Please bear with me while, not for the first time, I fall to my knees, hands clasped together, and give thanks that I wasn’t single and looking for love in the time of Tinder.
What must it be like to be judged and found wanting with a single nonchalant swipe? At least when I was young, people put a bit of an effort into their soulless sexual objectification.
Now it seems that dating app Tinder has come down with swipe-anxiety, or at least gone a bit shy.
It’s taken umbrage at a GlobalWebIndex study that says that it has a large number (42%) of married or attached people using their app to have affairs. Fancy.
However, Tinder says that the study is too small to be accurate, and the bulk of the users are too young a demographic to be married. Also that Tinder is a social network and not only for arranging sexual encounters.
Well, sorry your majesty! In truth, the average age of users doesn’t mean Jack – even the young can be partnered up. Besides, by definition, people who have affairs are fairly adept at lying, and this could conceivably include their age. Just saying.
As for the focus not being on sexual encounters, I’m genuinely confused. I would have thought that Tinder was as much a signifier of this as pots of pampas grass were for swingers. I thought that this was what people actively liked about Tinder: it would seem that I’m completely wrong.
Or perhaps it’s Tinder that could be mistaken. Surely it knows what it is, just as everyone else knows what it is, and generally it isn’t where people arrange to meet up for a cup of tea with their lovely new friends.
