It was 10 a.m. on Saturday morning and the light peeked into my dorm. As birds melodically chirped and marathoners finished their last laps, I got a message on Tinder. Saving my relatives from the expletives I encountered, I will not mention some of specific messages I received.
I scrolled through different messages from boys with names like Jon or Luke. Bored by wading through the same “wanna hook up” or “wat r u up to,” my finger followed my brain to the settings section, where I then hit the “Delete account” button, and I watched the screen turn white in agreement with my maneuver. Smiling at my decision to be freed from the mundane cycle of receiving the same messages from different people, I went back to sleep.
I don’t mean to be melodramatic, but deleting my Tinder account changed my outlook on dating and meeting people. It marked the end of an era of spending endless hours swiping left and responding to questions like, “What are you looking for on here?” with answers like, “Internship opportunities and LinkedIn endorsements.” Deleting my Tinder means that I no longer have hundreds of potential suitors at my fingertips. Deleting my Tinder means going out into the world and attempting to meet new people, which both terrifies and excites me.
Tinder takes away from the real-world experience of meeting someone, which can be both a good and a bad thing. When using Tinder, your phone acts as a mediator, and the app’s swiping and matching system ensures that you’re going to be communicating with someone who probably finds you attractive, decent, funny or any combination of the three. This saves us from spending hours talking to someone, thinking you’re hitting it off and then learning they have a significant other, never wanted to talk to you in the first place or really just wanted to walk past you and not hear the story of the Zamboni explosion that traumatized your childhood.
Tinder can be a bad thing because it is simulated discourse. Because you’ve never met that person in real life, they could be less funny, less attractive or have horrible-smelling breath. Of course we run that risk in person, but we can always cancel or walk away on an account of “bad sushi.” I’ll thank “The Clique” series for that maneuver.
Because Tinder is mediated through a phone, the experiences seem unreal and replicable. This is not to say that people haven’t created relationships out of their experiences on Tinder — I’m sure many have. This is to say that my experiences on Tinder have been limited to one-dimensional conversations with guys who never use correct grammar.
The truth is, and I’ll attribute this to my old soul, I want these experiences in person. I want to bump into people on the street, in cafés, through mutual friends, on the way to work or in class. I recognize that meeting people is not as easy as simply running into them or having them roll down the window to their limo, but as an avid watcher of “Sex and the City,” I can dream.
Maybe it’s not Tinder. Maybe it’s just me. This want stems from my desire to break away from the mechanized ritual of meeting people on Tinder. I became tired of being asked the same questions, which, for some reason, never ended in a question mark. I was tired of giving excuses every time I didn’t respond to a message within the same second I received one, and tired of wading through messages to find someone to have a decent conversation with.
This is not to call out those who have Tinder accounts, nor is it a call to action for those who are considering deleting theirs. This is also not to shame those who have Tinder accounts, nor is it a character analysis of those with whom I’ve interacted during my time on the app. When it comes down to it, I’ll choose the awkward over the digitized, the personal over the impersonal and the man fishing to the guy holding a fish in his picture. I want to go through the process of meeting someone, even if that means rejection, embarrassment, bad breath and a bad sense of humor.
But if none of that works out for me, I’ll call “bad sushi” on the whole dating thing.
Meredith loves telling stories and pretending to be Carrie Bradshaw, minus the man and comfy NYC apartment. She, however, eats enough brunch to cover all six seasons. When she's not drowning in 16th-century literature, she can be found lamenting over the bad grammar and bad boys in her middle school diary.
Find her on twitter @merewilsh or email her mwilsher@bu.edu with all your love musings or questions.
