In a venture purely for the sake of journalism, I downloaded Tinder, the latest and greatest dating app for the socially incompetent and the acutely lazy to meet prospects within 50-miles. Since I have spent the entirety of the last 20 lunar phases of my life eating bagel chips in my bed, and I don’t live on a deserted island, I am the app’s target demographic.
Tinder takes out all of the guesswork of actually approaching a person and holding a conversation to fain interest. With it, your days of maintaining personal hygiene to attract someone can be over. From the comforts of your own cave, you can scan through profiles of hundreds of degenerate trolls, high school students and a handful of kids you’ve seen with beer stains all over themselves at Tavern. It enables you to choose whether or not they are worthy of your evidently desperate interest by deciding whether or not to anonymously “like” them. If they also decide that your profile merits them moving their finger from the “X” button to like, the app notifies you that you are a match, and you become subsequently betrothed.
To create a profile, Tinder uses your Facebook account information. Your profile consists of your first name, age, mutual friends and shared interests with other users, and four profile photos. To generate higher results, I changed two of my photos to Rihanna and one of me as a baby (I suggest you do the same). You can also provide a description of yourself. I wanted to come off as hard to get and intellectual, so I put ‘“Single doesn’t mean I’m looking for somebody’ – Sammy Adams, 2009,” on my profile.
The best part of Tinder is that it lets you know the exact distance other users are away from you. This is great because I have been looking forward to the Lifetime movie sequel to “The Craigslist Killer.” I’m just waiting for the day when I think I am alone in my room and then, surprise, one of my matches is zero miles away.
Since the entire basis of the app is to cut to the chase, don’t expect any prolonged courtship here. After you have found a match, you can message each other. This is where the real Prince Charmings come in. Expect a lot of messages that are either too vulgar to print here, or so lame they were probably plagiarized from Quagmire.
I can’t say that this experiment in husband hunting has been a success, but I have met a lot of bachelors with potential like Carlos, the 28-year-old with multiple photos of himself wearing furry mouse ears, or Abraham, a 26-year-old whose profile only features photos of his eyeballs. I am already anticipating the day when we tell our children how we met.
Jackie Salo is majoring in journalism and political science since she couldn’t find a job as a froyo taste tester. She has won numerous awards including the prestigious Chai Center Hebrew School Perfect Attendance Award 2004. Follow Jackie on Twitter at @GoodInsanity.
As Told by Jackie is a blog that chronicles all of Jackie’s latest grievances that result from not being able to sleep 28 hours a day.