eh
i'm not good at dating
Wow, these guys seem really shitty. It's one thing to want to hookup but another thing to openly objectify and look at this as numbers game. See also: And suddenly the article got very sad. I've always felt weird and uncomfortable with Tinder, even when I was using it fairly often (and with some success - though not in the fashion as the people in this article). This article is right about one thing - almost everybody is on some sort of dating app, Tinder / OkCupid / Hinge / whatever else and I don't think there's anything wrong with it depending on your attitude. There were a lot of things wrong with the attitudes of the people in this article though, and to be honest I couldn't really bother finishing it. Is dating dying? Maybe? It's hard to say because I'm clearly not in the audience of people interviewed for this article because even my friends who use these apps don't look at dating / hookups / Tinder in the fashion of the people in this article. It's much less sinister, more of a lets have fun and leave it at that, there's no misogyny, no looking down on people for performance, no sharing a text with 7 people. Bleh. I'm all for sexual empowerment but there are varying degrees of healthy ways to go about doing it.“Guys view everything as a competition,” he elaborates with his deep, reassuring voice. “Who’s slept with the best, hottest girls?” With these dating apps, he says, “you’re always sort of prowling. You could talk to two or three girls at a bar and pick the best one, or you can swipe a couple hundred people a day—the sample size is so much larger. It’s setting up two or three Tinder dates a week and, chances are, sleeping with all of them, so you could rack up 100 girls you’ve slept with in a year.”
But Marty, who prefers Hinge to Tinder (“Hinge is my thing”), is no slouch at “racking up girls.” He says he’s slept with 30 to 40 women in the last year: “I sort of play that I could be a boyfriend kind of guy,” in order to win them over, “but then they start wanting me to care more … and I just don’t.”
“And it reaches a point,” says Jane, “where, if you receive a text message” from a guy, “you forward the message to, like, seven different people: ‘What do I say back? Oh my God, he just texted me!’ It becomes a surprise. ‘He texted me!’ Which is really sad.”
American Psycho was written in 1991. Bonfire of the Vanities was 1987. Fuck, What Makes Sammy Run was 1941. Douches are douches are douches to the beginning of time. I mean Per Se is five blocks from where Studio 54 defined "hookup culture" in nineteen diggity seven.“If you had a reservation somewhere and then a table at Per Se opened up, you’d want to go there,” Alex offers.
That was kind of what I thought about it. I'm older admittedly (34) and I've been safely married off for a good long while, but even when I was young and single, there was always the complaint that "Men don't want to commit!" I've always found men to be as quick to commit as women are, and it's not as though I'm an amazing prize. I just didn't run into any douches, I think. Maybe on Tinder, your chances of running into a douche are higher?
...no comment. But I do have a thought and question and this ties into kleinbl00's comment. How much of this do you think is driven by a fear of feeling like a person hasn't attained the absolute best partner? Or, more plainly, a fear of feeling like you have settled? If we're all striving for something, running, what's to convince someone to stop and say "yes, this is worth the chance" when there are so many possibilities.
It's driven by status. Pure, naked status. The minute people pursue their own best interests they seek happiness. When they're pursing their best outward outcomes, they constantly trade up. "A man tells the world who he is four ways: his house, his wife, his car, his shoes." - Warren Adler, War of the Roses
Is it possible that both of those fears are really manifestations of insecurity and so as a result possible to say that what makes a person able to stop running is confidence? Edit: I will now add to this by saying I am watching the series Gilmore Girls for the first time in my life, and in today's episode Rory and Lorelei are playing "one, two, three or pass." If I understood it right, the game is that the next three people who pass that would be attractive to you, you must decide immediately : yes, 'marry' that one or no, pass, believing the next one will be better. However you are limited to the first 3 passers-by so your choices are limited and if you pass the first two you are stuck with whoever the third is. It was too relevant not to mention although I suspect it adds very little insight.
I feel so lucky, I found my wife just as the advent of online dating was upon us. I don't know that I would've faired well in the tinder and hook up culture. I gained a bunch of weight working in a call center with an in house cafeteria, I have a hairline that makes me look 10 years older than I am, hate bars/clubs, and make awkward first impressions when my wife isn't there to be my better half. So glad I don't have to deal with all that. Christopher Ryan - who the article mentions - also did a brief interview on harmontown (warning: autoplaying audio); found him quite interesting.
