Morning all you daters and non-daters.
Here’s yesterday’s Sunday Times column, come on and give it a good sniff.
Have a great week.
A MILLION MILES FROM NORMAL – By Paige Nick
SMELL YOU LATER
My single friends are all on Tinder now. Forget the latest hot meat-market club, supermarket or gym as pick up spot, this is the place to be. And the best part is, you never have to leave your pajamas.
It’s a dating app, which I guess is the natural progression from being on a dating website. What sets Tinder apart, is that it operates on a very scientific basis, looks.
You load the free app onto your phone, and it draws your information from Facebook, like a blood-thirsty vampire. Then it uses your GPS to collate a collection of regularly updated eligible bachelors within a fifty-kilometer radius. All you have to do is anonymously ‘like’ or ‘pass’ on each match, based purely on looks. If two people mutually like each other, bam! Or rather, I should say, bang!
Problem one: my first match, Ben. Ben’s profile pic had two guys in it. Ben and bestie. I wondered which one was Ben? The tall, handsome guy or the sabre-toothed, greasy long-haired guy, oh who am I kidding, if he’s available…. oh wait, there are more pics of him… as I expected… pass.
Next…
Andre, 22. Wait, what? 22! *Swipes to next picture*.
The other information you get is an optionally filled in blurb, in less than five hundred characters, Tinder also shows if you’ve ‘liked’ any of the same stuff on Facebook, and whether you have friends in common.
Dave (27), posed in a cowboy hat in his first pic, and with a keg and two thumbs up in his second. The computer says we have two shared interests, I can’t imagine what those could be. My friend Tamara was with me when I looked at him, and she said she thought he looked intelligent. By that I assume she means he has nice abs.
Nikita (29) bio reads; “‘If you ask me about Nikita, I will say only one thing – I love his mustache.’ – Oscar Wilde.” Hipster much? I guess you can know someone after just reading an eighteen word bio and seeing a photograph.
Tinder’s like a flipchart of man-samples, like the ones you get when you’re choosing curtains.
Meanwhile, on a cellphone between five and fifty kilometers away, Ben, Andre, Dave and Nikita, are all thumbing through my images having a snortle at my expense. ‘Dude, she’s old enough to be my mother, and what’s with the lazy eye? Pass!’
There were some guys my age, so that was a relief, but my sense is it’s more a hook-up site, than serious dating option.
We can’t get too morally perturbed about dating people based purely on looks. As long as there have been bars, men and women have been scoping the room, and making snap decisions based on this kind of shallow thinking. That’s why the beer goggle has played such a major role in helping ugly people get laid since the beginning of barley.
Tinder is no more nuts than Pheremone Dating. A UK firm organises pheromone parties, where singles from around London work their way through a pile of dirty laundry to find their soul mate.
Each single picks through carefully numbered plastic bags. Each contains a t-shirt the eligible bachelor slept in for the last three nights. They sniff the contents until they find one that tickles their nose hairs. Then a picture of you holding the numbered bag is projected on the big screen, and the owner is free to sidle up and offer you a sniff of his underarm in person. Have you ever seen two strange dogs sniffing each other’s butts? It’s a bit like that.
Before this, if you caught a guy sniffing your nightie, you’d slap a restraining order on him, now if you sniff back, you could find yourselves smelling wedding bells.
Pheromones are scientifically proven to play a part in attraction and nobody wants to be in a relationship with someone who smells like six-week old Gruyere. So this is loosely grounded in some form of science. But more than that, I suppose it’s an interesting way to land in a room of singles, with a cute trick to break the ice.
The online dating market is worth over two billion pounds a year, it’s no wonder entrepreneurs will try anything to get a piece of the action.
The bottom line is we could use the help, dating isn’t easy. A friend went on a blind date and twenty minutes in, the chap mentioned he was suffering from terrible piles. ‘You know what that is, don’t you?’ he asked. ‘Yes!’ she shrieked, with a mouth full of chop suey, ‘Please don’t tell me!’
‘It’s an internal anal ache!’ he said, blatantly ignoring her pleas.
Perhaps a metaphor for many of our dating experiences… a pain in the ass.
