#tindergeneration

This is a thing that I had planned to post on Medium as part of Alana Levinson’s #tindergeneration project but I don’t have the stones for it so it’s going here instead. I guess I’m part of the Tinder generation because everyone who exists right now is really part of the Tinder generation. We’re all complicit in it, because we all interact with it. Everyone has his or her or their opinion on the app. But I’ve tried to exempt myself because I had Tinder for just one (very hungover) morning my sophomore year of college and immediately panicked and got rid of it.

For a while, I thought that made me superior. I didn’t have Tinder; I was better than everyone who did. My two roommates downloaded it at the same time and got such a kick out of swiping and giggling. Left, right, left, right, left, right — I didn’t know which direction meant what. So, feeling a bit left out, I downloaded it too. The unease I initially felt quickly turned to a sense of pride. Yes, I thought, I could reject all those men who had rejected me. I could pick apart their profiles and find little flaws that would justify my rejection.

I am afraid of commitment. There’s no delicate way to say it; my boyfriend knows it; I’m bad at sharing and emotions and talking about myself, qualities that tend to inhibit the development of a normal relationship. I vacillate between thinking I’m the scum of the earth and unworthy of any suitor and thinking I am superior to any man I could meet anywhere. On Tinder, I could out-noncommittal anyone! It allowed me to make sense of my patchy dating history. Here was the solution. Buckets of rejection, and none of it was directed at me.

But mid-swipe, one profile caught my eye. I knew him by sight, though we’d never interacted. I paused. Swiped right. Just a little bit — just moved my thumb towards that little green check mark. Just enough that it wasn’t an accident, but not so much that I could be said to have done it with any enthusiasm. The app new, and registered my response as such. My first right-swipe.

My stomach dropped when his photo disappeared from my screen with a puff. I did it. I committed. I didn’t know what would be worse — a match, and the inevitable (perceived) embarrassment of a Tinder date, or radio silence, and rejection.

I deleted the app.

The anticipation was too much. I couldn’t just let it go. I downloaded it again.

Deleted it again.