I’ve previously discussed some of the ins and outs of “traditional” online dating, such as thoughtful profile construction, assembling an array of photographs, the right frame of mind to be in when sending out messages, and some techniques for not only selling yourself truthfully yet convincingly, but also thinking critically about what you truly might be looking for in a match.

If it sounds to you like there’s a lot of work that goes into this shit, then yeah, you’re right.

So because I’ve grown a bit weary in what’s now month fifteen of my soulmate sojourn (or whatever) I’ve started to look for easy ways out and to cut corners where I can. Tinder it is!

Like a lot of people probably did (and do), at first I thought Tinder was a pretty stupid concept. Your “profile” consists almost entirely of just a few photos of yourself. There’s no search function since the app solicits nearly no information from users that could form the basis of a search. Instead Tinder presents you with a (seemingly) limitless number of people, served up one at a time and you just say yes or no to their photographs. (“Thumbs down, he’s holding a dead deer carcass…thumbs up, he looks good in a suit…thumbs down, she’s got a kid…a vigorous thumbs up, she’s giving a liquor bottle a blowjob…”)

Now I’m increasingly convinced that the Tinder people are really on to something.

It’s not just that the people on Tinder are, on average (as you’d expect from a photo-driven service), more physically attractive, but the effort involved in setting up a traditional online dating profile is staggering. It’s particularly burdensome when you’re picking yourself up from a failed former fling. With Tinder, all you do is open an app, pick some decent photos of yourself, and begin swiping. Elegant in its simplicity. So low-commitment that seemingly vast numbers of people have signed up (or at least it seems vast when you have to swipe one by one).

A reasonable person might object: “Sure, there’s a lot of attractive people on there, but that’s not all there is to a successful match! What about the dimensions of compatibility??!?!”

I dunno man. Water seeks its own level, or whatever. So far I’ve met the same caliber of women off Tinder as I met off of other sites – professionally employed, grad degree-holding/seeking, ambitious, etc. After investing some time into getting myself a decent main profile pic and boiling down my In Search of Lost Time-length OkCupid profile down to a much shorter (I dig Margaret Atwood’s short story from that link) 30 words, I’ve been getting more intelligent, attractive women willing to meet up with me than I have evenings free to spend with them.

Lest this sound like I’m just taking the opportunity to brag, I realize the same mechanism that’s bringing these women into my life is also bringing a bunch of super hot dudes into their lives, which is to say when Tinder delivers up an unending stream of interesting, attractive people, the inescapable implication of the way it shapes my perspective on dating is that it’s doing the same for the women on the other end. I’m not breaking ground here by observing that online dating can lead to embarrassment of riches type-dilemmas, but Tinder feels like some next level shit – a hyperreal expansion of possibilities and reduction of difficulty in meeting people. Imagine a slot machine where each pull is free – all it costs is the time you spend sitting there yanking the arm. How much do you have to win before you’re willing to walk away?

The ease with which you can meet people, I think, makes it harder to recognize your endless matches as individual human beings with unique perspective and experiences – and feelings. Unless you make conscious efforts to step back from the addictive game of aimless swiping right and left in your free time, it’s seductively easy to view any single person as entirely disposable. For any reason, or no reason at all, abandon your current contacts, open the app back up and make some new matches.

FUN REAL LIFE EXAMPLE! I “matched” with Julia, 24. We exchanged a few messages about this and that and agreed to meet at a neighborhood coffee shop. Then she cancelled and we rescheduled. Then she cancelled on the day of, and we rescheduled. Then she cancelled on the day of, told me “I promise I’m not really fickle, I’m just sick,” and we rescheduled. Then she cancelled on the day of and said she did not want to reschedule.

Which, being real for a sec, is it possible for any one person to be indispensable? For any of us with a lot of options, when is good good enough? And when good is good enough, will the other person agree?

After a break up one of my good friends told me, “It sounds like [ex’s name] had a lot of really great qualities, but you’ll find other people who have great qualities. They won’t have the same qualities as [ex’s name], but they’ll be wonderful in their own ways.” And time’s proven him right – I’ve met lots of people who are extraordinary in ways I never predicted and couldn’t have guessed in advance that I’d appreciate anyhow. Women with qualities I didn’t know I’d want to look for before I met women who possessed them.

All of this is to say I’m becoming a skeptic that the concept of “what I want” is something knowable – something I can access and work off of to achieve the goal of forming something meaningful and lasting with someone. My favorite author in my favorite novel wrote that “almost nothing important that ever happens to you happens because you engineer it.” So if it’s hard enough to sift through thousands of women’s profiles to identify promising prospects if I have criteria I know are what I’m looking for, think of how adrift I am browsing through Match.com or OkCupid profiles when I’ve lost faith in my judgments about who might be a good fit for me. And what if all the other compulsive swipers out there are coming to the same realizations I’m having?

Ah well. Got another Tinder match while writing this post. Time to figure out what to say to another hot woman I know nothing about.