I downloaded Tinder on Monday, out of curiosity.

Initially I kept getting shown women photos, which really puzzled me. And one woman’s profile kind of scared me. She said:

“Second try on here. Please see criteria:

• No inmates
• No married men
• No Y fronts”
  

I was a bit worried: “WTF?! What kind of people are ON here???!”

Eventually, I realised that the reason I was being shown women’s photos was because I accidentally selected those setting! Haha. Oops. But still slightly skittish given the woman’s profile criteria.

Anyway, I updated my settings and started browsing. And there was actually a tonne of pretty decent eye candy on Tinder! Not sure about personality, fit, chemistry. But as a distraction / window shopping, works perfectly well.

Yesterday a few matches sent me messages, I think largely during the day. I only replied quite late at night. Rather hoping to avoid actual interaction I think, which would feel, maybe too much, too intense for me now. But one of them was up late and replied, so we had an exchange of messages, which ended up being actually… quite fun.

He started off weirdly direct, which I was taken aback by. And I almost stopped. But I was in need of a distraction, I was safe behind a screen, I was anonymous, some of his words reminded me of someone I know, I figured I should try new things / be adventurous – life’s too short you know, and so I mentally shrugged and thought: “why not?”

The banter over Tinder ended up being really quite nice. Largely lighthearted, and playful, with moments of directness and honesty. He said: “Well if you can’t be honest on here what’s the point. No point in messing people around”

So true. Life is just too short.

He suggested meeting up. Even though he doesn’t look super like my type, I said okay. (Why not?) Then we called it a night.

We didn’t actually agree when / where to meet. Maybe he got cold or cool feet.

I’m chilled either way. But this could be fun. I found a head chef on there this morning. This could be like back in my early days of online dating when I really expanded my horizons and met all sorts of people – CGI designer, music producer… (okay, those were my most “left field” ones! The rest were probably boring folks)

Although last night at some point Tinder said I ran out of people. It’s hilarious – I didn’t even know that could happen!

Maybe this could be a good distraction after all. Not as bad an idea as my friend said it would be. I don’t need to find “mister forever”. What’s wrong with “mister for now”? People do that all the time, don’t they?