Tinder loving care

Allan, a twenty-something executive working at an advertising industry, would pick up his date from her house just a few kilometers away. They agreed to go to a nearby pub where they would less likely bump into common friends. They had a few drinks, a decent conversation, and then they would make out in the car before he took her home.

This is how Allan’s first date went with Bea, whom he met over the new dating app called Tinder. If you were averse to online dating, then you’d most likely be iffy about Tinder. Here are the basics you should know about Tinder, in case you haven’t already heard:

1. It links to your Facebook account, which is appealing, because you know you’re talking to real people.

2. Based on your location, the app allows you to look through the profile pictures of people within your vicinity.

3. What you can see on people’s Tinder profiles is limited: their profile pictures, first name, age, their likes on Facebook, and who your common friends are.

4. Based solely on these limited but crucial points of information, you can choose to like or reject the person. The person on the receiving end will never know, unless they have liked you as well, in which case it would be a match.

5. When you match, you’re both notified, and that’s the only time you can start chatting. It’s really a cleverly designed dating app.

To be blunt about it, it’s a hookup app. And this isn’t based on the local stigma of online dating. It’s based on observations of how the app was designed: the fact that the two important factors in the dynamic of Tinder is people’s distance from one another, and how good they look in their profile pics. Not necessarily details you’d need if you were looking for the perfect partner. The very interface suggests that you have everything you’d need to know to look for a “fun time.”

Allan is someone you can easily typecast as the young alpha male with a raging libido. He manages a life of work and play. He frequents the “It” bars in Manila and has, in fact, no problem asking girls out on dates. He admits it was his raunchy male friends who convinced him to join, with the selling point that it’s a “cool app na maraming chicks.”

As someone who has no problem in the real physical dating scene, I ask him if Tinder is just like an operator of booty calls. He denies this, but only because he’s being polite. Sadly, he says, it is what it is. It is “just as much of a connection as you can have through text,” which means not much. And the only good thing about it being that “you know at the very least that you both are attracted to each other physically,” which means you already eliminate that long, awkward guessing game. 

A few weeks after our interview, he would text me to report that he’s getting bored of the app. “Getting bored of the app” is actually a complaint I have heard from two or three other users. Maybe for people who don’t really need it, it’s easy to let go. But the same cannot be said for Janet.

When she started using it late last year, this twenty-something said it was mostly filled with foreigners. But today, she sees people from within her circle every so often. For Janet, Tinder is just the newest in her series of experiments dabbling with online dating. Working in a call center for about three years, dating online was something she had sought since working odd hours wasn’t conducive to her social life.

Since she began, she has met up with only two matches: one is Australian, the other is Spanish. She’ll joke that it’s because of her exotic looks that all her matches are foreigners, but one could say that she has an envious morena beauty. Janet has gone out with Mr. Aussie and Mr. Spanish more than once, and remains in contact with both of them. Mr. Spanish has been introduced to her friends; Mr. Australian cooked her dinner.

This is now Janet’s dating life. Unlike Allan, she doesn’t consider the app just a supplement, it is her milieu. About whether Tinder is just used for hookups or not, Janet says she’s not naïve about the fact that some people use it to get an easy lay, but that it is also open to share other things — not necessarily sex.

People will use Tinder in different ways and people will accept it differently too. I got on Tinder myself, and here’s what I like about it: it’s the shameless rush of making a match. Of pressing the heart button on adventurous Joe, whose profile pictures are a mix of hiking a trail and snorkeling in Palawan—and then finding out he heart-ed me back. It’s a match! Besides being a harmless way to look at cute guys, I reckon people are addicted to that power to like or reject a person. People aren’t normally bestowed with the right to judge Hot or Not, but on Tinder, you are the master.

For myself, I will cling on to my ideals while I can: glances at a coffee shop, a lingering look, eye contact, the brush of arms as you pass each other by. I will cling on to the rush of first impressions and real-life connections, because I myself am uncertain if this will all be lost — if one day, we will all be dating through our smartphones. I understand that the digital space is growing. This is our future. At least online, we know there are literally plenty of fish in the sea.

But until then, and because my gut tells me that time is near, I think I can delete my Tinder app for now.