I hate online dating

I'm not terribly old, but I remember a time when you met someone in person, and if you got along maybe you would go on a date together and if you hit it off, maybe you would do more than that. You would be introduced to people by your friends and maybe things would turn out well for the two of you. If you were bold enough you could walk up to strangers in public and have a try at becoming friends and maybe more later. I met one of my best relationships in my life by doing just that at a Karaoke night in some lounge in a hotel. It was pretty great.

These days though, I feel like if you want to meet anyone to potentially start a relationship, you have to go through what feels almost like job interviews or as I have heard them referred to as, "sex interviews."

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Recently, I started having a go at using Tinder to meet people. I am not one of those people that is looking to hook up with someone for a one-night-stand nor am I looking to deceive people into sleeping with me and then abandoning them. Apparently though, this is what a lot of people use these sites for and I'm not so naive that I didn't already know this.

As someone who was genuinely looking for some real human connection in life, I have found these apps, which have become the norm, to be just a horrible development in human relations. You swipe right and left and every now and then someone also likes you... then 50% of those people are either trying to sell you something or are prostitutes.

I have met up with a couple of girls that I "met" on Tinder and it has been an extremely uncomfortable situation. We meet somewhere neutral and it almost feels like a peace accord between warring nations. Both of us are ill at ease and the conversation is difficult. We don't really know anything about one another and trying to make small talk becomes tiresome quickly. Neither of my meetups resulted in anything that felt good to me, and I can only presume that it was the same for the girls because we never went out again.

For people that are just looking to have sex I would imagine that this situation works out quite well for them because at least they know what they are both in this thing for. However, when I think about that sort of existence, which I probably could to if I wanted to, what sort of gratification are the two people getting out of that? I like sex as much as the next guy but I really don't think that is a good way to live your life and it is only going to result in feeling bad later. I would imagine that this experience is even more taxing on a woman than it is on a man.

The problem for me here is that I don't like the entire process but it seems to be the norm now. As a result I think that people who are simply hanging out in public that you otherwise might hit it off with, are reserved and instead expect some sort of magical digital intervention as far as their potential relationships are concerned. People don't talk to one another anymore and for me, this is just sad. I really don't like that this is what our entire world has become.