Love Me, Tinder

I remember it like it was yesterday.

Eighteen-year-old me takes a whiff of his breath for the fourteenth time the last hour before stepping out of the bus heading towards the café where my first date ever is currently enjoying her latte.

Que Inner dialogue:

“Just be cool, ask questions, let her talk, listen, be interesting, don’t do that shit with your hands that you do when you get nervous, just beeee cooool.”

Exhales, checks breath, and opens the café-door.

Now, of course, I did the exact opposite of everything my inner dialogue told me, plus so many other things.

Still, I went through it; I asked a girl for her phone number, she gave it to me, agreed to go on a date with me, she even seemed to enjoy herself, in-between the curious and nervous quirks that constitute my personality.

Afterward, I felt good, actually great, like a warrior on the front line of love, or at least a dude that managed to be himself in short glimpses throughout an hour when every instinct of his body fought hard against it.

Sadly, the result was a rejection, the chemistry wasn’t there, and she smartly pointed that out, so I didn’t have to.

First, I would state that rejection is essential to learn, especially at a young age; it can help you stay grounded in the face of adversary and help you deal with other rejections, both in love and in life.

However, the critical lesson I took away from my first date was that I put too much effort into how I felt she should perceive me; I also pondered how she may or may not have reacted to the person I am rigorously trying to hide from her.

Why would I hide the person I am? If I wanted us to have a real relationship, shouldn’t I be frank about what kind of person I am? Isn’t that a more pragmatic approach? Or is that kind of a fourth date ordeal?

Anyway, next time I will be better!

So, rejection aside, I shrugged my shoulders and kept on truckin’; most importantly, I faced the girl, we chatted and tested our social skills against each other in a sort of personality tug-of-war challenge, and both came out whole on the other side.

The self-revelatory philosophical cherry on top about honesty and daring to be me was, in hindsight, the meaning of it all.

With this in mind, I would claim that going through the motions of how people fall in love step-by-step is, in many ways, the ultimate manifestation of life.

However, I feel this has changed a lot during the last decade.

Personally, I haven’t been on a date for the last five years where it wasn’t arranged in its entirety using some form of an online dating app, and I feel this is the case for most people of my generation.

You might say that we’re reinventing what it means to fall in love and are currently in the earliest state of digital-romance-metamorphosis.

During this stage, I would go so far as to say that we’ve exhausted the whole how-am-i-gonna-look-like bone in our skeleton. The narcissism that newfound SoMe dating has catalyzed has been detrimental to our romantic relationships and how we meet people.

When the controversial Marxist philosopher Slavoj Zizek was asked about online dating, his take was simple:

“When you date online, you have to present yourself there in a certain way, putting forward certain qualities. You focus on your idea of how other people should perceive you. But I think that’s not how love functions, even at a very simple level. I think the English term is ‘endearing foibles’ — an elementary ingredient in love. You cannot ever fall in love with the perfect person. There must be some tiny small disturbing element, and it is only through noticing this element that you say, ‘But in spite of that imperfection, I love him or her.”

On Tinder, an average user has about 4–5 of his or her “best” images. These select few portraits display the visual attributes the user recognizes as one’s most attractive, simultaneously containing the visual “signature” the individual wants to put out into the world, how that person wants to be perceived.

In other words, the way he or she “is.”

This involves playing a bit of identity-jeopardy, and the root of most inquiries goes something like this.

1. What parts of my personality do I deem most attractive to the opposite sex, and how do I display it? Am I funny? Should I post a joke in my bio? Do I want to be perceived as funny? Why do I want to be perceived as funny? Are funny people loved? Do funny people get laid?

2. What kind of clothes do I want people to know that I wear? Should I use photos where I wear baggy clothes? Does that mean that my persona will come off as hip-hop? Should I wear fewer clothes? Am I the type of person that wants half-naked photos on the web? Is the person that wants this the person that I want to display myself as?

