Remember those days when you saw a cute boy or girl in your school or college or even at a party and got all nervous and felt like butterflies had taken up residence in your tummy? Like harps were playing and the angels were singing and you were floating on a cloud every time? Like you’d just die if you didn’t see or hear from him or her again? Yeah. Those days are pretty much over, I’d say. And for that, you can blame TINDER, the notorious dating app that is doing the rounds, not surprisingly, even in Goa.
Our generation is now reduced to looking at pictures of people on a screen and swiping left or swiping right based on someone’s face and how attracted you are to that person’s face, eventually leading to chatting and meeting. II am not a fan, just for your information, and I’ll tell you why.
TINDER – Swipe Left, Swipe Right
TINDER is a location based social media app that facilitates communication between mutually interested users, allowing them to chat. The app is mainly used as a dating/ hook up app and was conceived sometime in 2012.
The first ‘swiping’ app where users either swipe right on another person’s picture if they approve or swipe left to get to the next picture, it has reduced contact to a mere minimum with conditions attached.
Using Facebook, TINDER is able to build a user profile with photos that have already been uploaded. Basic information is gathered and the users’ social graph is analyzed. Candidates who are most likely to be compatible based on geographical location, number of mutual friends, and common interests are then streamed into a list of matches. Based on the results of potential candidates, the app allows the user to anonymously like another user by swiping right or pass by swiping left on them. If two users like each other it then results in a “match” and they are able to chat within the app. The app is used in about 196 countries. (Paragraph Source – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tinder_(app) )
According to sources, TINDER is now available in approximately 30 languages and an estimated 50 million people use the TINDER app every month with an average of 12 million matches a day. However, to get to those 12 million matches, users must collectively make around 1 billion swipes per day. As if it isn’t hard enough dating in this day and age, we are now forced to swipe left and swipe right and confuse our brains even more than they already are.
There are quite a few young Goans on TINDER, I would assume, given that this is how most of us choose to date now. Not that any of them would admit it outright. After all, no matter how modern you think you are, there is always that feeling of “what will people say?”. So they choose to use the app on the quiet unless you’re on it too, you’ll never find out who is following this new dating trend.
On A Personal Note
I always equated dating with more than just being lazy and picking and choosing a person based on a picture. Shouldn’t stuff like attraction (mental and physical), personality, a sense of humor, kindness, decency and so on figure into the story somewhere? I guess, when the app was created, its makers believed that they would be saving the dating world, by being a kind of electronic Cupid and preventing everyone else from going to different bars or parties and meeting people they would definitely not settle down with in complete harmony.
Thanks to TINDER, however, dating has just become lazy and completely superficial. We’re now judging and making dating decisions using just one finger. Where’s the work that goes into meeting someone in person and actually deciding whether you like them for their looks and personality and sense of humor and all those other elements that make someone a whole?
I spoke to a few close friends and asked them for their opinions. I will allow their names to remain private for anonymity’s sake.
One girl had this to say, “I guess it has its good and bad points, I mean you can meet people you wouldn’t normally meet or interact with but on the other hand, the location option that such an app uses could cause problems. I mean, it provides a tracking history and you can’t restrict it to just people you know.”
Another friend said that he knows of people that the app has worked for in exactly the manner it was designed for. Some have hooked up, some haven’t been able to, due to the superficial nature of the app, and some have even found love everlasting and settled down. He also says on a more personal note, it’s not really something that appeals to him in the grand scheme of things.
Another close girlfriend told me, “TINDER is marketed as a dating app. But it’s designed to initially make men feel like Lorenzo Lamas and women feel like Rachel Hunter on the television show “Are You Hot?” You swipe to pick seemingly attractive locals in your current area based solely on their looks. So much for ‘not judging a book by its cover’. After two people have matched, chats seem to be more about finding out if sex is on the cards than finding out more about the person. The app might’ve started out with good intentions but it went rogue faster than Harvey Dent turned into Two-Face. Tinder is like the Yellow Pages for Hook-ups. Looking to meet someone on an app like this has such a negative connotation. It’s assumed that women are easy and willing and men are on the prowl. It’s hardly used for its original intentions. But, like with all things, there’s always an exception. It just depends on how many times you’re willing to swipe left or swipe right.”
Ultimately, yes, this may or may not work for people all over the world and it’s probably a great idea to some but if you’re basing meeting a potential date or significant other on just a visual aid, you probably won’t be finding true love anytime soon.
