Tinder Hearted

How did a dating app become my longest-running relationship?

- By Allison P. Davis

I first downloaded Tinder in the spring of 2013, seven months after it launched. I'd heard about it as a concept (Grindr for straights) but felt exempt from needing it until one evening at the tail end of a drawn-out breakup with someone I'd told myself I would marry. We were at a restaurant in San Francisco, having one of too many brutal good-bye dinners that led to this-is-the-last-time-I-swear sex, and I put the app on my phone in front of him. He stoically chugged his negroni while I marveled at the hundreds, presumably thousands of men who were waiting for me on the other end, should he decide to go through with the breakup. "Look!" I said, waving my iPhone 5 in his face. (I didn't mention that at this early point in the app's history, it was mostly populated by 20-year-old college students and S.F. tech bros who exclusively wore free T-shirts from start-ups.) By June, my boyfriend had gone through with the breakup and moved on-quickly and not via app to a woman he'd met through mutual friends. I wanted to die. But instead of the sweet relief of death: Tinder.

That July, after several swipes and false starts and conversations about "logistics" with friends who, like me, had downloaded the app but never gone out with a match, I had my first actual Tinder date: Jameson. Either his bio had a joke about "taking a shot of Jameson" or my opening message did. I'd chosen a pale-blue minidress that showed some tit but not too much it because I was meeting him straight after work. And he'd chosen happy hour at an Irish pub in Alphabet City that was dive-y but not too dive-y. I'd chosen him because he had hair like Felicity-era Scott Speedman, and while nothing he said was that impressive, it also wasn't boring or offensive, which I'd already recognized as hallmarks of most Tinder conversations.