Tinder: A Personal Experiment

     This was a hard experiment for me to do. When I first heard about Tinder, I was in no way interested in downloading the app, let alone participating in it. Why? Because it seemed like a juvenile approach to "dating" and I didn't see how it could really benefit anyone. Why would I want someone that I have never met before to strike up a conversation with me just because I happened to like his picture, too? Awkward. What are you even supposed to talk about?
     In an effort to better understand my generation and their new "cool" apps, I decided to do a little experiment. What would happen if I downloaded the app and started using it? Would I become more superficial with guys? Would my self esteem drop a few points because I wasn't getting a decent number of matches? Here's what ended up happening to me:

1. I felt really awkward... at first. I'm not exactly all that great at using apps, so when it came to swiping left or right I found that I kept messing up. I kept making the mistake of swiping left when I wanted to swipe right and vice versa. Aside from my own awkwardness, I also felt kind of bad for judging these guys based on their pictures, name, age, and short description. That's pretty much all you have to go off of. The first couple of times, I took the time to seriously consider them as human being, but that wasn't the case for long...
2. I stopped feeling bad after a while. After using the app for a little while, I just started swiping left and right at an alarming fast rate. I stopped worrying about judging them because I knew they would never know that I had skipped over them, unless of course they hadn't skipped over me. Instead of taking the time to make an educated decision, I just swiped according to the first picture that popped up. If they didn't catch my attention at first, they wouldn't catch my attention later, right? Looking back on that, boy do I feel bad. I was judging a book my it's cover, literally. 
3. Conversations were weird and never went anywhere. The first conversation I had was pretty funny because this guy decided to start the conversation with #noerapenal (Is it really obvious that I'm Mexican?). We talked about soccer and things weren't all that bad, but the conversation never went anywhere and it eventually stopped. It wasn't until after I started using the app that I was told what Tinder was really used for: booty calls. *Sigh*
4. My self esteem did drop a point or two. I became a little self conscious when it came to the pictures I had up and was kind of bummed at the amount of matches I got. When I realized that this was happening, I made the decision to just drop the app all together. I like to think that I have a decently high self esteem and an app is so not worth jeopardizing it. 

     I do understand that some people use it for different purposes than finding a date and I also understand that others use it to try to find the love of their life. I'm not judging either way of using the app, but I do know now that I'm going to stick with real life to find a date. Granted, I never intended to find a date with this app, but maybe a more information based dating site would be better. You can judge someone by their political views or something instead.