Tinder

Because of my conversation with Kimberly, I decided to give Tinder a try. I had to create a fake Facebook account, but that was easy enough to do.

I wrote down some initial thoughts, after a week or so of using the service.

Who are you selling? Yourself, your dog, your group of friends, or … ?

I’m going out on a limb and assuming that if you’re on Tinder it’s because you want to meet people. So you’re hoping they’ll see your profile, be interested in meeting you, swipe right, and thus will begin whatever type of relationship you’re looking for. In order for them to be interested, however, they have to be able to find you in your profile. Some people don’t seem to get this concept.

Dogs

What the fuck is up with North Americans and their dogs? Well over half of the profiles I see on Tinder feature dogs. And notice my wording: I didn’t say that the photos “include” dogs, I said they “feature” the dogs. The dogs are the primary characters in these profiles. There’s a dog, and if you look very closely, there’s also a human female in there somewhere, too. Usually.

Now I get that different people are looking for different things on Tinder. I’m guessing that the typical “dog profile” is created by a woman who is looking for something more significant than just a series of orgasms; she wants a boyfriend, who will eventually become a husband, who will sire children with her¹. Apparently, for this type of woman, a key deciding factor in choosing a husband is whether that man likes dogs, and her dog in particular.

I mentioned this to Kimberly, and she said this:

When I first started on tinder I realized I was having all sorts of weird convos with randoms. I showed some of it to a friend and she said 'you swipe right every time the pic has a dog. The question you are being asked is not 'do you want to pat this dog'. It clarified matters nicely for me.

Us old chicks, we are all about the hounds.

I haven’t seen Kimberly’s Tinder profile – if she still has one – so I don’t know if it features dogs. I’m not going to ask her, because I might be forced to make fun of her. And no matter how nice she is to me, I refuse to have sex with her dog.

There is a separate question here as to whether love of dogs should really be the overriding factor in choosing a mate, but it’s not a question I’m particularly interested in at the moment. I’m looking for wimmins to fuck, not women to have a lasting, meaningful relationship with, so however these ladies want to go about choosing a boyfriend/husband/child siring partner is up to them.

Groups

But that’s just dogs. I’ve also noticed a lot of profiles in which all of the photos feature groups of people, rather than the woman herself. There’s a large intersection between women who feature their dogs and women who feature their friends, so, again, I’d say well over half of the profiles are like this.

Just like with the dog ladies, I’m sure these are profiles from women who are looking for child-siring material, and, again, the message is similar: If you wanna be my lover, you gotta get with my friends². And to a certain extent I get the logic. But ladies… you have to get it under control. I’ve seen a lot of profiles in which I couldn’t even tell which woman it was who was who owned the profile! I see a group of women, and then I look at the next picture and see another group of women (often the same group, maybe in a different order), and then I look at the next and see… another group of women. And then… is that a dog?!? By the time I get to the end, if I can’t tell which woman it is I’m trying to date I swipe left.

Unless she has written a profile and seems interesting, and all of the women in the photos are hot. Then I might still swipe right, since I’d be fine seeing any of them in my bed.

What have I done to anger you?

Some women get it, though. They know that I’m not looking to meet a dog, or a group of women³, so they put photos in their profile that actually make sense: pictures of the woman who is writing the profile. Eureka!

But some women now have a different problem: Why is every photo you’ve chosen a picture of you looking like you’re angry at the world (and me in particular)? Why are you so pissed off at Tinder? And… if you’re so pissed off at Tinder, why are you on Tinder? Or, as the photos indicate, why are you so pissed off at me? (And why, in that case, are you trying to meet me?)

I get that we’re not all photogenic. I’m definitely not photogenic, I’m better in person. (I’m also a really good kisser, and it’s hard to get that across in a Tinder profile.) But on a site like Tinder, the first – and often only – impression you make is going to be that photo. Maybe try to find one that doesn’t look like you have a seething hatred of mankind; one that doesn’t look like you’re on the verge of committing murder with rusty instruments. If you don’t have such a photo, maybe you’ve got some issues to work out, before trying to get a boyfriend? (Or even a fuck buddy? I get that “hate fucking” is something all the kids are talking about these days, but they don’t mean actually hating the guy who’s inside you.)

You might be thinking that it’s just one bad photo. After all, Tinder allows a profile to have multiple photos; maybe some of them are better. But in my experience, if that first photo looks bitchy⁴, they all look bitchy. There’s going to be 5 or 6 photos of someone who’s angry as hell, and it doesn’t make me want to slip it to her.

