Saturday 18 January 2014

A Review of Tinder: Is Romance Dead?

Helloooooo people!

So here we are. 2014. 

I have officially eaten enough food to feed the five thousand, drank enough booze to make George Best look teetotal, and am one step closer to a heart attack since my last post! Thanks a lot Christmas (although it was totally worth it). 

One of my New Years Resolutions was to blog once a week. Well that failed as we've already hit the third week of January and this is my first post of 2014...oh time fliiies. But now I'm back baby!

2014 has, as I'm sure it has many of you, led me to question things in my life / look at things in a new light. Job, living situation, appearance, friends...relationships. 

Particularly the dreaded r-word. 

In 2013, one by one my friends slowly started getting boyfriends. Now I've been single for approaching two and a half years now, and I've actually been really happy. Don't get me wrong, relationships are great too (I do not say this from personal experience...my ex and I created our very own World War III in the three and a half years we were together...oh young love). But as more and more of my friends began their very own love story, I began questioning... 

Why is it I'm being left behind when some friends have had more boyfriends than Taylor Swift?
How many frogs do I have to kiss before finding my Prince? 
Where and when will "the one" appear?

And I feel almost more guilty for not having a boyfriend with the emergence of apps like tinder. I remember a day when internet dating was solely associated with desperate, socially recluse weirdos searching for a chance of happiness with some other poor, equally strange / desperate being. It was also associated with the older generation. Young people and internet dating were rarely used in the same sentence. And here we are, in 2014, with this new dating app which has become so popular it makes Facebook look pedestrian.

 So how have we got here? What happened to the good old fashioned world of dating where a man wooed a woman face to face...where people actually met first and exchanged numbers after?

I felt even worse about my current relationship status when I heard stories of friends of friends and their experiences on Tinder. One described having the "best date of [her] life" while another has been wined and dined simultaneously by three guys she got talking to on it. So I thought I'd give the app a go...

...139 matches and two months later, I had some pretty odd proposals...

"I'll be Burger King and you be McDonalds, I'll be having it my way and you'll be loving it" 
"Ahhh so annoying, really wanna blowey. I'm so fed up with my five finger shuffle"
"My mate who I'm sitting next to told me to like you on his behalf"
"Sit on my face and I'll eat my way to your heart"

Charming! 

I also learnt that people aren't always who they say they are...(as much as I did love this one)! 


...and I made a few discoveries...

1) I only used it when I was bored as a form of entertainment,
2) I found myself thinking 'When the hell did I like you...I must've been either half asleep or drunk?!' over and over again,
3) I could never be bothered to actually talk to any 'matches', even if they were Ryan Gosling lookalikes. 

The fact of the matter is...I had no clue who these people were. And no desire to get to know them. 

The pure existence of the app itself also made me realise that life isn't a fairytale, but if it was, I certainly wouldn't be meeting my Prince Charming on Tinder....nor would I want to.

It's superficial. A persons appearance is the one and only definitive factor which determines the users choice of whether they swipe left or right. Surely there's more to a person than their looks...after all, Belle certainly didn't choose to be with The Beast for his dashing smile and muscular physique!

So after pondering all of this, I have decided that I am still happy as larry being single, and my search for the one has officially come to a halt this year. I have also decided that when he does eventually turn up at my door with his witty charm, Irish accent and a bunch of roses, it'll all be down to fate, not a million dollar dating app which, in my opinion, is more of a social platform for casual sex than anything else. 

Next week I'll be uploading another YouTube video on New Years Resolutions so stay tuned :) 

xoxo 


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