The Tinder

This week on “things the kids are doing” I bring you something called “the Tinder.”

When I got back from Palau I came quickly to find that every single person in the greater Salt Lake area was in a serious relationship with every single person in the greater Salt Lake area. I was feeling left out because the only successful relationship I was in was with my plant O2, which Anna Swayne attempted to kill with neglect and guile. I guess I also have the Vietnamese tailor next door who has told me more than one time in the last two months, “if you come back I KILL you.”

Note: I do consider the Vietnamese relationship to be a successful one because there was a period in which she had some of my clothes in her possession and the last time I was in her shop I was touched more than I have been since that time a cat jumped onto my lap and tried to get under my shirt during a red-eye flight to New York in 2010.

I was confused about why everyone I knew was going on dates with everyone else I knew. And that’s when I was peer pressured into learning about something the kids are calling “the Tinder.”

Tinder is this: online dating for people who are too lazy to fill out a profile and maintain it. It all happens on your phone, it pulls your information directly from Facebook, and it allows you to select people you're interested in based on their picture alone. It is the best way to find yourself in a terrible relationship without having to put forth any effort.

All you have to do is click some button on your phone and TADA. You have Tinder. Well, in my case, all you have to do is hand your phone over to Kurt and wait for him to give it back to you and point out the little fire symbol (the Tinder icon) and say “use Mr. Pointy finger to tap tap on this and magic pocket computer brings up pictures.” 

He’s caught on very quickly the beauty of simplistic explanations about electronics. Krishelle could take a page from his book. It requires about 13 “I have no idea what the Hell that means”s to get her to dumb it down to an understandable level like that.

But anyway, once one obtains the Tinder, suddenly all of the single people in town are at your fingertips waiting for public electronic validation or anonymous rejection. Tinder presents you, one picture at a time, with other tinder users in the area and you can either swipe their picture to the right (meaning you like them) or to the left (meaning that based on the almost completely inconsequential information you were given about them, you’re pretty sure it will never work out).

Once both parties have swiped right on one another, Tinder lets you know you have a “match” and encourages you to start chatting with the person.

I saw, almost immediately, that the majority of my friends were using their Tinder match collection the same way one might use their Pogs (are the kids still playing with Pogs?). They don’t do a lot of chatting, but just try to get their match list as long as possible so they can occasionally thumb through it and feel proud of themselves for being super hot.

Naturally, this is exactly how I started using Tinder immediately. And to my good fortune, I found Jolyn Metro, whom I obviously swiped right. She returned the favor. And that’s when I started chatting with her.

~It Just Gets Stranger