Although these discussions aren't mutually exclusive, the implication of the latter point comes with a begrudging acceptance not tied to the first. Tinder may be the reality that many people accept when searching for a partner, but that doesn't mean it is the fantasy.

Picture it. A grand serendipitous meeting, your hands touch fleetingly as you simultaneously reach for the same vinyl reissue of Pavement’s 'Brighten the Corners'. A glance, a smile, a fluttering. A sickeningly romantic moment that is embellished to friends and family for years to come. It might be pastiche but it sure sounds better than “Yeah well, I saw a picture of him holding a goat and thought ‘What the hell!?’ So I swiped right”.

But then, not everyone is on Tinder looking for love or a lasting relationship. Aside from short-term and physical-based relationships, many users claim to be “doing it for the memes”. There are Instagram accounts dedicated to documenting humorous Tinder exchanges, a subreddit with well over 300,000 readers and an entire podcast series.

A male friend of mine recently confessed to me that his ‘worst nightmare’ is seeing an exchange between him and a suitor posted online. In the modern age of ‘trolling’, the threat of public humiliation lurks alongside us constantly. And the simple fact is that generations before us didn’t have to contend with this anxiety. A dating blunder wasn’t going to live on in metadata forever. It couldn’t be screenshotted or cam-corded. Could this ever-present fear of embarrassment cloud our interactions online? Does our aversion to public humiliation impact our ability to have honest conversations behind technology?



When I was a user, one of my biggest irks with Tinder was the seeming inability of most users to be direct about their intentions. A lot of us were using the app for different reasons, so why couldn’t we just be upfront about the outcomes we desired? A friend presented his answer to this question as being more of a gender issue;