Growing up in the 2010s was a truly illustrious time. Not only did we get to experience the classic, ageless contributions of the '90s (Gameboy, "The Amanda Show," countless well-written cartoons), but we lived the experience of growing up in a technologically advancing decade. We watched development and evolution of the laptop, the cell phone and the tablet. There have been countless things developed that in 2001, no one could’ve possibly imagined. Needless to say, the last thing we could’ve imagined was a massive negative shift in the dating world, one that draws its roots in Tinder.

Tinder is lazy dating. When we were young, we often felt disdain when we saw reference to E-Harmony in media, and it was obviously associated with desperation, a feeling we definitely never wanted to encounter. However, when we reached a certain age, we felt it necessary to start exploring our own sexualities and interacting with the other sex. We wanted more. Before Tinder, there was strategy and challenge in dating. You had to approach your partner with as much poise and style as you could muster in that instance, and you represented a truer version of yourself. Every girl-meets-boy story starts similarly, and they have a root in the real life practice. Meet in a bar or a restaurant or a family reunion or a park, speak and then work up the incredible courage it takes to ask someone “do you want to perhaps go get coffee sometime.”

But the approach is dead amongst millennials, you go out, you talk to your friends, and you never have to go speak to the attractive person you keep making eye contact with. You have 394 Tinder matches at your beck and call. There’s a catch lying in the lifestyle, though. You’ve never met these Tinder matches, you don’t know their middle names, what they do in their free time, who they associate with, their values and their morals. You don’t know them. In Tinder, you miss out on the value of true association and human connection. It’s more pleasurable to sit on your couch and swipe left or right and send a couple of casually flirtatious texts to actually go to a bar and try to talk to someone. The satisfaction of being recognized and valued when you match with someone attractive is there, but the denial and reality of dating is not. Compatibility cannot be determined with a couple of words, a link to your Instagram account, and a couple of pictures.

Compatibility takes time and honest attraction to honest features. It takes a conversation that lasts more than five minutes, and the respect to not bring up sex until after you know someone at a reasonable level. Tinder erases the satisfaction of actually awkwardly messing up with a girl at the bar for the first time, stumbling over your words because she’s too incredible looking for you to function. Tinder doesn’t let you learn what’s okay and not okay to say on the first date because at the time of the first date, you’ve already crept all over someone’s profile and you know where they were born, what they study and that they love hockey. You’ve lost the opportunity to effectively communicate on a Jane Doe level and for that, you will lose the opportunity to truly meet the person as an uninfluenced representation of who they truly are.

It becomes often where people provide a misrepresentation of who they are on social media and all of us are guilty of it. We choose to put our best foot forward, but we forget that the rest of us will still come to light eventually. Dating shouldn’t be shrouded by bizarre pick-up lines, artificial profiles and weird first impressions. Dating should be two people being themselves in an honest and straightforward fashion.