Over the past two years, I’ve dated many kinds of guys–and not a single one I met on Tinder. “Who’s the guy you’re talking to this month?” my friends would often say.
And each month featured a guy worse than the last.
Freshman year brought the guy who made me pay for his twenty-dollar salmon at my own birthday dinner after his three credit cards were rejected. Then came the guy my friend told off for his incessant text messages and following that, the guy who spoke way too much while we hooked up (and never turned the lights off). Sure, they were nice guys, but none of them screamed “meet the parents” material.
So what made me think that I would find my Prince Charming on an app like Tinder? The truth is, I didn’t think I could.
Earlier in the semester, I met someone with the potential to become more than a friend with benefits. He took me out for frozen yogurt, clicked with all my friends and always supported my articles. But just three weeks into seeing each other, he gave me an ultimatum. He told me to choose between him and a guy I spoke to back home. Apparently, another girl wanted to husband him up and I was standing in the way.
After a night making out under the stars, I ended our relationship. From then on, every time I met someone in a bar, library or even in an elevator, something went wrong. Maybe God was suggesting I go fish in a different pond.
So what better ocean out there than Tinder, where Greek life fish, liberal arts major fish, like-to-get-their-grind-on fish and even fish-holding fish swim? Two weeks after Ultimatum Boy, I downloaded Tinder out of desperation. For twenty minutes, I swiped right on plenty of guys who fit my type: tall, dark and handsome…Israeli Jews? Oops, my location was still set in Jerusalem. LDRs were definitely not my type.
I changed my location, but the guys who popped up just didn’t interest me. Swiping felt strangely comparable to holding auditions for a beauty pageant. One guy in particular hit me with a “you’re hot” comment, and I chatted with him for a couple of hours just to procrastinate on my American 19th Century Lit paper.
But then I matched with someone different. We shared a bunch of mutual friends, and I wondered how I hadn’t met him before. Did my so-called friends hide him in a closet, or had he just escaped the black hole where all decent guys live? My lucky match wore a suit in one of his profile pics (a total plus) and seemed tall with brown eyes and hair–just my type, so I swiped right.
The first thing he said to me was “cute dog.” For the first time on Tinder, someone wanted to learn about my life rather than how to work the zipper on my pants. Our conversation spurred from our love of Israel and our eye-opening experiences on birthright this summer. After texting long paragraphs for a week straight, we eventually met at a McDonald’s on a Friday night with all our friends. I nervously avoided eye contact with him the whole time, but my best friends knew from the way I spoke about him that I’d found my Prince Charming.
Two weeks later, I deleted Tinder–for once it had succeeded. I fell head over heels from our first “Netflix and Chill” date. We sat on his bed eating sushi and drinking wine and shared secrets with each other that we rarely told anyone.
Two months have passed since I swiped right on him, and I still smile every day. Maybe the power of the universe set me up for all those bad dates and horrible hook ups to eventually meet him. Maybe he hid somewhere for a while before I finally learned that life’s not a Rom-Com, and you never meet your Prince Charming at a ball.
In the hook up culture we live in, the right guy might only be a right swipe away.
