I have a Tinder Google Doc

In which I am slightly psychotic but it helped me in the end

When I first moved cities, I had no idea how to make friends and meet people. To be fair, I don’t think I’m an expert after five or so years here, but I do think I know a bit better. If I moved to another city knowing what I know now — assuming I was still single — I don’t think I would look to Tinder, lol.

A lot of other people’s Tinder experiences are, frankly, more horrifying than mine, though I don’t mean to diminish the effects my “dates” (if you can call them that) have had on me. I joined this group recently, and the “red flags” and “tea” that people have been divulging on there about London’s sordid population of men warrant criminal charges. I wish I were exaggerating, but I’m not.

Anyway, my typical entry for a date includes a screenshot of their dating profile, the date of the first time we met, their star sign (if my sleuthing skills were good enough to find out), a recounting of our dates and convos, an emoji rating that encompasses my feelings of the person and the date, and a verdict on whether or not I would see them again.

A few passages from “Tinder Suxx”:

• Works for VSCO. Probably the tallest guy I’ve gone on a date with. Uses the 🤙sign in person unironically.

• Not super interesting to text with, but good conversation in person. He has a slight lisp, which is kind of cute. As you can see, his profile clearly says 35, but he is, in fact, 39.

• I should note that when we were conversing prior to meeting, he did say he liked Elon Musk so I should probably have taken that as a big fucking sign. Is the joke on me? Perhaps.

• I have to mention that he blocked me on WhatsApp in early August because I declined a bootycall that involved him coming over to my house (when my housemates were not at home, so I was pretty much alone). I got unblocked at some point in September to receive a dick pic lmfao

My journalling of my exploits fell by the wayside after some point. It didn’t seem worth it to casually quip about things that were, truthfully, quite hurtful. There is no emoji rating I could come up with that would adequately explain my feelings about the creative director who would only see me at his place¹ or the man who lived by himself and had a framed photo of JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure in his otherwise Spartan room. Yes, the anime. (At least he voted Labour, I guess.)

I started writing my recollection of these dates down because I thought I could write a humorous book about how dating people is rough. Like, “look at what this clown did,” and although there are times when I can laugh about these things — because I’m far away from the situation now, because I’m with someone I love, because I didn’t really want to be with them anyway — the why’s of their actions remain questions I don’t have an answer to. Besides, a lot of the writing happened in the early days of meeting these people. It turns out, I never write about the endings.

I suppose it’s not really that deep. People are just people, and they often come out of the woodwork to get what they want, and that’s it. More often than not, there is no malice involved. They don’t want to actively hurt you; they don’t really think about you at all. I know which is worse, but it changes depending on the day.

My flatmate is having a horrible time with dating currently, so it made me think about the time I was, too. I never really spoke about it, except to close friends, but I was seeing someone who was in an open relationship. For about three years, we saw each other about once a week, except of course, when I would fly home or during lockdown. After I came back from what would have been my last trip home in two years, we met up and he told me he was having a baby with his girlfriend of 16 years. I said I’d still see him.

Most of my time with London was — and still is — entwined with my relationship with him. It makes me really sad that I was in that place. While he was objectively nice and lovely with me, I feel like having put in a situation like that was a little traumatising. I was not in a good way, not really. Although I did meet someone I considered to be a friend, my world was, in some ways, smaller. I felt really closed off from the world, because of my fixation on this one aspect of it.

I wish I could tell you I ended things, because I woke up and realised he wasn’t being good to me. But, it was my current partner who said he would rather not me see other people, if that was okay. We had been seeing each other for about three months. It wasn’t an ultimatum, but I think I recognised the glimmers of something real and true and big with him, and so the decision to end things was difficult, but also not so.

I’m often scared that a part of me would have chosen to stay. I’m glad I was brave that day and chose what I felt was best for me. I cried about the other guy in his bed for the entire day. I don’t know how he hasn’t held that over my head, not even when we argue.

1. I literally have not seen this man outside of his flat. He cooks for me, and we watch YouTube until it gets so boring I just go home. That was obviously the plan, because who watches that much weird cooking YouTubes when they have someone over? One time, he kept agonising about a headache and acted for his life, so I just left instead of staying over, lol.