Make online dating an instant affair
Geolocating technology a big hit
He looked good on paper. You know what I mean.
His name was Adam and I met him on Plenty of Fish. His photo didn’t say much, except that he had nice eyes and brown hair. Average height, weight and intelligence. Aside from that, his written profile suggested he could spell, had a quirky sense of humour and had travelled.
We emailed back and forth for a week, but I get impatient with inane chat, so when he asked to meet at a pub, I agreed.
Back when I was single, I had a simple plan for meeting men in public places: “I only have an hour — I have a meeting/dinner/colonoscopy to go to right after this.” That way, if I needed to pull the ‘chute, I had announced my intentions upfront. If all went well, we’d plan another date.
Thank God for exit strategies. Adam was OK, but there were red flags. He had soft, moist hands. He was pale and a bit weedy. He was too nervous. Five minutes later, I was ready to run. Still, I am endlessly curious about people, so I ordered a drink and asked a few questions. Turns out, the “something” that wasn’t right was that Adam still lived with his ex-wife.
“We can’t afford places on our own,” he said with an apologetic smile. “We’re both really addicted to gaming,” he added, no doubt hoping that Call of Duty was my sweet spot, too.
“We make such a good gaming team — I live in the basement — so we decided to stay living in the same house,” he concluded. (To repeat: Not his parents’ basement after a bad divorce, but his current ex-wife’s basement.)
It didn’t get any better from there, although as I prepared to flee after 20 minutes, he assured me “he was available to date.”
That was several years ago, and while online dating hasn’t improved much in the interim, it has changed. A lot.
If online dating exposes us to a seemingly endless parade of candidates, new dating apps such as Tinder, Grindr, Hornet, Scruff, Twoo, Blendr, The Game, OK Cupid, SceneTap — the list is pretty long — not only supply hundreds of possibilities, but locate those possibilities within feet of us and indicate if they are willing to meet, like, right now. No more coy back and forth chatter or tedious, badly spelled emails. Just you, your smartphone and the guy or girl at the end of the bar.
Based on geolocating technology, the new apps play off two important traits for digital natives and millennials: an almost pathological impatience with anything that isn’t instantaneous, and an ability to use partial attention to absorb, assess, accept or reject new information while watching TV, chatting with friends and emptying the garbage bin.
Depending on the app, users upload an image of themselves—sometimes-non-identifying and in the case of gay apps, featuring attractively displayed body parts — and that’s about it. Users sign in, say they’re available and the app geolocates them within a certain radius. From there, it’s a simple swipe or screen touch to indicate if you think someone is “hot or not.” If someone likes you back, it’s just a matter of getting in touch and saying “let’s meet in five minutes at the bar/on the street corner/behind the Dumpster.”
That sounds facile and superficial, but according to Tinder-user and millennial-generation, small-business consultant Tegan Wylie, it’s not as simple as that. “This is how my generation dates,” she says. “We have our friends and don’t want to date within that circle, we want to keep our friends as friends. We want to meet people outside of that and Tinder is a great opportunity to do that. I’ve even maintained friendships from Tinder and had a lot of really good experiences,” she says, noting that she is currently seeing someone she met on the app.
“My generation isn’t against meeting people organically, but it’s not necessarily what time permits, since many of us work for ourselves. We are a work/life generation.”
Indeed, the millennials were the early adopters of dating apps, particularly Grindr, the Los Angelesbased gay app launched in 2009 on the iPhone 3G by former online magazine salesman Joel Simkhai. Designed to quickly and easily introduce gay men, it has blossomed
“MY GENERATION ISN’T AGAINST MEETING PEOPLE ORGANICALLY, BUT IT’S NOT NECESSARILY WHAT TIME PERMITS, SINCE MANY OF US WORK FOR OURSELVES.”
TEGAN WYLIE
to its current seven million downloads, although it has stiff competition from newcomers like Hornet and Scruff, each of which, offers slight variations on the theme.
“You could be in the checkout line and meet someone on Grindr,” Simkhai says in a phone interview from his Sunset Boulevard office. “It’s very real time and you never know what’s going to happen.”
Gay apps are undeniably used for quick-’n’-dirty hookups, although Simkhai insists he and others have met boyfriends and pals through the app.
But that’s not really what dating apps like Grindr are all about, says Jaime Woo, author of Meet Grindr: How One App Changed the Way We Connect. According to him, they gained instant traction because they were “shiny and new and there was this idea that the men on Grindr would magically be different from the guys they saw at the bar.”
In fact, they are the guys you meet at the bar, but the app helps those who may not have the social skills to baldly introduce themselves in that setting, he explains. “It makes it easier to ask for what you want. It’s hard to just walk up to someone and say, ‘you’re attractive, let’s have a quick encounter, does that sound good?’ It would be weird, whereas online, we have this language that allows for that.” For some, that may sound like a dubious benefit.
There are also drawbacks that are very real and for some, dangerous.
Recently, a 28-year-old woman from New Zealand travelled to Australia on business and, finding herself at loose ends in Sydney, set up a Tinder date. After meeting the guy at a restaurant, they headed to another bar, where he slipped her the date rape drug, Rohypnol, before calling his friends, who gang raped her.
Dating app misadventures are not widely reported, admits Simkhai, but do happen, which is why women like Wylie take precautions. “You have to have your female spidey senses, your intuition on full alert,” she notes. “Let people know who you’re seeing and where you’ll be. I always meet in a public place and make sure I sent friends a text message part way through the night, so they can get a sense of things.”