An Ode to the Fakeness of Tinder

By Reis Tobolski

Being teetotal has led me to gather far too much experience with Tinder, it’s become another addiction. A hot spot for the vain who want to see how attractive they are, or just sad and lonely types who are hoping a short time on this app can cure their woes. Of course, sprinkled throughout you can find sex addicts, general degenerates and even a special breed of person that wants a meaningful relationship. For some unbeknownst reason they’ve decided to put their faith into Tinder. To say the least, this isn’t the most suitable place for finding a real connection.

That’s the problem with Tinder, it is just all fake. It’s one online persona meeting another online persona and none of it’s real, which is strange and scary.

You can talk to these strangers for hours, telling them all your secrets, hopes and fantasies. Creating this dreamscape of your lives together. You get to know one another without ever knowing each other; then you meet up and realise they aren’t the person in your dreams, none of it was real, which should have been obvious from the get-go. Yet, you still sleep with them, even though you know in the back of your mind you won’t want to speak to them again. They just aren’t the person in your head and they never will be. You can’t really delete someone from your life but now you can. All your left with is a bit of shame and guilt. It’s kind of messed up but sometimes I liked the shame, maybe that says more about me than Tinder. In all honesty, there’s likely a childhood event missing from my memory which would explain all of this and give Freud a wet dream.

Even if you get lucky enough to where you reach a signed agreement to being friends with benefits, it still all falls apart. You have to be friends with the person in order to be friends with benefits. So often is the case that after sex you couldn’t stand the person and there was no longer a point in keeping up the façade of pretending to be interested in them as a person. I guess that’s another one of the problems with modern sex though. It’s so focused on physicality that once that’s gone, what’s left?

And then, to make things worse, once the chase ends and the thrill of talking dissipates, your left feeling lonely again. Suddenly, you don’t need to carry on with your tinder persona and now what? I always think that people who say friends with benefits doesn’t work because someone catches feelings must watch too many films. They don’t work because you don’t like the other person, and someone would rather go home and read comics because cuddling is overrated and there’s no point in wasting more time. So, they make up a lie in order to get away like ‘my sister has broken her leg in four places’.

Maybe I’m generalising too much or being too preachy or mean, but there’s an air of fakeness to Tinder that exacerbates the modern problems with love and loneliness. I look back at the Hunter S. Thompson quote, “Sex without love is as hollow and ridiculous as love without sex”. I can’t help but think that Tinder is a hollow and ridiculous answer to sex and loneliness in the internet age. So, watch some porn and have a wank instead: another hollow and ridiculous answer to sex and loneliness in the internet age. At least it comes with less shame and repressed memories.