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Tinder: The Saviour of Humanity's Celibacy
Other | Tuesday 26th November 2013 | Alex
When it comes to flirting, I have always been and will always be entirely, unequivocally useless. I’ve awkwardly sidestepped any advance and made a few self-deprecating jokes to make myself seem like a less viable candidate but, really, how has anyone developed anything like what could be considered “game”? I’ve always felt as though my own appeal to anyone stems mainly from Stephen Frears adaptation of Nick Hornby’s “High Fidelity”:
“Hey, I'm not the smartest guy in the world, but I'm certainly not the dumbest. I mean, I've read books like "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" and "Love in the Time of Cholera", and I think I've understood them. They're about girls, right?”
I also make a killer compilation tape. I am Rob Gordon.
After seeing the BBC’s News page today, I couldn’t help but think it could be worse, much worse. If you go to their homepage you’ll see the two highly read articles coming from hugely different ends of the spectrum. On the one hand, there’s a short video explaining why Tinder is solving humanity’s problems (if it takes something like Tinder, we don’t deserve the right to be saved) while people nowadays are having less sex than at any point in the less twenty years per month.
It would seem that in the 16-44 demographic, people are only making the beast with two backs 4.9 times a month for men and 4.8 times a month for women. Apparently, money issues and social media sites affect your libido. In other news, water is wet and Ricky Gervais is still a grade A berk.
If this is the case, Beeb, how can Tinder claim to solve all our sexy problems? By being able to dismiss a potential candidate at the flick of a digit, does that not diminish our social interaction skills? If you used to lie in bed checking Facebook and Twitter on your phone while your partner was asleep, you’ll soon be doing that alone with one hand under the sheets.
Tinder works on the basis that if you don’t like what you see, you can swipe to the left and the troll that was on your screen is banished forever. If, however, you’re interested in what you see, swipe to the right and then, if it’s reciprocated, you’ve got a match! If not, you’re the troll. How fucking shallow have we become as a population to develop things like this?
The guys at Tinder say they developed this to suit their needs to meet people and those traditional social hangouts like bars or restaurants are now the domain of friends. That’s a grim statement, isn’t it?
I don’t think any story about how two people ever met is the truth. Normally it’s all about how romantic it was and blah, blah, blah. In actual fact, I’d love to hear someone say, “well, in all fairness, it just got to a point where it just would have been harder not to”. Pragmatic, yes, but there’s romanticism somewhere in there, right?
It’d be such a shame if it came to down to saying, “Well, kids. I met your mother when she posted the most charming little picture on Tinder where she was doing some very impolite things to her own finger”. You never forget those moments.
Please don’t let apps like Tinder and these become the norm. There’s a lot to be said for awkwardly dancing around the idea of sex until it happens. Apps like Tinder allow us to skip all those parts of dating that are essential to the process; the stage of texting where you’re not sure if you like each other, sneaking around so your friends don’t know what’s going down. It all adds to the final product being amazing. I know what Bobby Boucher’s Momma would say about Tinder…
I'd love to hear to worst Tinder experiences or where you stand on the matter. Is it a soulless, vapid app that makes us more shallow or is it just the next step in human relationships?
Alex Taylor https://twitter.com/alextaylor18
