Tinderview #6 — Andrew

Andrew, 26, finds Tinder tough as an Asian male.

I had started taking new anti-depressants the night before. The sleep helped subside any effects. The next afternoon was my Tinderview with Andrew. I took my pill in the morning and that’s when it hit me. I spent part of the afternoon feeling like no one was around me even though I was working at a crowded place. I had to make phone calls to my wife and mom just to known that I wasn’t alone.

An hour or so before the Tinderview, I stopped working and walked a half mile because the sun was out and the weather was nice. I was high and the weather made me feel even warmer inside.

This is all to explain where my head was at entering this Tinderview.

We met at the coffee shop where I regularly go during the day to write. I couldn’t get a read on how he was feeling when we sat down, but that’s only because I didn’t know how I was feeling with the side effects of my medication.

Recorder on.

Andrew started by telling me that he’s been on Tinder, off and on, for about a year. When I asked why he joined, he didn’t really have a concrete answer. He had moved to North Carolina to attend grad school after spending two years teaching English in Japan. “I had an iPhone, I was single, and people use it,” he said. “I was mostly looking for a relationship.”

We discussed other dating apps/sites like Grindr and OKCupid. Like previous Tinderviews, Andrew informed me that Tinder is more of a dating app than a hookup app in the gay community. If you want to just hook up, you were better off joining Grindr. He told me that he tried OKCupid but there didn’t seem to be many people using the service.

Since he was looking for a relationship, I asked why he didn’t use a paid service like Match or eHarmony. My theory is that people who pay to use a dating site are typically more serious about finding a real relationship than those who use free sites.

“I always got the impression that Match was more for like, older folks,” he said. “It seemed like most of the people in my age-group were using OKCupid.”

Despite initially joining Tinder for a relationship, Andrew informed me that it has almost turned into a game for him due to the lack of success he had in securing dates.

“Most people on Tinder were just not interesting. I don’t say that to be arrogant. It’s just that I don’t have many of the same values or interests with a lot of these people. I would swipe right on some people who weren’t as cookie cutter, but it would just be to swipe right to see if I’d match.”

I wondered why he went from relationship-seeker to game-player, but before I could ask, he opened my eyes to the reason.

“For me, as an Asian guy, race comes into play,” he said. “Objectively, I know that Asian men get less matches. A lot of people may swipe left on me because of my race. I wouldn’t want to meet those people anyway.”

I never looked at the race aspect of Tinder because I never put myself in the position of others on the app. For me, I’m looking to talk to anyone and everyone, regardless of race. But if I were looking for a serious relationship, I would be more selective and closed-off in my swiping.

The majority of people on Tinder, at least in my city, are white and are likely seeking white relationships. I can’t say this applies to everyone, but statistics prove that people are more likely to date within their race.

After doing a little bit of research, I found multiple articles on why Asian men struggle on dating apps. OKCupid did a five year study on racial bias and Ravi Mangla looked at race dynamics of online dating for PacificStandard.

Through my experience, I found myself matching with just about every guy I swiped right on. I just assumed that gay men swipe right on everybody because they’re just open to any possibility, whether it be hooking up, dating, finding friends, or sharing their experiences to a stranger. It turns out that me being white helps my cause and that if I were another race, I may not have as many matches.

“It tells me something when most of my matches are with other people of color,” he said. “It does signal to me that there is racial profiling happening [by white men — and this reminds me of white supremacy every time I use Tinder, whether I want to think about race relations or not].”

This was a rather eye-opening conversation that made me feel bad for Andrew. People are missing out on a good person by left swiping because he’s Asian.

Andrew told me about one experience he had on the app where a gentleman was specifically looking to hook up with an Asian. “He said, ‘I want to fuck your Asian mouth.’ So, there’s the assumption that I will take a more feminine position. It’s like you can’t help but being racialized.”

It may seem odd to say, but I felt more alive after this conversation. Maybe it was just the drugs, but my brain was so awakened by the new information that I couldn’t help but be excited.

Following our Tinder discussion, I steered the conversation to learn more about Andrew. He told me he was born in Colorado, which immediately made me jealous because anyone who knows me knows that’s a place I want to visit in the near future. As an English major, Andrew is a writer himself. He wrote a collection of short stories dealing with identity and interpersonal relationships. “They were in the vein of literary fiction,” he said.

I asked him about teaching in Japan, which he did for two years after graduation. “I was a Japanese minor so I wanted to make use of it and take a break from being a student,” he said. “I taught elementary and middle school students in a tiny town. My Japanese improved, I’m not sure how much their english improved,” he said with a laugh.

He talked about being in an isolated town as the only American.

“There were other recent college grads, but you have to make a drive to see anyone you can speak english with. It was a lot of being by yourself and doing your own thing and living at a different pace. In some ways, I miss it. In other ways, I’m glad because it would be really stagnating after awhile.”

I wondered how he was enjoying North Carolina thus far and he told me that he feels a heavier sense of a racial past. That’s been evident this past month with the monument protests in Durham. “It’s a pretty liberal area, so it’s better than other areas I’ve been at in the past.” For example, he told me that Wisconsin, where he went to college, isn’t as progressive as the Triangle Area.

He talked about the struggle of making friends because he gets lumped into a foreign culture. “They don’t really picture someone like me in these spaces. There are like Chinese international students who are speaking in Mandarin and people see me and lump me in with people who are foreign even though I’m very American.”

He said that being around other grad students has helped with the transition because “they know what’s up.”

We discussed the racial climate in the wake of Donald Trump being president and the recent monument protests and he told me that he doesn’t feel that it’s gotten any worse than it was a year ago when he moved to North Carolina.

“Things are just as racist as they were before, we just have these new fires to put out. In reality, every day racism is happening. It could be worse. I could be black and somewhere less progressive.”

I asked him what he plans on doing after finishing the PHD program, which he informed me takes roughly five years. He’s hoping to become a literature professor once he finishes the program. “My field right now is contemporary literature. Like contemporary anglophone novels that implicate east Asia in some way. Like a post-colonial approach to literature dealing with how imperialism and colonialism has shaped literature.”

I ended our conversation by asking him if he’s been on any fun adventures and he told me the story of going to Peru and hiking Machu Picchu. “As someone who loves the mountains and that kind of climate, it was really nice. It was a pretty tough hike. You’d see these porters who carry camping gear for people hiking the four day trail and that’s their job. They just hike the trail with other people’s luggage, which is crazy.”

That brought our conversation to a close.

I thanked Andrew for his time and wished him a safe drive home because the rain was coming down hard outside. I got soaked running to my car and took a moment to sit and compose myself before exiting the parking lot. I knew that I was still feeling a bit high from my anti-depressant, but I was also super excited about the conversation I just had.

Andrew made me see things on Tinder that I was previously blind to as I was trapped in a “white-writer” bubble. I am appreciative of his insight to the app and thankful that he was willing to share his story with me.