



I woke up the morning after Christmas on my sister’s couch. I didn’t intend to wake up there, but Colorado was hit with a small blizzard as I was attempting to drive home from my father’s house. If you have never driven a rear-wheel-drive pickup truck with bald tires in a blizzard, trust me when I say it’s a terrible idea.

After I lost control and missed hitting a concrete divider by just a few inches, I decided to pull off the highway and let my truck slide into a snowbank. Luckily, I was only a few miles from my sister’s apartment, so her boyfriend came to rescue me, which explains why I had woken up on their couch.

But that’s not what I’m trying to get at. What was special about waking up that morning was that I had a new Tinder match. I hadn’t used the dating app in a few weeks, but at some point between opening presents and Christmas dinner, I had pulled out my phone and swiped through a couple of hundred women to pass the time. Before I could check out the new match, my sister offered to drive me back to my truck.

I had downloaded Tinder with some vague notion of easy hookups but quickly realized that if I struggled to pick up women in a bar, I was still going to struggle to pick them up through my phone screen. Mostly I used it for entertainment. I would read the profiles of women around me. Some were really sincere; some were making fun of the whole idea. I loved all of them.