I Can’t Even Woo Teenagers – A Missive On Tinder

Anyone that has spent enough time with me (and by enough I mean more than 10 minutes) will know that I am awkward as all fuck. I also suffer from a debilitating disease called bitchface. Bitchface, for the uninitiated, is an autoimmune disease that causes you to look unimpressed with, or in severe cases pissed off at, everyone in the room. Symptoms include not having many friends because everyone is too shit scared to talk to you, and mild constipation. If untreated a sufferer of Bitchface will face death as a crazy cat person and be eaten by their cats. Already having two cats, I am well on my way to Stage 3 Bitchface.

A curious side effect of this is that I have become what I like to call professionally single. Relationships and I just really don’t get along. We’ve kind of agreed to ignore each other.

Up until recently that is. I don’t know what changed. It might be the fact that so many of my friends have decided to get married and have kids, or in most cases the other way ‘round, and in some cases give marriage the finger altogether and just have kids. It might also be that I am one of the last remaining single people. Couples are generally diametrically opposed to hanging out with their single friends .We tend to drink too much, cause trouble, and are generally considered bad influences. Also after seeing what my mate Nick does to a toilet after a night out with me I would not want him or any other man, lady, man-lady, or lady-man hanging out with me either.

So I set off on a quest of sorts to make friends with relationships and I suppose in the process convince a woman that I am worth being sober around for more than 5 minutes. I started off venturing off into Another-Day’s Speed Dating. Needless to say that was a dismal failure. All I got out of it was a job (this one) – I already had one of those, thanks – and a confirmation that female accountants that don’t like Star Wars are not even worth three minutes of your time.

So speed dating blows and attempting the all too popular method of just asking someone out just provokes panic attacks in me. I had no choice but to turn to my one true friend for help: The Internet. The Internet has never let me down in anything else. The Internet gets me. It would be my saviour.

I signed up for both OKCupid and Tinder, mainly because they were both free. Tinder is kinda blowing up all over the world, and some dude on Yelp said OKCupid was pretty legit (seems good enough for me). Needless to say, OKCupid was dropped after just one day. People on there are weird, and it’s just far too much effort: Uploading pictures, answering an assload of dumb questions? No thanks. So Tinder it was.

Tinder is surprisingly addictive. There is something compelling about swiping through what is essentially a Hot or Not list with little to no consequence. The added comfort of these profiles being linked to Facebook and hence probably not bogus kinda helps too.

Things started off slow… in fact they’re still kind of slow, and matches are few and far between. Then getting them to reply to a message is another story altogether. The one solid lead I did have just upped and left the country a few days after matching (what the actual fuck, universe!?). Needless to say I was getting pretty bummed out and resorting to just swiping right on everyone, deciding to curate later.

That kinda worked out. I matched with a rather foxy lady. There was a downside though: she is still in high school (just a bit on the creepy side on my part). “Fuck it,” I said. “What’s the worst that could happen?” (if you’re thinking ‘arrest’, she is 18… I hope). She is actually rather rad. Deciding not to fuck around I cut straight to it.

“Would you like to meet up?”

[Nas Note: Ladies & Gentleman, this is dating the Another-Day Way – as invented by site co-founder and resident molester Jordan Koen]

That mercurial bitch Chance seems to be on my side and she agrees to meet me at Park Acoustics, with her sister to chaperone. Understandable, especially with the retrospective view that I had probably lost my virginity before she hit puberty (Thanks, Nick, for that imagery by the way). I also am not too comfortable with meeting someone that openly describes herself as a “promising serial killer” without the comfort of knowing I can run away and hide behind papa bear Henk if I need to.

Needless to say, Sunday has come and gone. I have been stood up not once but twice (the first, another person, probably not of the romantic persuasion but harsh nonetheless). Yep you just read right. I was stood up by two different people, and one of them a girl in high school. Even The Internet finds me repulsive.

Not to end on a complete downer but I have some pretty interesting observations on Tinder:

1: It is populated almost entirely by school girls and cougars (especially out Fourways side).
2: Weirdly enough all of my most interesting matches have been accidental with us having no friends or interests in common.
3: There are a lot of people out there that I should in all likelihood know given the number of shared friends and interests we have, but despite this have never met.