Before you say it, I know, in most cases they’re not going to care if I want to fuck them, because they don’t want to fuck me; they want an actual boyfriend, not an adulterous affair with a pervert. But the same thing applies to your potential boyfriends, ladies. Who’s going to want to date someone who looks so angry? Who are you trying to attract, looking so angry?

We’re all the same. No, seriously, I mean almost identical…

So you’ve decided to create a profile on Tinder, and you’re so committed to the endeavour that you managed to find a picture of yourself in which you seem happy to be alive. Or at least... not in a blinding rage. Now that you’ve chosen your photos, you need to decide what to say.

One option, of course, is to say nothing, and that’s a perfectly viable option. I’ve swiped right on lots of women who had no words in their profiles. Men are shallow, and Tinder is all about the photos, so if you don’t want to say anything you don’t have to.

If you do want to say something, however, you are faced with the problem of how you make yourself stand out amongst a sea of women with similar physical attributes. How do you sum up your unique personality in the scant space allowed? How do you let men see your strengths, your quirks, the ineffable essence of yourself, in the allotted space? Simple! You copy and paste everyone else’s, so that you’ll fit in! You don’t want to be a freak and say something original!

Here are some ways that the vast majority of women on Tinder are saying the same things, over and over:

Oh good, you like wine

Look, I get it. In high school you and all of your friends used to brag about how much you drank; it was the source of much of your humour, and it was a rite of passage. And then you got to college and continued to brag about how much you drank. It was a bonding thing. But now you want to be taken seriously as an adult, and you’re afraid of people seeing you as sophomoric – but at the same time, you don’t want to give up that bonding experience of getting shit-faced with your friends. So you’ve decided that the best way to do it is to just change the type of alcohol: If you start making jokes about loving wine, instead of jokes about loving beer⁵, you’re suddenly classy! (“Who’s that bimbo staggering around the bar? Wait… is that a pinot in her hand? Classy! I wonder if she’ll mother my children?”)

In another few years you’re going to realize that the wine jokes don’t set you apart because everyone is making them, which is a topic for another day. But if you are going to make jokes about loving wine, try to be original. I’ve seen a dozen profiles that use this exact line: “Red wine, travel, good food, red wine again.” Those. Exact. Words. I’m hoping it’s a quote from something. (Something that women are into, probably, like Eat Pray Love or whatever.)

Along similar lines, I’ve seen a few profiles that said, “I’m willing to lie about how we met.” Which was clever… the first time I read it.

You know how this works, right?

For those of you who are unfamiliar with Tinder, let me explain how it works:

1. You take a bunch of hot photos of yourself and post them to Facebook so that all of your male friends can hit on you, because they’re pigs
2. You create a Tinder account, choose your favourite photos, write a witty profile about yourself (or don’t), and open it up to the world
3. You scroll through hundreds of guys, swiping right on the ones you like and swiping left on the ones you don’t
4. When there’s a match – when you like a guy and he also likes you – you can talk to each other. Eventually, if everyone’s lucky, that might lead to boinking and/or love.

That last point was the important one, right now. You can’t talk to someone unless you like him and he likes you back. That opens up the channel of communication. So all of those profiles out there that say “send me a message if you want,” or “ask if you want to know more,” don’t work. You need that mutual connection first. If I do have a question, I have no ability to ask it.

Maybe I’m just being a jerk with this one. This whole document is getting kind of cynical and acerbic. But I’m not done yet...

Guacamole

Do you like guacamole? I do. It’s great on nachos, obviously, but I also love it on burgers. (If you haven’t tried it, give it a shot. You’ll be surprised.) There are a bunch of other foods that pair well with guac, too. It’s good food. But… is it so good that so many women feel the need to call it out in their profiles? Not as many as the ones who love wine, of course, but lots of women seem to love guacamole. And they feel so strongly about it that they need to include that fact in their profiles – which leads me to believe that they want to date men of similar interests. That is: interest in guacamole.

Lots and lots of people have written about the harm that online dating sites do to society, because we come up with narrower and narrower criteria for who we will and will not date, and I mentioned the dog thing above, but I’m not going to get into that. Hell, I’m just looking for strange, so my opinions on that would be skewed anyway. But ladies… don’t you think you’re doing yourself a disservice to limit yourselves so much that you’ll only date guac lovers?!? If you love guacamole, and meet a man who doesn’t, you can get past that. It doesn’t need to be called out in your profile.

