As 2016 is coming to a close, I’ve begun to reflect on a few of the things that have become more popular this year and past years. The rise of dating apps I think has become incredibly prevalent in my millennial generation. Especially Tinder, tinder is an app that some would consider a game even. You create a profile and then images of either boys or girls or both, wherever your preference lies, pop up. You have the option to swipe right or swipe left, and then if that person also swipes right and you then you two match and have the opportunity to have a conversation. Though I do have and use Tinder, I find myself sad whenever I use it, from my experience at least it is a space for guys to message you creative pick up lines to basically only hook up with you.
Tinder is a prime example of the loss of dating in our generation, it creates a space for casual hook ups and nothing more. According to “Tinder and the Dawn of the Dating Apocalypse” done by Vanity Fair, “Tinder King, a young man of such deft “text game”—“That’s the ability to actually convince someone to do something over text,” Marty explains—that he is able to entice young women into his bed on the basis of a few text exchanges, while letting them know up front he is not interested in having a relationship”(Vanity Fair). Tinder creates this hierarchy between men and women in the sense that men feel as if they can rack up as many women as they want and they don’t have a problem with it. They would rather have multiple hook ups with girls whose names they can’t even remember.
Maybe i’m just a hopeless romantic, thinking that guys in my generation still want to take girls out on nice dates and take them home afterward. Obviously this is still the case, I have many friends who are in cute and strong relationships. Though I guess my fear is that we are heading towards a time where dating apps will just become so much more of a norm and “using their phones as a sort of all-day, every-day, handheld singles club, where they might find a sex partner as easily as they’d find a cheap flight to Florida. “It’s like ordering Seamless” (Vanity Fair). This all goes back to our reliance on technology, we are so plugged in that we lose our sense of selves and ability to have person to person interaction. Millennials flock to Tinder so readily because it subtracts the human interaction and gets right down to so called business.
I’ll leave you with this, whether you use Tinder or not I don’t judge you for that, heck I use it, so I have no room to cast judgment. Just think about the next time you go on Tinder, what is your purpose, do you want to just hook up willy nilly or do you want something of substance? If your answer is the second question, just delete Tinder, it will just add negative toxicity to your life.
