The tale begins with me stumbling on to Nancy Jo Sales' feature in the September issue of Vanity Fair, "Tinder and the Dawn of the Dating Apocalypse." Putting aside my thoughts on the piece for now, I did what I always do when I come across something relevant and titillating—I texted it to my friends to garner their thoughts on it. What ensued was somewhat of a heated debate over text which, in a way, wrote this week’s column in itself. People use Tinder as casually and commonly as Facebook now. We’re also either pretending we haven’t used it, and hence sticking to our lofty state of judgment, or we’re part of a couple who wants to see what else is out there. So we have opinions—oh so many opinions—about Tinder.
Arriving full circle back at the aforementioned article, Sales documents the Tinder rituals that have become a part of the norm for twenty-somethings and the dating in which they engage. Gorging on the swiping, and riding an addictive high from the esteem boost when you match with someone, is what dating, for all intents and purposes, has been reduced to. Sex has never been easier. Gone are the times when a play or a line would be enacted at the bar every weekend, since Tinder takes care of every little detail that might translate to something we once knew as effort. With a smorgasbord of willing participants available to us, with as little as a swipe and a few emojis, the heady chemistry one feels with someone to whom they're maddeningly attracted might be facing extinction as well. The point is simply sex, and many are willing to engage in it with you: the who does not matter beyond the stamp of approval that is the right swipe.
One friend raised a thought-provoking point: in the midst of everyone insisting that this is the end of romantic dating, and nothing short of a dating apocalypse, it is sometimes easy to lose sight of the simple fact that perhaps the tendencies were always there, and Tinder was simply the trigger that was missing. Maybe technology is finally catching up to the callousness and self-involvement we always desired in our casual interactions. My friend had a point, no doubt. It has become incredibly irksome and tiring to hear and shoulder the blame for "this" generation being the crux of depravity and downhill movement of many things. Surely human behavior can’t change that drastically, simply because there are tools at our disposal that allow the existence of certain behaviors. After all, those that have found their significant others on Tinder and through other online dating platforms also exist. Instead of the tools being the bearer of the end, perhaps we need to reflect within and recognize our penchant, for all that we engage in is now at our fingertips.
The end result, from what I read in Sales' article and observe in the masses, is that, as a rule, no one's interested in intimacy or developing connections. It's all about finding an available orifice to stick something in, and vice versa. The best news for them? That's all readily available now. So all the good things that came about from the connections and intimacy, i.e. sex, exists without the "burden" of the connections and the intimacy. It's a brilliant shortcut: a quick, fun and hassle-free physical release of many shared orgasms without ever having to dwell on anything personal. It's not much different from masturbating, except that there's another live body there. So, really, things are not changing. The masses were, in fact, always this shallow and disinterested to begin with; now they simply have all the tools to do so openly and publicly. Maybe they're just shedding the façade now and owning up to what they always wanted without the fringes and bows on top, without having to play the social norm game of “love” and “connections.”
Sales references Christopher Ryan's book, "Sex at Dawn,” which more or less echoes the same sentiment. People have always chased novelty and a high number of sexual partners as a species, with a few in-between who value relationships with depth and emotions, so the behavior Tinder seems to have exacerbated is really not something alien that has suddenly gripped everyone. I agree with Ryan, since people don't become more and more depraved toward some epic final doom. They simply become more open about their predilections that always existed and simmered under the surface, but were never accepted in "polite" society. It'll simply get harder for the ones that do put stock in connections, personalities and finding meaningful depth-filled relationships. But, then again, it was never easy to begin with anyway. People just pretended more than before; they put on a ruse and went along with whatever was socially accepted with the full intention of only giving and taking what they themselves wanted. The result? More people got hurt, more people were blasphemed as lying cheats who promised to love you, when all they really had in mind was bouncing on you a few times. The perk of the times, at least, is that the ones who are only interested in bouncing have the freedom to express that and engage in it. The ones who only selectively boink those they connect with on all possible levels have a less pretense-filled world in which to find themselves.
