The original plan for this comic was to summarize my initial impressions and experiences with online dating, but a lot changed in half a year (and it’s been quite the year). Some backstory: in January, my girlfriend of nearly two years broke up with me. In March, the quarantine hit. About a month layer, due in no small part to social distancing and isolation, I opened a Tinder account. My only other brush with online dating was in my junior year of college. For the joke and the novelty, I made a Bumble account and showed it off to my friends. It cropped up a lot of the same anxieties as going to a party where you only know one person, or grouping up for an assignment in a class full of strangers. Mere minutes after making my first swipe, I accidentally liked someone who I was not interested in. I panicked and deleted the app. That was the end of Bumble.
Yes, a lot has changed since then. I now know that an errant swipe means absolutely nothing. Thousands of these meaningless gestures are exchanged every day, all with the hope that just one of them leads to a match-up of mutual interests. It’s a numbers game, they say. That may be the primary reason I was hesitant to hit the online dating scene. Yes, I was anxious to put myself out there, worried that it was too soon after my breakup, suspicious that I was acting out of an extraordinary need for human interaction. But above all, I just didn’t think it would work. Or at the very least, wouldn’t work for me. Subtle flirtations, nuances in body language, humor and wit will be replaced with pick-up lines, icebreakers, swipes and algorithms. My dating experience is already severely limited and now I’m entering entirely foreign, digital territory.
So I started with Tinder because where else to begin? It’s the quintessential dating app and I wanted to know what all the fuss was about. Call me naive (I won’t be offended, I really was at the time), but I quickly learned that everything was based on looks. The entire platform is built around making snap-judgments based on visual qualities alone (if you’re totally ripped or have a bangin’ beach bod, cheers). It’s not an entirely unfounded system. When you meet someone in person for the first time, you see them before you get to know them. Like it or not, we will make a first impression based on how someone first appears. Of course, that impression is molded as you learn about their life, their likes, dislikes, hopes, dreams, and fears, but on a dating app, you don’t even get that far. You’ve got the abstraction of a digital platform and the veil of partial anonymity. You can be rude as hell and get away with it - and a lot of people do. For me, I felt sleazy after my first few swipes. I saw each profile as an actual individual who put time and effort into curating their outward presentation and personal details. I was slow, going through every line and picture. If I could only see myself now, how quickly I breeze through and brush off dozens and dozens of women without a second thought. Yeah, it definitely sounds bad when you write it out like that…
As I got over my initial disgust, an interesting voyeuristic aspect started to emerge - and not in a salacious way. Each profile became a small window into the lives of hundreds of people who were like me and very much not like me. People who lived in my area, all looking for something on this artificial and impersonal service. I like comparing it to, say, seeing someone who catches your eye at the grocery store. It’s a fleeting moment that amounts to nothing, lasts for a few seconds then you go back to looking for canned garbanzo beans. When you see a profile on Tinder, there’s even less interaction than a chance supermarket run-in. It’s an entirely one-sided interaction, skimming through a short bio and tapping through a gallery frozen in time. And yet, you end up knowing more about this person. How they dress, what they do with their friends, things they like to do. You can’t get any of that by staring down aisle 4. It ends up being this weird social exchange: learning about someone with as little interaction as possible. And it’s implicitly consensual! People on Tinder make profiles to be seen in this way. When we’re all living in our own bubbles during this pandemic, going through these profiles can be a nice reminder of what life was once like. It’s imperfect escapism that may promote objectification, surface subtle racial biases, and cheapen legitimate human connection, but hey, in times like these, I’ll take what I can get.