3. Should I try to emphasize my more robust qualities when listing my traits, or should I focus on some of the negative aspects of myself so that a potential meeting would go smoother? Am I selling a used car here, or am I looking for a meaningful, long-term commitment?

4. Photos, how many? Is five showing too much of myself and my weaknesses? Is three too little and an indication that those are the only three photos ever taken of me in history that is somewhat decent?

Who would have known that creating a Tinder profile could be such an existential task?

Back to Zisek.

The Slovenian exemplifies an encounter between a man and a woman in a public library. The woman stands by the printer awaiting her dissertation’s print-out. Turning, she collides with a man heading for the Biology section.

Papers fly, eyes meet, hands touch, excuses, red faces, smells, foibles. Every aspect of your imperfect, un-strategized personality traits are on display in a brief encounter. You become yourself in the most natural human form you could ever offer, acting on pure instinct, and your potential partner learns more about you in a single moment than he/she ever could reading or watching the self-edited, twice-drafted autobiographical story of Tinder-you.

Now, I realize that we are in the year 2020; online dating has been around for a very long time. But my claim is that there’s something existentially wrong with dating apps, and I would go as far as to say if you meet someone on an online dating platform, you could, in most cases, be setting yourself up for failure.

The main issue I have with putting out the most attractive and “perfect” version of yourself online is that it creates the circumstances for your relationship to “start the race to the bottom” the second your eyes meet.

When the dating-persona both has created for themselves do not fit the description in its entirety, even if it’s pretty darn close, the official game of “Ok, so what else has this person been lying about?” has started.

If you then discover an issue that either conflict with the persona he/she has created, or notice something that should have been mentioned beforehand, or something that even couldn’t be discussed online, but is in fact there, there is already perceived dishonesty.

Examples of this can be wholly arbitrary and so minor that even mentioning them to yourself or others makes you seem silly or disingenuous. Still, their surprising element reveals the very nature of such a selective dating process.

Large nose, high pitched/low-pitched voice, prominent forehead, close-talker, mole, lack of/too much eye contact, etc.

Again, it’s not the superficial element that plays a role in such an encounter; it is the often inability to display those things on a very sophisticated yet, at the same time, very restricted device.

It simply does not work.

What’s the solution?

As with most metamorphosis, we have to adapt, learn to fly, swim, or jump within the context of the new landscape we’ve created for ourselves.

I could encourage you to delete your apps, go to a park, tell a person how attractive they are and ask them for their digits, and in the same breath, advise you to pick up a VHS-tape and re-watch Casablanca, or dust off the ol’ Walkman and go for a WHAM!-stroll. Still, these nostalgic activities’ inconvenient nature makes them challenging to implement and maintain in our busy lives.

Besides, the Me Too-movement, although highly necessary, eliminated the conventional old school courtship-methods we once held dear.

So, this is the part where some of you will feel an inclination towards some casual eye-rolling, hear me out, in the name of love.

Virtual Reality.

A piano plays as an avatar version of you saunter into a bar-simulation.

You randomly encounter another avatar of interest; perhaps you spill your digital Whiskey Sour on the avatar’s top.

As the bar-simulation scans the available color-palettes for the situation, encodes some crimson-red in both your cheeks, you awkwardly strike up a conversation, sense each other’s “vibe,” see how the person more or less looks like in a simulation that does not allow significant visual upgrades, you realize how you interact with each other, you leave everything on the table, and the same level of randomness is present as with the printer and the flying dissertation.

Only this time, you start from scratch, and the race to the top commences.

And so, my conclusion is simple; when we eventually physically step into the digital world, we bring with us our foibles, our specific idiosyncratic characteristics, and imperfect un-strategized personality, by default.

Making old fashioned courtship with a twist once again possible.

The metamorphosis completes when you sit in the bar, rejected, sipping your half-spilled digital whiskey sour, muttering to yourself in a passé Bogartian-manner as your avatar-date marches out the door.

“Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine.”

And you love every second of it.