Wednesday 2 January 2019

The Tinder Diaries

I’ve steered clear of Dating Sites for my entire life and always held a particular distain for the King Of The Dating Sites: Tinder. I’d called it a meat market, a horrendously shallow, simplistic, binary decision making cesspit. But after my burning car wreck of an attempt at a love life through 2018, I decided to take the plunge. I know there’s bumble and other things now (I only found out about that through Tinder) and I feel like the kid that signed up to MySpace 2 weeks before Facebook took off, I’m late to the game, I’m aware.

Also another caveat before I go any further, I know I’m not a conventionally attractive bloke. Most of the time I dress like a Lumberjack or Bruce Springsteen, my hair’s on its way out and underneath my eyes are a pair of bags so baggy because of all the fucking shit and drama they’re carrying. My personality does a lot of heavy lifting for my face, I’m not Photo Atrractive. It’s cool. Nonetheless I fired off into the abyss and decided to go swiping.

So the Tinder app got installed on the weekend of my birthday. Went to London with Mum and Dad to visit some friends. Dad his mate and I went to Wembley to watch the Football, 1-0 Spurs 91st minute, Christian Eriksen. The scenes. Got mighty pissed and decided to see who was about. In a drunken stupor the little red tinder icon ended up on my iPad homescreen.

Back at the hotel. Swipe swipe swipe. You’ve run out of swipes! The fuck? Suddenly this Dating App has turned into some strange Candy Crush lives type scenario and then all these in app purchases were available. I went to bed that night and thought nothing of it. Middle of the night, PING PING PING, the little red flame icon had woken me up in the night to tell me that I had all these likes and I should swipe to try to get a match. But I was out of lives! It started telling me to do Gold or Premium or some other package that all just sounded like an Overwatch Loot Box but instead you get more chances to try to find a mate who could someday be your life partner and bear your children.

So, yes, woke up in the night, saw the aforementioned anonymous likes, bought the Tinder Gold Package which apparently gets me unlimited likes, 5 super likes per day, the opportunity to see who likes me, all for one whole month (plus 2 new limited edition outfits, an extra level, and an mp3 copy of the soundtrack).

The women that liked me were decent! I matched a few back and sent some fairly innocuous exploratory messages. I was slightly tired and did a super like on a girl that I didn’t super like because I didn’t know what all the buttons at the bottom did, she matched me back eerily quickly seeing as it was 3am, managed to style out a conversation that petered out fairly rapidly because she was boring as fuck. But lovely and very polite. But dull as a post.

So yeah I’ve realised a few things. When you apply a video-game style loot box mechanic to a Dating site it’s like fucking cake for me, like catnip, like caffeine. So I went balls deep in Tinder.

I matched with a girl I already knew, I super liked her because I legit do super like her. We chatted a lot. I enjoy speaking to her, she has her own opportunities and stuff right now and she should follow her heart and go see the world again.

I realise I have a thing for Vets, like people who fix animals. They also all seem to be really pretty and people who look after other people or animals are fucking saintly souls who should be adored. I have a good few vet matches and animal chat is the fucking best.

I’ve notoriously always been shit at moving from chat into a physical date and that’s proving to be the case again here, I don’t take the plunge, I should be more assertive. But I’m not, but I will be. 2019 I’m going to start saying ‘yes’ again.

It’s given my confidence a bit of a boost though, a little spring in my step some days when I’ve absolutely needed it. The £20 I spent for a month of engaging with people in a fun and quirky setting was well worth it. I’ve stuck more in the bandit in an hour. I don’t see myself renewing the gold package though, I don’t need Dating on an industrial scale. I don’t need to see everyone that likes me. I’d prefer to go fishing with a rod, and not with a trawler. Nonetheless it’s nice to be ‘liked’ sometimes, and you never know, just one ‘like’ starts a conversation. Conversations are good for people.

Thx for reading.

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