"She must have found him on Tinder or something,” someone in the room said dismissively. I was at a family dinner and the topic of someone’s aborted wedding was gingerly brought up.
Turns out all the wedding preparations revealed to the future bride and groom in question, that they were, in fact, not compatible at all.
And so they broke up and now here was someone gossiping about it in a living room and there I was quietly stuffing my face with biryani hoping no one asked whether I was on Tinder. Cause, obviously, I was.
In my early 20s, I too set out on that great odyssey of True Love. A few years of being single later, I hesitantly made a profile on OkCupid.
The online dating scene in 2012 was a little wanting.
Outside of that brief sojourn on the internet, I mostly met folks who I would go on to date (briefly) through “real life”.
Needless to say, a few more years of being on and off dating apps and meeting a few oddballs (mostly oddballs) the odyssey devolved into more of a casual recce for Maybe Just Some Company for A Movie.
Cut to 2020, when most of my friends are on or have been one or the other dating apps. There really seem to be no other avenues to meet new folks, outside of the internet.
There seems to be a pattern to all our experiences.
We’re bored, we feel like we’ll die single and unloved, there’s extra data on your phone so you download a battery-draining dating app.
You’re excited. Maybe this is the time you find someone. You open the app, which now asks you a billion questions to fill out.
Okay, small price for potentially big reward, you say to yourself and fill it out.
You’re ready to go. An hour later, with your thumb aching with all the disappointing swiping, you want to cry into the pillow—there’s really no one out there for you. You put the phone aside. Whatever.
You come back to the app of course, because it’s there, because it’s feeding into the hope that maybe this time something’s different.
It’s all about numbers, after all, and you have to weed out the bad from the good. You meet a couple of promising folks in person only to either not get along, or get along really well and have it inexplicably fizzle out.
The emotional fatigue of dating apps is real. You’re on them because there’s the great capitalist promise of more.
Irrespective of whether you’re in a relationship or not, the apps seem to whisper into your ear: there might be someone else who is better for you.
But I’m here to make a case for dating apps, not against them.
For one, it really is opening up our worlds. We’re meeting and talking to folks who we may not have known existed in a non-technological universe.
Newer apps are trying to mitigate the harassment women often face on these apps by letting them dictate the communication.
Friends around me are meeting more people, making friends, inching closer to knowing what they really want and some of them are getting married after meeting on an app.
This old notion that everyone on the internet is a fraud and out to scam you needs a serious makeover. So, while I ate my biryani silently, I wanted to say “good riddance!” Good riddance indeed to the relationship that was no longer serving two people (who seemed to know what they wanted and took the brave decision to work towards it), not the app that gave them the chance to meet.
Shruti Rao, Author
shrutirao1988@gmail.com