I am a romantic but not just any romantic. I’m talking a twentieth-century, love letter-writing romantic. So often, my expectations of dating don’t align with the 2018 hookup culture. Currently, we are living in a time where humans have more interactions with their phones than actual people. Because of this, a new-age vestal for romance has emerged called online-dating.

There are multiple different websites and apps for online dating, but the one that started the trend is Tinder. If you don't know, Tinder is an app that shows you fellow users who are near your location. You are shown a bunch of people's profiles, then you swipe right if you are interested and left if you aren't. Simple right? That's the problem.

Tinder takes the spontaneity out of meeting someone. Don't get me wrong, I'm not here to bash on Tinder. I know a ton of people who have had pleasant dating experiences and even some who have had long-term relationships form from the app. It's just not for me.

I don't like that I am judging a book by its cover. I personally do not have the patience to scroll through each of the person's pictures, read their biography, and then decide if I'm going to swipe right on them. More often than not I'm going to quickly skim through the app and only swipe right on the people whom I immediately find attractive based on their profile picture. More than half the time I don't even read the person's biography.

Sound shallow? That's my point. This app reduces the fun of meeting someone into a mediocre task that's similar to online shoe shopping. It's reduced people to commodities.

I also don't have the guts. Amazingly, there have been a rare couple of people on the app that I've had genuine conversations with. Some of these people I talked to for a couple weeks, some just a day or so, but when they asked that pressing question, "So do you wanna meet up?" I'd panic and ended up ghosting them. Am I proud of this? No. But if you talk to someone long enough you build up an idea of what you want them to be, and actually meeting them destroys that idea. There is no way around that.

I guess I just long for the old-fashioned way of meeting someone. Getting to know them through conversation, not just through the bullet points on their bio. Being comfortable around them because you've already met them, not just their picture on a screen.

As a society, we live in the golden age of the consumer, where we know what we want and we want that thing now. But I don't mind waiting a little longer if that means I get to have a human interaction that isn't manufactured by a computer.