Labor Day weekend has been lovely in an "I'm not doing anything" sort of way. However, as much as I relish early bedtimes and sleeping in for up to two hours past my alarm time, it occurs to me that I'm slipping back into my hermit shell a bit. With a new school year starting this week, I'm about to be super busy with work and the tendency to hide from the world will only get stronger as the days get shorter. I need to shake things up and force myself to (ugh) meet people. So this morning I woke up and said, "Hey, MathMercy, things are pretty mellow right now. Why not try to complicate your life? Shouldn't you be dating?"
A quick peek at Plenty of Fish showed me what I've been missing in my absence: I already saw all the lonely fish in the Seattle sea months ago, and I'm still not trying to catch any of them. Time for something new, right? So, partly to challenge myself to be more social, but mostly to provide entertainment for this blog, I joined a new dating site. A little online research led me to - wait for it - Tinder.
I have been reluctant to try Tinder because the name is so close to Grindr and I have no use for a hookup app for gay men. However, one of my girlfriends has been using the app fairly successfully for a while and I was intrigued by the model. Basically, no one can contact you unless you both "swipe right" to indicate interest in the other party. No creepy stalkers and no hurt feelings is pretty appealing. The other thing that's different is that you don't really build a profile with Tinder. Instead, it accesses your Facebook profile photos and "likes" to build your profile.
That last bit took me a while to accept. The app tells you it won't ever post to Facebook, but how do I know that some creepy guy can't start contacting my friends? Luckily, I ran across a real life friend on Tinder (and made sure to mark the little swipe right heart instead of the x so we could joke about the dating experience together - as long as he swipes right too...) and saw that the only things I see from his Facebook profile are our mutual friends and mutual likes. Okay. So far so good. None of my friends needs to know that I'm on Tinder...Unless, of course, I blog about it.
My first observation of note is that somehow this feels more organic than scrolling through carefully crafted (or not so much) dating profiles. As superficial as it seems, judging somebody purely by the photos and common interests that they share with their friends feels a bit more like seeing somebody across a crowded room and venturing over to find out more about them.
My second observation is that when I know that the other person will never know that I clicked "Nope", I am much more judgmental than I might be otherwise. Of course, there is a lot less to judge, so maybe I'm not a terrible person. If I can't run through my typical checklist (car, job, height, sentence construction, etc) the only thing left to judge is the photo, right? The shirtless torso pic at the gym or in front of the bathroom mirror is suddenly elevated to super douchebag status when you realize it was either a Facebook profile photo (can you imagine?) or deliberately added to the Tinder app. Either way, eww.
I have actually marked a few "likes" and been rewarded with "matches" today, which is a boost to my confidence. In fact, I am about an hour and a half away from my first date in months.
The fun game-like aspect of swiping left or right has made way for reality. Suddenly, I am wracked with jitters. I don't know anything about this guy except that he has a couple cute pictures and he's in the Coast Guard. What if he hates kittens? Or cheese? Or sunshine? Worst of all, what if he's as short as I am? I'll just take a deep breath and remind myself I'm doing it for the blog. It's all about attitude, right? Right. I can do this! Maybe it will even be fun. I'm not shaving my legs though; that's more like second or third date territory. Wish me luck!
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