Why *Spin* Isn’t a Four-Letter Word on Tinder
Never feel guilty for putting your best foot forward
Can you recognize the historical figure from each of these three biographies?
Biography 1
Police commissioner. Cattle rancher. Colonel and war hero. Amazon explorer. Survived being shot and finished his appearance anyway, with a bullet hole through the note cards of his talk.
Biography 2
Asthmatic heir. Determined boxer and gymnast. Harvard grad, Phi Beta Kappa. Taxidermist and game hunter. Wildlife author and noted conservationist.
Biography 3
Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Governor of New York, youngest serving President of the United States, and Nobel Peace Prize winner.
These three short biographies are, as you likely guessed, of the same person: Theodore Roosevelt, Jr.
Everything within them is true. But each tale gives the man a different persona: the first man is the Rough Rider, the second is the scholar, and the third is the politician.
As we might say with a modern eye: Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn.
Each of these stories borrows on the power of spin to tell a different tale from the same source material.
“Is this morally wrong?” you wonder.
Yes and no.
My favorite biographer of Theodore Roosevelt, Edmund Morris, had to write a trilogy of books to accurately address the long and active life of that man. It comes in at 2,533 pages.
There is simply no way to represent Theodore’s entire life within the space of one article — you’d never finish it, even if Medium’s engine allowed you to infinitely scroll that far. And if I don’t edit it to the brightest and most interesting moments, you’re even more likely to tune out early.
I have to spin the story to connect with you.
We live in a new world: teenagers may only recognize a 3-minute song on the radio when it gets to the 7 seconds that they heard on TikTok.
Creating summaries, and therefore the natural picking and choosing of representative moments, has become an absolute necessity. Tinder, the most ubiquitous of dating apps, has a text limit of just over two tweets — 500 characters.
I swiped right on a guy recently who had fallen into acting when he drove a friend to her audition.
The director spotted him and said, “Hey, you look like a Nazi.” So that day he filmed a scene where he lit a cigarette on the Hindenburg in full Nazi regalia, and then another ignoring an iceberg from the crow’s nest of the Titanic.
He later flew out to LA to be in a movie and was seated next to two defecting prominent bankers who were immediately smitten. They contacted their lawyer in air and had my Tinder match Docusign an employment contract before the plane landed.
When he researched how to avoid ACH payments for their company he thought Bitcoin might be a solution before anyone knew what it was. The bankers laughed, but he started channeling a portion of his paycheck into it, and into Ethereum, and in 2018 his crypto assets ended up being worth more than their VC-backed startup.
Now, I don’t know how he should have made that story 500 characters, but perhaps he would benefit from a bit more spin.
The funny thing? NONE of this was on his profile. I swiped right because I thought it was funny he’d named his cat “Derper.”
(C’mon, you have to admit that’s cute.)
Studies have shown that Tinder profiles with text see 4x the right swipes in general. It is my hypothesis that if a sentiment analysis was also run an optimistic tone would get you even further.
So be upbeat, positive, and funny. “Spin” your story to shine like the pearl in an ocean of bass and deer corpse selfies.
I have chosen to use the term “spin” in this story on purpose. I find no other synonym for marketing triggers such vitriolic response from people who categorically hate advertisement, sales, and other forms of promotion. But I don’t find it to be a negative term because to spin something is not to lie, it is optimizing your product (often only a story) for your audience.
Some people would say that you need to be upfront about your life (slash business slash organization slash career) in any representation of it, in order to tell the complete truth. But that ignores many realities of social engagement in our culture.
Is it more moral to admit in your dating profile that you don’t have a car or that you suffer from periodic bouts of depression?
In a society that expects us to answer “how are you?” with “fine” every time, an admission of anything negative, no matter how minor, is often viewed as someone being a “downer” or interpreted as a small admission hinting at a much larger problem.
I would argue that Tinder’s character limit indemnifies you of blame for not airing your slightly-dirty laundry because you won’t get to that first date if you waste your characters on brutally honest drawbacks to dating you.
In order to have a date where you can fully explain why you’re totally worth using public transportation or wrapping into a burrito blanket from time to time, you need to be 500-character fascinating first.
So spin your story. It’s a modern-era super power, and like Uncle Ben will warn you, “With great power comes great responsibility.” Be friendly but withholding like Spiderman, and not a series of impressive but false illusions like Mysterio.
I hope you all spin up something good, my friends.
