Tindervision

Tinder is pretty popular right now, as many of you may know given the chronic wrist pain you are all experiencing as you read this. Or why you are all so practised and efficient when the time comes to PayPass. Or when you notice that you walk to the left of approaching people in the street when you find them attractive and right when you don’t.

 

“Sometimes my hand just goes all Tindly – on the plus side masturbation does itself”

The unforgivably shallow nature of judging your fellow humans by a single two-dimensional snapshot of some moment in their life, without audio accompaniment, just leads to people filling in the blanks themselves. It’s therefore either going to lead to throwing away an opportunity to meet someone who you might actually hit it off with, or becoming infatuated with a person you know nothing about.

“I bet she even eats Weetbix in that outfit. It clearly represents her daily personality. Sold.”

 

Think about how many people using the application would actually look at a picture of someone they find attractive for whatever reason and contently tell themselves “okay – they look interesting but I don’t know them yet so I’ll hold back for now”. Some of you are saying “yeh I totes do that because I’m wise like a monk and shit”. No, you would like to think you don’t make conclusions or assumptions but you would be denying an imperative of our species’ social evolution if you were capable of that, and that would actually make you a monk.

 

“I’ve never been good with small talk – I just have a pet tiger to eat the competition”

 

As soon as you see a profile of someone you like, you don’t see a profile of someone you like – you just see someone you like. It is a case of assume the positive, and try to disprove, because we are all optimists at heart due to the nature of the media’s presentation of romance. As soon as you decide subconsciously that you are attracted to someone, you are going to favourably fill in the blanks inversely proportionately to the number of times you have been screwed over. That means Phil who never had a girlfriend is going to build a perfect caricature of a horny genius from a single picture of a girl with glasses and boobage, and Tracey who has been divorced twice might be more cautious about assuming the Adonis also excels at mathematics, courtship and fatherhood.

 

After the first conversation: you know you both like cats and baseball. *Extrapolates to everything else too*. Your mind is saying “they probably also have a whole family of handmade My Little Pony clay figurines on their bedside table, just like me!”.

“I feel like we know each other so well already”

Don’t extrapolate – I know hope is hard to hold back, and even harder not to replace with cynicism, but try to keep the slate blank before it has been written on. Expectation is going to disappoint everybody, and suggesting we should all expect the minimum is also not going to help you be a likeable person, because to live that view you have to actually be miserable.

Although, you can probably be reasonably accurate in perceiving that most men are on there for sex, and most women are on there for a daily bitesize confidence boost (it’s a good indication that anyone who gets as many messages as OkCupid suggests is going to develop a complex).

 

Dating Apps to Women

Dating Apps to Men

 

Happy swiping!