The Fat Indian Girl (#10)
The Tinder Bully
Have you ever been rejected in love? What is your first reaction to such a situation? The typical reactions to such a situation are; why me? He or she wasn’t worth my time anyway. There is a lot of fish in the sea. Maybe I should try again. Love will eventually win. Doesn’t matter, I wasn’t serious anyway. Let me plot revenge. Really you are rejecting me?
All these statements may sound different but essentially they all mean the same — I gave you my love, now give it back or I will make sure everybody knows what a devil you are.
Meera’s friend Ridhima, is a serial dater with considerable experience in heartbreak. Ridhima insists that Meera signs up on Tinder in order to get over her break up. Meera clarifies that she really does not need to get over anything, she’s doing just fine. But Ridhima pays no heed to Meera’s supposed act of self-sufficiency. According to Ridhima, you don’t really get over one person until you find somebody better.
Meera is disgusted by Ridhima’s theory, it reduces the feeling of love to a mere commodity— like say your washing machine breaks down and you want to wear clean clothes, you have to buy a new one — same way if you want to be happy after a broken relationship, you have to look for a new partner.
Even though Meera feels Tinder is not the right platform for finding love, she signs up anyway. It’ll be a good social experiment, she justifies to herself, but honestly deep down she hopes to swipe right into a better version of Karthik.
After carefully scanning what seems to her like a million photos and accompanying bios, she starts talking to a handful of boys who match with her. This one boy stands out among all. Let’s just call him The Dude. The Dude and Meera exchange numbers and start discussing their common interests, life and love.
The Dude and Meera chat constantly for three days, on the third day this happens.
The Dude: Hey don’t you think we should meet?
Meera: I don’t know I am not really sure.
The Dude: Isn’t the whole concept of Tinder based on meeting new people and figuring out if you like them or not.
Meera: I know but I am still not really sure.
Meera goes offline.
Meera is thinking now, why did she even log into the godforsaken app?
Meera thought the love of her life would drop into the screen and it would all happen spontaneously as it did with Karthik. She does not like the fact that now she has to make decisions about who to meet and who not to meet. Also, does she really need somebody in her life right now, why is she even talking to this Dude?
Does she need a new friend? Not, really. She has enough friends, most of them she finds it difficult to keep in touch with.
Does she need a new boyfriend? Definitely not. She is in her — I am learning how to be complete on my own phase. She wants to integrate all the lessons she learned from self-help books and watching movies with strong female protagonists, into her life. All of these more or less preach one lesson over and over again — a lesson she is trying really hard to imbibe — learn to love yourself fully before you can love anybody else.
Meera goes online.
Meera: Hey, I don’t think we should meet, I am not really sure why I even signed up on the app. Sorry. I’ll see you around though.
After sending the message, she felt nervous, maybe she shouldn’t have written I’ll see you in the end, stupid mistake.
The Dude replied after what seemed like an hour.
The Dude: You are the most unpleasant person I have met on Tinder.
Meera blocks him, deletes his number, logs onto Tinder, deletes her profile and goes off to sleep. She puts her phone on the chair lying on the other side of the room, as far away from her as possible; maybe she’s scared The Dude will jump out of her phone and start accusing her of being a bad person when in reality, she’s just confused.
Now I know why so many movies have been made on a man being confused about love, relationships and commitment, and then a nurturing, loving and motherly woman comes along and saves him, gives him direction in life and shows him how to be domesticated.
It’s only because if similar movies were made on women, we would have to incorporate too many roles for bullies, intimidators or flag bearers of traditional values who would go on to tell that woman that she is being too moody, demanding, annoying, loose, un-nurturing, unpleasant etc. and that would heavily increase the production costs.
Maybe to a major part of society, there is no need for a woman to go out there and find herself or be sure of herself because eventually, she has to listen to a man. To that section of the society, please fuck yourself well tonight.
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