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To Tinder, Or Not To Tinder?

On a Long Enough Time Frame — All Relationships Are Temporary

Cold. Nihilistic, Disposable. These are some of the accusations lobbed against such dating practices by those who wish not to participate in them. Tinder and similar apps have actually been shown to make many people quite depressed. But are they really that useless, as their critics make them out to be?

On , one side, people feel this process is somehow dehumanizing, that we just get swallowed up in the collective whole as mere numbers among other numbers, nothing more than the value of our profile pictures and brief bios that pretend to summarize our entire lives in just a few hundred characters.

On the other side, people are enjoying the liberty of a lack of commitment, no longer being shackled down to a partner of their choice, especially supposing that they chose a bad partner, to begin with and wanted to renege on the deal.

But what does all of this mean? Personally, I think these two worldviews are more than just compatible, but their compatibility hinges upon the ability of people to be honest with themselves, sometimes in the face of social criticism.

A major shift in thinking happened in my dating life that radically changed the landscape of how I perceived dating, and it opened me up to an amazing world of experiences, creating memories that I treasure today.

Dating doesn’t have to suck — dating can be awesome if we don’t try to date when we date.

Here’s the consciousness change that took place in my life which made dating not only just tolerable, but pretty sweet.

For the record, even for those among us who are impeccably charming and irresistably attractive, Tinder can be quite depressing. It’s not just you, it’s everyone. I think most people experience a hint of rejection with every person they swipe right on to no avail…we get our hopes up when we see someone, but alas, it wasn’t a match. In the real world, most people might get rejected once a month or once every six months, but Tinder is a rejection every 17 seconds or so, and it’s easy to get lost in it for hours. It’s as if someone told you, “You’re not good enough,” 43 times a second, depending on how fast you swipe and how desperately you’re willing to swipe right.

To make matters worse, when we do manage to get a date, we can sometimes meet up and either have an awkward date or disposable sex, or both and then we return to our domiciles feeling empty. Ever feel slightly used after a one-night stand that you yourself chose to engage in? I sure have…and it sucks.

A brief aside, there are much better places to meet people than Tinder and when we complete the shift in thinking that I’m about to describe, we can meet people anywhere, great people, and not have the hangups or pretenses that it needs to be anything special. That’s when it becomes really quite awesome.

Eventually, I came to learn that once we manage to get a match or a date, things can actually go quite well if we do it right. Personally, I’ve met some truly amazing people all over the United States through Tinder, and while I’ve actually clicked with few of the women I actually matched with, I made a lot of great friends that I’ve managed to keep around for years and years. When you’re a traveler, like I was for years straight, dating and social apps become your best friend. The whole time I had just needed to actually focus on having fun and not some goal-oriented idea of how things were supposed to unfold.

I decided to go out and just start hanging with people, no expectations, no goals, no nothing, just have fun, explore who others are and find out about their lives, and I’m here to tell you the results were nothing shy of astonishing.

Guys, take notes, it’s actually a really fun and rewarding experience to go out and just make some new friends — it’s totally liberating.

I’ve dated a lot in my day, and by dating a lot, I was able to forge my character, by doing nothing more than having no expectations and making friends, and through it, I grew — sometimes by listening to women and the endless stream of beautiful words they had for me, other times by making mistakes, by saying something stupid, by getting hurt, by learning what not to do.

I think that this notion that dating needs to be either/or isn’t the best way to look at dating, it’s either total commitment or empty sex; honestly, and I was included in this, I think often times we look for either every date to be the one that’s magical and lasts, or we jump right to the other side of the spectrum and feel the awkward unease of the one-night stand, and this is a toxic way to interact with people.

Why does it have to be one or the other?

“What’s wrong with me?” I used to think, quite saddened after a one-night stand — is this what I’ve become? Is quick, easy sex my real value? I think we all ask ourselves these questions at some point, and over time, I learned that these questions miss the point.

It finally dawned on me that I could casually date — just date — see what’s out there, and I didn’t need some earth-shattering, cataclysmic event to transpire with every single person. Come to think of it, outside of dating, we don’t place these expectations on our regular friendships.

At some point, it dawned on me, the sad, existential reality that is the fact that, on a long enough time frame, all relationships are temporary. I felt some relief in this idea through its sadness and penetrating depth. From here, my casual dating experiences actually got a lot warmer and more fun.

I began dating and making friends, socializing like a real adult, and I stopped constantly looking for the next relationship that I could pounce on and try to make work — suddenly, everything was different, these apps weren’t the gateway to something special, the pressure to find someone was relieved, and Tinder was just something fun to do when I got a little bit of free time to kill.

Suddenly the idea had become outlandish: why did I believe for so long that everything needed to be something special, something more than just casual?

No emphasis on sex. No emphasis on relationships or finding the right person. What about just having a good time?

The release was freeing. Changing the way I viewed the timeline of relationships helped my life drastically; I no longer saw every relationship as some weird last chance at something serious and began seeing things on a more long-term and linear time frame, every day was building up to something wonderful that I began to have faith would come. And come it did.

From there I went out and just met people. Some blossomed into great relationships, most of those failed for various reasons, and I met some amazing people along the way. In the end, I’ve found the woman I want to spend the rest of my life with and it took time, it took dating people for literally a year without any sex, just casual, fun dating, laughing, seeing movies together, doing normal things that weren’t predicated by the notion that either sex or a relationship needed to blossom.

Some people are just meant to be our friends and that’s okay, but we lose nothing in making such friends, and if they can’t handle us wanting anything more than friendship, they probably aren’t capable of being very good friends nor lovers, and we definitely shouldn’t try to force anything.