Technology

Tindering Over 30: Not Actually a Dating Apocalypse

Posted on by egoandorgasm

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?

Sporgulation: Waiting for a Guy to Text You

Posted on by egoandorgasm

Sporgulate (verb): to become preoccupied over the fact that the person you texted two days ago, one day ago, several hours ago, ten minutes ago has not yet texted you back.

Sporgulation can begin immediately after sending a text, or it can manifest itself over time as it slowly dawns on you that the textee has had plenty of time to read the text and is making a choice not to text you back in a timely fashion, or worse, to not text you back at all.

Sporgulating can take many forms.  The most common form consists of repeatedly checking the phone to see if the textee has replied.  The best time to sporgulate in this way is when you are supposed to be focused on something else that is far more important.  Other common forms of sporgulation include sending multiple follow up texts to the textee even though they have not replied to the initial text, talking at length to your friends/coworkers/roommates about the fact that the textee has not yet replied to your text, and imagining a variety of hypothetical scenarios that might explain why the textee has not yet replied to your text.

Sporgulation is a waste of time.  We repeat, it is a waste of time.  But we do it anyway, even though we know better.

Viv: I have been dating someone for about a month, lets call him Doug, and it all started with me asking Doug out on a mobile dating site.  I gave him my phone number via the site, and he immediately texted me to find out when we could meet up.  Since that initial prompt response, however, it has been a total sporgulation game.  We meet up and have a good time. We have beers. We make out in public. We have great, healthy sex.  And then one of us leaves in the morning and I wait a couple days.  Silence.  I text something cheerful, like, “That was so fun last Thursday.  Are you free for more fun later this week?”, and then the real sporgulation sets in.  Doug can take hours to respond, sometimes over 24 hours.  I check my phone every 15 minutes.  I am convinced I will never see him again. I begin to chastise myself for even texting him at all. Isn’t it the man’s job to ask me out? But didn’t I set the precedent by asking him out? Who is attached to normative gender roles anyway? Its 2015!  And then he gets back to me and suggests a date and we meet up and repeat the good time and I assume he was just busy…… Until I start to sporgulate all over again a couple days later.

Sloan: I’m juggling 7 guys right now, which basically means I’m texting them or we’ve gone out on at least one date and there is potential for more. All of them text me. Some of them text me a lot, some a little, some almost never, some just enough. When it comes to texting, we’re all like Goldilocks – there’s a perfect amount of texting for each one of us. The problem is that no one but us knows exactly where that sweet spot is located, so we’re that much more likely to sporgulate, get really, really irritated at someone, or, you know, piss off a lot of bears. One of the men I’m currently juggling, let’s call him Mike, is driving me to sporgulate. I like him more than the others; so much more than I’m forcing myself to keep dating everyone else right now just so I don’t obsess over Mike. I met Mike in real life and our first meetup was fantastic. Except that I wasn’t sure whether or not it was a date – it was “coffee”. The second time we met up it became more clear that we were in “more than friends” territory, but I’m still not sure how interested he is. So. Sporgulation. I send a text to Mike and then put down my phone and try not to obsess about when he’ll text me back. Meanwhile, 6 other men are texting me and I don’t spend more than a minute thinking about their messages or my responses.

Analysis:

Sporgulation is clearly more about the sporgulator’s mental state and emotional needs than about the actual conversation taking place via our handheld devices. It has nothing to do – whatsoever – with the person sending (or not sending) the texts in question.

But what drives us to sporgulate?

Is it human to sporgulate? Is sporgulating even a new phenomenon, or has it simply intensified with our new technologies? Certainly, people sat by their landlines hoping for the phone to ring. They also waited impatiently for the postman to deliver a potential letter from a beloved. So what’s new?

The speed and level of connectivity is new. Social scientists and psychologists have been researching whether or not we feel more or less connected in the era of Facebook, Twitter, and texting. The answer is ambiguous. On one hand, we use social media and mobile technology to stay on the grid, to connect with far-flung friends, and make plans. On the other hand, social media and mobile technology can drive us to compare our lives to others’ lives (and come up short), spark #FOMO (fear of missing out), and drive up our anxiety to peak levels.

So sporgulation is, at its root, about our own insecurities and our attempts to connect with people we do not yet know if we can trust.  It is a side effect of our experimentation with attachment via technology.

Viv: I like Doug but I don’t know Doug yet.  I am in the process of moving away and getting a divorce and this means I do not ask Doug searching personal questions.  I don’t reveal much that is deeply personal about myself either.  Doug and I do not have a level of trust built up that can sustain long periods of comfortable silence.  Each time we see each other may be our last time together.  But we are connecting on intimate physical levels that can lead to attachment the more we sleep together (he spooned me last week and it felt like nestling in a bed of kittens), so the situation can reach high levels of emotional confusion.  Unless we break it off or we choose to have a more personal conversation about what we are doing together, the sporgulation is likely to continue.  I am OK with this.  Like Sloan, I am also dating several other people, in part to mediate the attachment I might feel for Doug.  And again, like Sloan, I don’t find myself sporgulating while texting with other men.

Sloan: I can relate to you, Viv. I like Mike a lot – but I don’t really know him. We haven’t had sex yet, though we’re on that track and it’ll probably happen soon. Once that happens, I’ll be in sporgulation central. The only hope for me is to work on my own insecurities and try to remind myself that I’m great whether or not Mike likes me back. I’m going to have to have a conversation with Mike, eventually, about what this is, expectations, etc. But for now, I’m riding this wave. Whenever possible, I’m going out without my phone, i.e. actually spending time by myself without the baby blanket of instant connection with my network of friends. It’s both terrifying and exhilarating. The bonus is that it really seems to lessen sporgulation. Note that I said “lessen” and not “get rid of.”