How do you find time to date with all of those other activities?

I travel for work. At the time I wrote this I was spending more time on the road than I was at home. But the folks on Tinder are way more well travelled than I am! 95% of the women who write words in their profiles say that they want to travel; 60% of the photos that I see are of women in far away lands⁶.

Couple that with the other active, rugged things I see in profiles, in and out of Canada: mountain climbing and skydiving being the most common, but by no means the only rugged activities that people are doing.

Add to that the high number of women who mention yoga in their profiles – often with a favourite position; is that code? – or call themselves “gym rats,” and I’m starting to wonder: how do these women find time to date, in amongst all of these other activities?

Not that I’m complaining, on this one. The yoga-themed photos are nice.

Sapiosexual

Sometimes people who are part of a community – in this case, Tinder – start to develop their own vocabulary, and certain words or phrases start to get used more often within the group than they do in society at large. One I’ve noticed a lot on Tinder is sapiosexual. It’s supposed to be a clever way of saying “I like smart people,” or, more specifically I guess, “I’m turned on by smart people,” or, more to the point, “I want to fuck smart people.” I had never seen the word before I came to Tinder, that I recall, but I’ve seen it on a number of profiles. A large number.

No hookups

I’m going to take a break from my cynicism to say that yes, it is okay to say “no hookups” on your profile. I’m not saying that everyone who goes to Tinder is looking to hook up, but the site has developed a reputation as a hookup site, so if you’re going there for something other than hooking up, it’s perfectly valid to say so.

Personally, I don’t bother swiping right on a profile in which a woman says she’s not into hookups, so it actually has the intended effect: If you’re not looking for hookups, I’m not going to bother you with my adulterous ways.

Not that you’ll know anyway; you’re probably not going to swipe right on me in the first place. Unless you don’t read the profiles, and only look at the photos, in which case maybe I’ve just saved you some time and hassle.

Tinder really is for the young at heart

Sometimes you can tell who the target audience of an app is simply by looking at its features. It’s pretty obvious to me that Tinder is aimed at the younger crowd – the ones who are just out of school, and learning to be adults, but still want to date and have fun – because of the emphasis on where people went to school.

If you’ve filled out your Facebook profile and included where you work, Tinder will give you the option to show that on your dating profile. That makes perfect sense to me. Where someone works is often a large part of who they are; it’s definitely a large part of how they spend their time.

If you’ve filled out where you went to school, Tinder will give you the option to show that, too, and that’s where the age divide comes in, because I’ve been out of school so long that, frankly, I don’t give a fuck where someone went to school, and she shouldn’t care where I went to school either. But if you’re a 20-something, fresh out of school yourself, then it actually makes a lot of sense to want to know where a potential mate went to school. There’s a connection there.

The fact that Tinder included this as a feature kind of indicates the primary users they’re targeting.

What’s in a name?

One final note on names: I’m used to Ashley Madison, where everyone is cheating, and obviously you don’t use your real name. But Tinder is tied to your Facebook profile, and part of the whole thing is that it’s supposed to be your real information, especially your name.

But I created a fake Facebook profile for Tinder, and I used a fake name. And I’m wondering: how are women going to take that? I fully realize that my take on this is different from many others’ opinion; I don’t think a name matters that much. If a women gets to know me on A-M or Tinder or anywhere else, she is getting to know me. Whether I’m using my actual name or have chosen a different one is a very minor detail. But I’m guessing that some women on Tinder are going to feel incredibly betrayed if/when they find out.

Perhaps I just need to train my brain to use my fake name, so that if I’m on a date and she calls me by my Tinder name, I remember to answer. She’ll get to know the real me, and whether she’d consider the fake name to be a betrayal or not would never become an issue because she wouldn't know.

Footnotes

• ¹ Or, hell, maybe she wants him to sire children with the dog? ↺
• ² Tell me I’m not the only one who gets dirty thoughts about this song. “In order to be your boyfriend I have to fuck all of your hot friends? Well… Okay. I guess. But to ensure your ongoing happiness, I guess I’ll need to keep fucking them on a regular basis, too. I’m not so selfish that I’m making it a one-time thing.” ↺
• ³ Well… under the right circumstances... ↺
• ⁴ Yes, I’m using that word. ↺
• ⁵ … or – shudder! – schnapps ↺
• ⁶ I make up all of my statistics in order to make a point. I’m not counting, there are no spreadsheets involved. Please don’t quibble with the math, it’s really not the point. ↺