A recent article in Vanity Fair by Nancy Jo Sales (http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2015/08/tinder-hook-up-culture-end-of-dating) describes the dating life of 20 somethings around the country. According to this piece, young women are perpetually glued to their phones, feverishly Tindering during dinner, while having drinks, and throughout sorority meetings.   They are addicted to “hook-up culture”, and mobile dating apps allow for an endless stream of “fuckboys” to come over and ravish them and/or exploit them. They have to play the perfect text game (read not act too interested), and they have to have sex with men they meet online (who themselves are sleeping with upwards of 100 women a year) and pretend they want nothing more. If they “catch feelings” for someone, it is perceived as a sign of weakness. All this is referred to in the article as our society’s current “dating apocalypse.”

The world depicted in this article sounds truly awful. However, this world is not what we are currently experiencing in our own app fueled dating lives. Instead of a dating apocalypse, we both think of our dating lives as healthy, interesting, and even, dare we say it? Fun.

Viv: I love Tinder. There. I said it. My warm fuzzy feelings for the app stem from the fact that it (and a few others) saved me from having a sexless Spring while my soon to be ex husband and I worked out the terms of our divorce (still pending at the time of this writing). I was able to meet truly nice people, have a few beers and a few laughs, and occasionally have sex without attachment (though never on the first date). None of these men had to know I was recently separated or recovering from the greatest emotional upheaval of my adult life. Without Tinder I would have been stuck with trying to date friends of friends, who would have known about my separation, or I would have to be spending an egregious amount of time in bars, looking attractive and available. This doesn’t work well for me, as I would vastly prefer to spend my free time with my friends while wearing grandma chic, and I have been known to kill men with the evil eye if they interrupt our conversations in order to chat us up.

I also love Tinder for the people I meet there that I don’t end up sleeping with or even kissing. I have had great one-off dates full of lively conversation, good food (I always offer to split the bill if we get to food- no “tinder food stamps” here), great drinks, and even some emotional intimacy when I am in the mood. At one point I met up with a man for cocktails who was also recently divorced. He looked handsome in his Tinder photos, and he was just as handsome in reality. We talked about his ex, his kids, and the realities of dating when you have children (I do not have children, so I was fascinated by this aspect of his life). This man held my hands, touched my hair, told me I was beautiful, and thanked me for a great experience. I never saw him again after we parted ways at the door of the bar, and I think that made the evening we had even more significant. It was just the kind of thing I needed that day.

Sloan: I am ambivalent about Tinder, if I’m honest. I used it for a bit and then turned it off because I was tired of the barrage of messages from the guys I had swiped right on. But, that being said, I don’t think it’s part of a “dating apocalypse” any more than I think Facebook is the end of civilization as we know it. I think that, as a culture, we love, love, love to bemoan the passage of the “good, old days” of everything that has been impacted by technology – and that includes love and romance and sex. Certainly Tinder and OKCupid and Ashley Madison (let’s not forget that gem) have changed the game, but they haven’t reinvented it.

I had a few dates off of Tinder and I’ve actually made a few friends (without benefits). I sexted with a hot, young pilot I met online and I’ll probably never repeat it even though I had fun doing it (I have a “try everything once” motto). I’ve had sex with Tinder guys a few times, too, and don’t regret a single second of it. Like Viv, I tend not to hook up on the first date and I’ve never met a guy off of Tinder (or any other dating site) that had an issue with that. I think that maybe our experience is different because we are more experienced game players. Or “playettes”, if you like (shout out to Blackstreet).

In sum, I tend to use OKCupid more than Tinder. But if I needed a fun night out without strings? Yeah, Tinder would be my go-to app. And I’m not embarrassed to admit it. Tinder is like the paprika of my dating life; it’s an interesting flavor, but I wouldn’t want to have it with every meal or overload on it.

Analysis:

Why is our experience so different from the women depicted in this article?

The obvious answer is that we are no longer in our 20’s. As 30- and 40-something women, we know we don’t have to sleep with someone to get them to like us, we don’t pay much attention to texting “rules” (though we certainly do sporgulate over men we think we like), and we aren’t attracted to fuckboys, even though we do sleep with men without commitment. We enjoy the affirmation, thin though it may be, that apps like Tinder can provide, but we don’t count our conquests or talk dirty to people we have never met (Viv: this is not strictly true. I have totally sexted with strangers on Tinder, but I have never ever gone on to meet those sextees in real life). With age comes maturity (for some of us) and a lessening (slightly) of the hormonal urge to fuck our brains out all the time. We are not looking for husbands on Tinder, and we are ultimately in control.

The men we match with on these sites are also older (though Sloan likes ‘em young!), and this means that by and large they are not crude walking dildos (and when they are we swipe left). We get that they probably would like to sleep with us sooner rather than later, should all go well with the meet and greets, but we don’t get the sense that we are a knotch in anyone’s belt. Before we sleep with someone we have to have the reasonable expectation that they will also want to see us again, but that is not at all the same thing as wanting to be their partner. We tend to pick men that seem to get this distinction (though we have been wrong on occasion). In other words, we don’t go for men who seem to be overtly suffering from “pussy affluenza”. (Sloan: I tend to date mostly 20-something men and I get at least 3-5 great dates out of them before we have explosive sex, girls. So it’s not necessarily as simple as hit it and quit it….)

Lastly, we don’t Tinder all the time. Ok ok, we swipe around a few times a day, though we can go for long periods (Days! Weeks! Months!) without opening the app at all. We would never swipe during dinner (unless of course we wanted to let our dinner companions swipe for us to gain some variety out of our match options), and we generally frown on swiping in public places. We do not need the world at large to know we are Tindering because we enjoy (and our careers rely on) the illusion of gravitas.

Can we just say the words “pussy affluenza” one more time?