Picture this: you’re in line at Starbucks before class and the line is incessant. You open Tinder and start swiping through hundreds of faces on your phone, reading corny bios, judging whether he has a little too much facial hair, and wondering if the guy you swiped right on will return the favor. You update your profile picture to something that says, “I’m fun and I’m cute, but I also have a great personality,” but panic ultimately sets in. Maybe that one was a little too fun. Duck faces are still acceptable, right? How much is too much cleavage? Is it weird that it’s a selfie? Was it too ballsy to swipe right on that guy from Econ?
Now picture this: you’re in line at Starbucks before class, and the line is incessant. Your phone is dead- your charger is broken (because iPhone chargers seem to have a lifespan of approximately two months). Consequently, your head is up. You notice the people around you, you make eye contact, maybe even a little small talk with the guy in front of you, and you compliment that girl’s shirt while waiting for your caramel macchiato. You are present and available in reality, willing to exist in that moment with the people two feet away from you, breathing the same air.
Nowadays, the second scenario is so rare on campus and in society because of the escalating reliance that we have on technology for comfort. Inevitably, it has seeped into one of the most uncomfortable, nerve-wracking, and sometimes humiliating aspects of life: dating. Tinder, an uber-popular app that promises to help you “meet interesting people nearby,” (which is its undeniably creepy slogan) is changing the dating game and making it more of an algorithm than an experience.
Online dating and flirting is a phenomenon in modern culture that seems to be an oxymoron. To flirt with someone, to genuinely show interest in someone, is so much more than a swipe on Tinder or even a “like” on Instagram. Poets, artists, writers, filmmakers, and musicians have all attempted to describe the emotions that coexist with the adventure of meeting someone who changes everything – and they rarely mention screens. Body language, eye contact, how she snorts when she laughs, if his voice cracks, the smell of her perfume, how he talks about his mom, the way she picks at her nails when she’s nervous – these are only a small fraction of details that are worth noticing, details that can only be noticed face-to-face. Sure, getting a notification on your phone from someone you’ve been dying to hear from can be exhilarating, but it’s important to remember that text messages, Tinder chats, and Twitter DMs are all just tiny pixels on pocket-sized screens; they do not represent the entirety of the people behind them.
If you want to meet someone real, you have to be real. Give someone a chance to notice all your details in person, look up long enough to really see the people you pass by every day. Maybe the person you’re looking for isn’t a couple of swipes away on Tinder, but has actually been breathing the same air as you all along.
Image courtesy of: wired.com