I’m On Tinder

I used to look down on Tinder—thought it was degrading, that real people met through better channels, that I was somehow above the whole apparatus. Then some mix of boredom and genuine horniness got the better of me, and I downloaded it one night while drunk, which I’m not going to pretend was a deliberate choice.

Setting up the profile was harder than I expected. Tried a couple of joke usernames first—”Horse Penis 84,” The Plumber, Marvel of Nature—but they were all already taken, so I went with my real name and called it done. Photos, bio that I spent way too long on, and suddenly I’m matching with people who exist nowhere else in my actual life. Actresses who only communicate in rhyming couplets. Broke students happy to text back and forth about the world’s dumbest blonde jokes. Cosplayers whose entire existence revolves around anime and kinky fantasy roleplay. The full spectrum of weirdness.

The strange part is how much it actually works. There’s a directness to it—everyone’s there for basically the same reason, no pretending, no uncertainty about whether someone actually likes you or was just being polite. If someone swipes right, they want to talk to you. That clarity is weirdly refreshing.

I’m not going to pretend this isn’t stupid. The what the fuck am I doing feeling hits regularly, usually around midnight when I’m scrolling through bathroom mirror photos. But the alternatives are worse. The alternative is pretending you’re not looking, or telling yourself that meeting someone through a friend’s friend somehow counts as romantic, or just… not meeting anyone. At least here you know where you stand from the first swipe.

I’m at the point where I swipe through photos at midnight on a Tuesday and it feels normal, which is either depressing or just how things work now. Probably both.