I’ve spent the bulk of my recovery messing around on Tinder. Ok I am very late to this game… perhaps I missed it’s prime entirely? Was it always so… boring? Is it odd that it’s actually killed my sex drive?
Okay… I get that folks don’t go on Tinder to find love. It’s for hook-ups. And perhaps my own idiosyncrasies are at play here, but the gamification of sexual objectification seems utterly contrived. It’s designed for a sort of infantile and superficial interaction: how much can you learn from someone’s selfie, really? How do you even determine if someone’s attractive when camera angles and filters and good nutrition has made pretty much most of humanity residing in the developed world a uniform +7 mannequin? Over and above a certain level of maintenance – there has to be some kind of personality, and chemistry at an individual level – for the person to stand out, right?
It has nevertheless been an entertaining ride dispensing judgment on total strangers based on a single selfie. Some of these are so absurd that they must be posed through some self-aware irony, right? Otherwise I despair at the homogeneity of people in this city.
- Selfie with filters: cheek effects, hair effects, eyebrow effects. And then there’s the subgroup of obfuscated face shots – hair, back of the head, turned-sideways towards the background.
- Club Dwellers: ladies in a full body pose, drink in hand, often with one or multiple companions, in the foreground of some club/bar scene (where the lighting is often blue or purple).
- I workout and my ass is tight: some kind of gym-based back shot, showing off shapely buttocks in tight yoga pants. Is this like, the girl’s version of showing off pecs and abs?
- Beach shot: either a bikini shot against the sunset or swirly long dress in the sand, mid-jump or spin. There seems to be a disproportionate number of divers too
- The Travellers: “my life is about traveling the world and soon I’ll visit Jupiter. If I’m not traveling I’m thinking about where to travel to. I have taken selfies at every tourist destination on planet earth”. Some string of flag emojis.
- Instagram model marketing channels: “I’m not here often. Follow me on Instagram”.
The best thing I took away from Tinder is that (1) I find it sometimes amusing, and (2) I feel more assured of my own hitherto indeterminate romantic outlook. As much as it may be cringeworthily naïve, it is nevertheless 100% authentically me. I suppose I am a meaning-driven creature, even for hookups.
For a very long time I have been embarrassed by my rather romantic and idealist outlook on relationships – not romantic in the sense of a belief in the existence of some rhapsodic, transcendental ideal of ‘soulmate’ and ‘true love’, or that their discover would miraculously complete us and ease all pains of this lonely caustic life. Rather, I believe – as I think all humanists should – that romantic ideals are chiseled pieces of art, the outcome of intentionality and shared effort, that true partners participate in a common vision, and strive for the same destination, and relish in the journey to get there and revel in each small victory.
One does not meet their ‘soulmate’ in that sense, but one grows to become it. The ideal partnership exists, but in destination only and is the outcome of the effort. This outlook necessitates the recognition of shared core values and traits and worldviews – most crucial among them the belief that people do change and grow, and hinges on cultivating a shared space of complete trust and open communication, and faith in what might be a lifelong process. There is something almost spiritual to it – that a successful relationship is tethered on intentionality and shared effort, not on its shape or form.
This of course draws from my very unhappy childhood living with two parents who married for practical reasons and stayed together for practical reasons, and took a practical, rational approach to life-partnership to its most pernicious end – an aggressive resentment of each other; an active, physical, murderous attempt to cause each other harm. Yet to me the issue was simple: they never worked on their relationship – they never had faith in each other and in our lives together, and never made an attempt to fall back in love.
And so I had vowed, long before I had the words to articulate it, to live differently, and more hopefully. Hope in that alignment is the result of revision and calibration of long-term plans, that shared interests are cultivated, learned and developed, that compatibility is not static, but the outcome of proactive attempts to understand each other. And you know that you’ve met the right person, when these efforts, arduous as they may be, is also satisfying and delightful. I know there is something earnest but naïve to this view, and it’s something that I don’t think many people share.
Here’s an idea for an online dating app for introverts: you don’t get to see any photos until you’ve exchanged a 1000-word personal essay first.
#00117F 