Wading through the pool of Tinder judgment

I recently was introduced to Tinder, the “dating” app that basically narrows down the hunt for a potential mate to a few pictures, a few sentences about yourself and whether you happen to share any friends or interests on Facebook. So, you know, a really great depiction of who you are as a person that helps others see the real you.

And it’s downright addicting. You just log on to the app and it instantly serves up profiles of whoever is in a pre-determined radius around you. You’re given one profile at a time and you can’t move on to the next profile until you’ve made your choice about the current person (and you’re only given two choices): YES or NO, i.e. HOT or ugly. You’re basically Rachel McAdams in Mean Girls deciding on whether or not they can sit with the Plastics. It seems harmless, but when you boil it down, it’s incredibly judgmental and we should all feel ashamed of ourselves for indulging in these reindeer games. Shouldn’t we?

I mean, who am I kidding? I’ve been on OK Cupid and despite the fact that people have spent an awful lot of time filling out a detailed description of who they are, where they’re from, what they’re looking for in a potential partner, their likes and dislikes and any other piece of information they deem worthwhile for others to know, what it all comes down to is how they appear in their photos. If there’s a photo with one crazy eye, or bad angle or terrible outfit, I’m not even going to bother reading what they have to say. I’ve already made up my mind they’re not a good fit for me.

So I feel conflicted when on Tinder. On one hand it seems like this is a revolutionary way to find a potential mate. Disregard having to get to know someone, just give me the goods up front so I don’t have to waste my time chatting endlessly before meeting you only to figure out I’m not attracted to you. But on the other hand it seems like we’re all becoming a bit too cynical and jaded and superficial. Shouldn’t our quest to find a potential partner be less focused on looks and more on who the person is? Like Laurie Metalf says in Desperately Seeking Susan: “Beauty fades.”

I was hanging out with friends last night and met one of their co-workers who was along for the ride. To say he was hot would be an understatement. He looks like Christian Bale in that (terrible) sci-fi movie Equilibrium. Basically, the guy is someone I would post as a gymspiration. If he was at the gym I would covet his muscles and complain to my personal trainer that I wasn’t making progress fast enough. But then I would also make an assumption about Christian Bale. Because he has an amazing body with heavage I would push people down a flight of stairs to have, I would assume that he was stuck up and pretentious and self-involved and wouldn’t be interested in speaking me if even just on a platonic level. However, those assumptions would be misguided.

Christian Bale and I chatted the entire evening amidst the crazy antics of the evening and I was surprised to learn that he experienced some of the same things in life just like I did. He had experienced heartache, he had checked up on his ex on social media, and he is currently dealing with being single and trying to navigate through that complex and unsteady journey of finding yourself. Yes, he’s muscled and beautiful, but hey look at that – he’s also a person with feelings and emotions too. Who knew?!

And I realize that the entire reason Christian Bale and I were even able to speak to each other in the first place was because we had mutual friends, which removed any questions of the intentions for the evening. This was not a set-up, I was not meeting him to figure out if I would want to sleep with him. I was not left wondering if he was interested in me. Plain and simple, this was just friends hanging out. And because the questions were answered, and the judgments were gone and the effort of trying to put on the best “me” possible didn’t have to happen, it made it really easy to just be myself as opposed to trying to be the person I thought somebody else wants to see. It was refreshing. If only first dates could go as smoothly…

Now I know that not every gorgeous muscled guy in the world is going to be as friendly or funny as Christian Bale, but it reaffirmed those age-old sayings I repeat to myself all the time: “Don’t judge a book by it’s cover”/”Beauty’s where you find it”/”If you can’t love yourself, how the hell you gonna love somebody else.”

So it’s nice to be reminded that love or friendship isn’t something as simple as HOT or UGLY. It’s more than that. Sometimes, getting to know a person the old-fashioned way, by actually talking to them in-person, can be an eye-opening experience where you learn something about another person and you also learn something about yourself in the process.