The Lady Vanishes (or, “Kids today….”)

I wrote about how deftly Tinder handles rejection in my original paean to the app.

If you haven’t used Tinder, there are two possible moments of rejection – before you’ve ever interacted with someone, and after.

Before you interact with someone, you can reject her (or him) by simply swiping their photo off the lefthand side of your screen (or by tapping the “x” at the bottom of your screen). Doing this erases those you reject from your existence forever, and for all they know, you never even saw them. They can do the same to you. There’s no notification, nothing.

After you interact with someone, it’s a little different. Tinder maintains a list of all the people with whom you’ve “matched.” At any time, you can “unmatch” someone (in the version of Tinder I first downloaded, only a month or so ago, this was called “blocking,” but they’ve since softened it). Unmatching causes the person to disappear from your list of matched people – and it causes you to disappear from her or his list.

This is the part that can be odd – and I’ll give you an example.

The other day, I was interacting with a woman. I thought it was a fun, friendly flirtation. I imagined there might come a time when we met, when we might even fuck. There was lots of teasing back and forth, and then… poof. She was simply gone from my list. No “good-bye,” no “thanks, it’s been fun.” I’m sure I didn’t notice right away. Rather, after a few hours had passed and there was no reply to my last message, I checked back, maybe to see if she’d been logged in, or to re-read whatever I’d sent last. And there she wasn’t.

With me, this tends not to happen so much with women my age, but as they get younger, it happens with greater frequency.

The kids today….

2 comments

  1. that seems a little reminiscent of the app Grindr. I hear from my gay male friends that, that is quite common(when they’re using that app).

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