Swipe Right.

Hey there, internet.

The other day, I played a game of chance with a friend who looked at me with a sly smile and told me that, if I lost, I had to get a Tinder.

I really didn't want to lose.

The Tinder website declares it to be "The World's Hottest App" that is "how people meet." It's based on instant attraction--if you like the way a person looks in their picture, you swipe right and hope they do the same, and if they do, a conversation between the two of you is started. If you decide in your split second of judgment that they're not for you, you simply swipe left and move on to the next contender. It's marketed as a simple way to meet new people, but what it's known for being used for is not broadcasted on Tinder's website. The app is famous for promoting hook up culture, giving the twenty-somethings of the United States (not the world--it's not uncommon for Tinder to be banned in other countries) an easy way to meet person on the app one moment, and meet them for a quick date or, in many cases, casual sex the next.

I can count on one hand the people I know who don't have a Tinder, myself included. So I really want to know: what is it that makes Tinder so fascinating to my generation? I don't quite understand it myself. After an experience where I messed around on my friend's Tinder pretending to be a hyper-feminist version of her to a well-intended, unsuspecting potential suitor (when he asked my interests, I said reading Gloria Steinem manifestos and smashing the patriarchy), I felt like the app was a total sham. How can I be sure, I wondered, that the people who I'm talking to on an app like this are who they say they are or are being genuine? If it's so easy for a nice, normal person like myself to pretend to be someone they're not, what's stopping someone with less positive motivations to do the same?

Men, I soon found out, run into this problem all the time. See, there's a massive gender imbalance on apps like Tinder, where there are more men looking for women to hook up with than there are women looking for men. This leaves Tinder with a problem: how to they keep men on the app? The answer? There are internet bots posing as beautiful women with minimal personal information automatically swiping right to begin false conversations with interested men. It keeps the men occupied with someone they'll never actually meet, but, nonetheless, it keeps them on the app.

On the other hand, how does Tinder make sure men don't overuse their app so much that they run out of women altogether? There's an answer for that, too: they limit the number of swipe rights a man can have in a day, while leaving the daily swipe right opportunities for women unlimited.

I have to wonder, though, what this says about how Tinder causes men to function in relationships in the real world. If men only have a limited number of real-life swipe rights, will they go for the women that they find the most attractive on the surface before they'll go for the women that they have the best conversations with? On the contrary, if the Tinder unlimited swipe rule for women was applied in real life, would a woman have to take whatever it is she can get because she's under the assumption that she may not have the sex appeal or social prowess to be as selective as her male suitors?

There's something in that imbalance that makes me feel uneasy somehow. But even more unsettling to me is how people actually are using Tinder. A friend of mine will switch phones with a group of friends and they'll all swipe right or left to choose mates for each other, in a sort of blind dating game. Another male acquaintance says he only uses Tinder when he's bored, using it as an absent-minded time-waster. A girl I share a class with even said that she and her friends will participate in "The Tinder Draft," where you take 30 seconds to swipe right as fast as humanly possible, "just to see who we get." So is Tinder a meeting app, or is it a game? Wouldn't you rather play Candy Crush? How is this app any different than a game like Angry Birds where you throw different kinds of birds just to see what you might hit? It seems like there's the same level of attachment to real humans on apps like Tinder as there is to the tiny greedy pigs in glass houses that you punt pigeons at in a game.

It seems to me that Tinder is a waste of energy and a waste of time, and what I find especially interesting is that all of my friends who have Tinders seem to, on some level, agree with me. Why mess around moving your thumbs across aptly angled selfies when you could go out and actually talk to someone in real life? Why not go to a park with friends and happen to stumble across someone reading a book you happen to love, or strike up a real life conversation with someone at a mutual friend's party or in a class you share? Isn't human connection something we all need more of in our lives, or has social media completely desensitized us from feeling the importance of being a part of someone's life outside of the on their Facebook wall?

Regardless of the answers to these questions, I think that, against the requests of many a millenial, I'll be staying out of the Tinder scene for now. Maybe forever. I don't need another app on my phone, or another game to worry about whether or not I'm winning. I would rather play fair, and I would rather play for real.

-mk.

(by the way, I won the game of chance.) :)