This Changes Nothing

Some unconnected notes about Tinder

I have downloaded Tinder dozens of times — always when I am at my lowest, and it always brings me lower. The promise is sex, positive reinforcement, variety and fun. Tinder is, or has become, terrible at delivering any of these things.

But Tinder is exciting to talk about again because a legacy magazine has published a dated story that uses upper-class New Yorkers to define a generation, poorly defines “fuckboy,” heralds the “dating apocalypse” and openly denies contrary data because who cares about that nerd stuff anyway. These ideas are terrible.

Disjointed, personal notes:

Dating is a process, it’s wearying, no one likes it, and Tinder doesn’t fix it.

Many founders of online dating sites will tell you that they hate their product. The second season of the podcast Startup, which takes you through the struggles of matchmaking company The Dating Ring, has a moment midway through the season where founder Lauren Kay says that thinking back, she never would have picked dating for her first company.

Dating, she said, is a product that mostly have negative associations with.

The consumer-facing negativity wears on the people who have to sell the bleary lies about possibility and adventure. When I had afternoon drinks with another dating company founder — I won’t name him, but you know his site— I asked if he was going to stick around in the business long-term.

“Fuck no,” he told me. “Preferably, no one will ever hear about the next company I start. Maybe I’ll go into b2b.”

People hate dating. Some say they don’t, but I have a deep distrust people people who say they “like dating.” To me, this sounds like saying they enjoy filling out job applications, or even going through endless job training sessions for recreation.

Being single isn’t fun or glamorous. Making the case for being single is usually a proxy argument where “being single” is just a substitute for solitude, free time, discipline or independence. Simply having no romantic partner is an insufficient route to achieving these qualities. And having a romantic partner does not prohibit having these qualities.

Unless it’s just about having sex with a lot of different people. In which case, sounds fun. Whatever.

~ ~ ~

When I worked for the New York Observer, the publication that Sex and the City is based on, a series of cigarette breaks with a close friend, Observer editor Matthew Kassel, led to Matt write “50,000 First Dates”, a well-reported, genre-defining Online Dating Thinkpiece about how online dating is better at generating leads for first dates than finding meaningful connections.

The piece performed astoundingly and was written about in The Atlantic and New York Mag, and Matt became an instantly fetishized fixable, awkward guy. He was inundated with dating requests, most of which he ignored, but some of which he took — I meet someone every few months who, yes, read the piece, and yes, went for a date with Matt Kassel.

Matt likes jazz, the NYT crossword, and the Sunday morning paper. I took this photo of him in Bed Stuy.

They were often disappointed that he didn’t fulfill the fantasy — Matt is as cardiganed and writerly as the trope allows, but as it turns out, awkward in fantasies looks like a worthwhile project and in real life looks like vomiting on nearly every first date.

You know who’s the most disappointed? Matt.

The best way to deal with the wearying sadness of knowing how ineffectual apps like Tinder are is to not acknowledge it at all. Embracing it sounds like a pessimist’s Middle Road. It isn’t.

Sometimes, people will put links to online dating stories like Matt’s in their OkCupid profiles to show “it me” solidarity with the similarly self-deprecating miserables. I’ve seen them — I think Matt’s seen his. Don’t do that.

And if you like what I’m writing, don’t share it with someone you want to go on a date with. Tinder is something that can only be enjoyed when you pretend it isn’t happening to you.

There are two kinds of people online dating works for.

The first are those people who find their matches fairly immediately. We all know a couple who found their long-term partner on their first or second Tinder or OkCupid date. I know two of these couples.

The second are the people who have quantified the experience — the decathlon daters who use techniques like profile optimization and batch-messages to game the system.

Note: The most successful instance of gaming OkCupid, by mathematician Chris McKinlay, involved him using a series of bots and dummy accounts to scrape OkCupid’s thousands of profiles and re-prioritize and sort matches — OkCupid as it was intended couldn’t achieve his ends.

These two camps are exceptions to the online-dating-is-terrible credo, possibly because they are both exceptional groups of people. Those who are more easily happy, and those who are willing to work methodically to achieve ends that the rest of us feel entitled to by dint of our special-ness.

If you are permanently unhappy, by the way, you’ve probably asked the question, “Are there people who are just naturally better at being happy?” It’s not a silly question. There are.

You should also know that I’m not good at this.

I don’t smile in pictures, I’m not a clever texter. I’ve been told by that making a profile and crafting messages is its own skill, and I haven’t mastered it because I haven’t made time to, because I’m stubborn.

I have had four (five-ish?) relationships in my life that lasted longer than one year. But I have only had one second date from Tinder, and after the third date, she — no shit — dramatically made her exit and began seeing a therapist. In the words of Charles Barkley: I’m not a role model.

~~~

At a bar nestled above a Five Guys on Bleeker Street, I was with a group that included one of NYC’s top online dating consultants. Someone who charges hundreds to look at your profile once. She introduced me to her husband, who I learned was New York’s leading professional wingman. They met on Twitter.

I asked how two people to whom dating is a science that can be sold could ever get along, much less be married. She looked me in the eye and said each word precisely:

“Ultimate absence of game.”

The single pillar of sand

Online dating services are predicated on a single, flawed idea: that we know what we want. Worse, they ask us to know what we want based on relatively useless data points: cursory attraction, shared interests, ability to be interesting based on questionaires.

We do not know what we want. It’s why the tired cliche that “love always strikes when you’re not actively looking for it” still wins out. You will always find your most meaningful relationships when you’re not looking because you’re always looking in the wrong direction.

The best dating app is really anything that’s not considered a dating app. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram — wherever you can develop a relationship without the broken metrics and pressing overtone of Relationship Development.

There is no Tinder Generation.

The idea that there is a “Tinder Generation” says that Tinder is the primary space for humans today to explore our romantic selves, and that the characteristics of that space have changed us. But Tinder’s expedience has not changed human connection any more than McDonald’s expedience has changed human nutrition.

Hacktivism has not dramatically changed the face of social justice. Social networks have not dramatically flattened society. The democratization of tools hasn’t dramatically overthrown incumbencies in finance, politics or the media. Anyone who tells you that they doubtlessly have has been tricked.

To say that Tinder has changed the way we date is technologically deterministic, it’s extremist and it’s naive.

Dating hasn’t changed. That’s. the. fucking. problem.

Jack Smith IV is a tech writer for Mic. Click the little green heart below if you want to make other people sad. Instagram here, Twitter here.