John Wilkes, the eighteenth-century radical, rake and uglybug, claimed that it only took him half an hour with any woman to talk away his face. Tinder gives you 500 characters. It’s not enough. I am not saying that I am, like the old libertine, a shocking dog to look at, who ought not to be exposed to pregnant women’s view – Tinder hasn’t, yet, destroyed my self-esteem quite that much – but I think I probably need slightly longer to talk away my photos than the length of this paragraph.
I had hoped that I had dodged dating on the apps – I was married the year before Tinder was launched in Britain – but that optimism lasted no longer than the marriage. I had been an early adopter of internet dating, but back then photographs were considered unnecessary (and would clog up your dial-up connection to no purpose). You just found someone with the same interests and wrote a message about those interests. ‘I see you like… stuff’.
I always felt they made a mistake by only listing things you liked; generally, you bond with people over things you both hate. When Mr Wilkes dined with the Tory Dr Johnson, things were ‘aukward’, Boswell says, until someone mentioned Scotland and the two of them vibed by disparaging Scotchmen together. There was an app in America where you could select a partner who hated the same things as you, but it went bust, squeezed out by the market leader, Tinder.
Although you can list your interests on Tinder – they are very broad: ‘Literature’, for example; ‘Harry Potter’ is its own category – they are an afterthought to the photograph, which is the primary sorting mechanism. You can’t even open an account without a photograph: and this was my first difficulty. I went through my camera roll and found photographs of sunsets, landscapes and my son’s Rugby matches; very few of myself.
Women on Tinder often complain that men are always posing holding fish. They construct elaborate theories to explain it: are the men trying to show that they are good providers? Or outdoorsy? Or patient? (Only one of these is genuinely sexy.) The actual reason is that it is the only photograph they have of themselves on their own. A woman might ask her friends to take a photograph for no other reason than that she is looking pretty; a man could never risk the inevitable mockery from asking the same. An Englishman over the age of 12 can only reasonably ask for his photograph to be taken in three circumstances: if he is holding a) a fish, b) a prodigious marrow, or c) today’s newspaper. And since (c) only applies to providing Proof of Life when being held hostage, when one rarely looks at one’s best, and holding a prodigious gourd aloft makes you look like a hobbit going to a party, a portrait with a fish is the only option.
Generally, you bond with people over things you both hate
Women also complain that the men on Tinder are rude. My experience with internet dating was that everyone was rude, but in a different way: men would be rude when they were rejected, and women would be rude when they were rejecting. Safely entrenched behind her laptop, and free from the social conventions (and, perhaps, physical danger) which prevent women from insulting a man to his face, women would not just reject you, but set out the reasons why it was an audacity even to ask. But we only hear about the men being rude: obviously no one is going to post a screenshot of a girl disparaging your face, weight, age or lacklustre prose style. (That one hurt.)
But on Tinder you can only correspond with people who you have ‘matched’ – that is, you have both seen the other’s photograph and not immediately rejected it. You will not even know you have been rejected – the algorithm will not show you people who have already passed on you – which is more efficient, I suppose. And it must save women time when they can swipe left and do not have any obligation to provide reasons. But it does mean that you can, very quickly, run out of people.
A friend of mine in Cornwall used to joke that she had ‘completed’ Tinder. As if it were a video game developed in Silicon Valley to trap users in dopamine loops and endless side-quests. I would watch her flick through potentials – ex, ex, brother, ex’s brother, sister’s ex – and assume I would have better luck, not having been at school here. But actually, it’s very easy to get to the point where you run out of people, and Tinder blithely asks if you want to expand the search radius a bit wider. And being a newly-divorced man you think, I don’t mind travelling, and you expand the search. And still there’s nothing. So you expand it wider still and the algorithm excitedly tells you that they have found a potential match – Je recherche un homme… Living in Cornwall, I am nearer to France than I am to anyone who wants to date me.
And it only took me a couple of months on the app to find out. That is efficiency.
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