I first downloaded Tinder in the spring of 2013, seven months after it launched. I'd heard about it as a concept (Grindr for straights) but felt exempt from needing it until one evening at the tail end of a drawn-out breakup with someone I'd told myself I would marry. We were at a restaurant in San Francisco, having one of too many brutal good-bye dinners that led to this-is-the-last-time-I-swear sex, and I put the app on my phone in front of him. He stoically chugged his negroni while I marveled at the hundreds, presumably thousands of men who were waiting for me on the other end, should he decide to go through with the breakup. "Look!" I said, waving my iPhone 5 in his face. (I didn't mention that at this early point in the app's history, it was mostly populated by 20-year-old college students and S.F. tech bros who exclusively wore free T-shirts from start-ups.) By June, my boyfriend had gone through with the breakup and moved on-quickly and not via app to a woman he'd met through mutual friends. I wanted to die. But instead of the sweet relief of death: Tinder.
That July, after several swipes and false starts and conversations about "logistics" with friends who, like me, had downloaded the app but never gone out with a match, I had my first actual Tinder date: Jameson. Either his bio had a joke about "taking a shot of Jameson" or my opening message did. I'd chosen a pale-blue minidress that showed some tit but not too much it because I was meeting him straight after work. And he'd chosen happy hour at an Irish pub in Alphabet City that was dive-y but not too dive-y. I'd chosen him because he had hair like Felicity-era Scott Speedman, and while nothing he said was that impressive, it also wasn't boring or offensive, which I'd already recognized as hallmarks of most Tinder conversations.
This story is from the August 01 - 14, 2022 edition of New York magazine.
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This story is from the August 01 - 14, 2022 edition of New York magazine.
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