Tinder was invented for non attached hookups. That's it. If you are on tinder, that is what you are looking for. I don't care what excuses you make, there is no other purpose and if you pretend that you're special, you're an idiot. But if you want real relationships, with real people, you should not be on tinder. The two perspectives are not cohesive. You cannot have free sex with tons of people and still expect to find a worthwhile relationship on the side, that's greedy as fuck an will never work in anyone's greedy favor.
It's kind of weird that an app where people make decisions based on just pictures of people (well, there are profiles, but they're a click away), would be considered a "dating" app. The "dating" label is the equivalent to the "for tobacco use only" sign on the pipe display at the hippy store in the mall. Saying that you go on Tinder to date is like saying you go to Hooters for the food.
I don't think dating is 'ending'. It's just more difficult to do. Or, it seems more difficult to do, at least. After years of message boards and IRC and email and texting having an actual, honest-to-goodness conversation with someone is hard. There's so much more information to process face-to-face. So many more ways to screw the whole thing up. I know I've done my fair share of that. I'm curious as to what the relationship landscape is going to look like in 10+ years, when all of this has stopped being new. We're at that point now with online dating and it hasn't 'killed dating' as many people thought it would. Now it's just another, valid method by which people can meet people.
I'm not gonna lie, I think I would have loved Tinder. I am in the business of "selling appointments" for a living. Once I'm belly to belly with someone I have been highly trained in the art of conversation, establishing needs and positioning myself as the solution. I imagine I would have had some fun :) I'm glad my wife and I met how we did though. It's a charming story and I'll be glad to tell it to my kids.
Great post! Online dating in general sometimes unfairly gets a bad wrap, but most people don't realize that over 40% of new relationships world-wide are started ONLINE! There are a lot of good paid sites, and a few great free ones if you know where to look. For those who are more interested in Asian singles, the best truly free site we've found is www.Filipino4U.com There are also some good paid sites like Match or eHarmony if you are willing to pay monthly fees.
lil -- have you tried Tinder yet? If not, I think you should. If nothing else, I would get immense enjoyment from your experience. :P
I imagine I'd need a mobile phone with pictures and apps and all. Then I could call Uber too. Maybe it could be a New Year's re-solution. I have more reflections and "What can be learned" ideas about dating. I'm not really dating. But I am meeting up with "Kevin" soon in Seattle. Tee hee.
I have never really gotten the number count when it comes to dating. At the end of the day, I am probably going to forget if someone had 50 flings. It seems like a useless thing to keep a track of. Reading that article, I got the impression it was more about the dating problems of the privileged. I tired Tinder for a while but I never got a conservation that went anywhere and eventually got bored of it and deleted it off my phone. On Ok Cupid and POF, I have been more consistent on there because there seemed to be more average people that could relate to an average guy like me. I am short, Hispanic and middle class. I have gotten dates from there but nothing ever really materialized but there was always someone that wanted to give it a shot unlike Tinder where no one wanted to give me a chance. Somehow someway though, I have been more lucky on craigslist which really surprises me. Getting a few hook ups here and there and I was almost serious with one girl years ago but I didn't feel like we had a good connection. I don't think I really fit into this hookup culture but sadly I kinda have to play this game because most people play it. I mean I have tried to ask women out face to face when the Internet wasn't as popular but I have never been on a date with a person that I didn't meet online. I have met about 15 women or so through online dating. I should try real life encounters more but I never know what would be the right approach. I don't want to come off as a creep. I do poetry slams and have thought about asking some women out in the scene but the faces keep changing. I will see someone one night and not see them again for a couple of months. The ones that are consistent faces seem to already be in relationships.
Wasn't texting supposed to ruin dating? I'm fairly young and nearly 3 years ago when I started dating my girlfriend she was surprised that I called her and had to take a second to compose herself since she was so confused as to why I would be calling. Tinder may enable promiscuous vacuous behavior but it doesn't have to be that. It's really just the bar scene take to the next level, all kinds of people and desires will be mixed up in it. That said, I'm so glad I'm not in the dating scene. I hate dating and don't enjoy hooking up. I'm afraid Tinder has become like LinkedIn, nobody likes it but everybody "needs" to have it. That would be the true tragedy.
This was my first thought as well. Sadly, I know a couple of knobs like this and none of them wrap it up. If you want to do that fine, just be safe about it
Hey _refugee_, there's no link in your post.