believe that any of them were actually in love. Otherwise, it would have lasted.

Lin has a point about the apps; I've only ever gone through with one date. Years ago — I think I was nineteen or twenty. He was older, well educated, handsome, from a family richer than God. But he also had a girlfriend, and when I confronted his omission he acted like I was the prude and asked the waitress to split the bill. It was disastrous and depressing evening — a waste of my time, my energy, my youth, my et cetera. Even the most perfect person I could find — an identical match to the type I was looking for at the time (he was a painter who wore a coat of black wool in every family photo) — was a wreck of disappointment. It was easy to move on. I told her, after lamenting about my recent weekend with a person I had higher hopes for: if I’m going to be disappointed, I would rather not care about the culprit.

So now, I swipe. And the game continues with the same unanimous answer: not, not, not, not, not. But I stay distracted and hopeful, because with an infinite pile of possibilities it seems likely that eventually someone will live up. I know that Tinder’s infinity is not really infinite — I’m limited by location and age and the sort of person willing to catalyze love from binary code — but the logic is sound if I don’t think too hard. I'll be surprised eventually. And until then, this strand of disenchantment has a shallower cut.