Madison Shumway

Life Editor

So, I recently returned to Tinder.

If there were ever an appropriate time to use the cliche “mixed bag,” it’d be in reference to my experience with that infamous pink flame.

I’ve enjoyed bizarre luck on the app. I dated, casually and at once, an adventurous poet who wandered between various national parks, a marathon-running dentist, an Ivy-educated professional with a sailboat, a Brazilian biologist with pristine taste in music and fashion and a rock-climbing barista who remains one of three men under 30 able to engage me in a political conversation without my eyes rolling back permanently into my head.

During this period of my life, I often encountered incredulity: how the hell are you finding these people?? I would shrug, wryly, give up the secret. The question then became, how the hell are you finding these people ON TINDER?!?! My answer remains a cool ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

After a solid three months on Tinder, I got tired of the swiping scene. That Brazilian biologist became my (ex-)boyfriend, who recently pursued his passion and moved to Europe for the PhD position of his dreams. Rude, I know. His departure inspired my latest venture into the sometimes exhilarating, often disappointing world of online dating. We’re comparing notes, and, honestly, Tinder seems pretty bleak no matter where in the world you swipe.

See, to find the five matches I consider Tinder successes, I had to navigate thousands of terrible profiles, at least 700 of which included an anthem by XXXtentacion. I had to view photo after photo of separate individuals somehow executing the exact same selfie pose in front of a toothpaste-encrusted bathroom mirror. I had to field pick-up lines that ranged from naively nerdy to completely depraved. I had to accidentally super-like an adult man whose primary photo was of six decapitated deer heads, and I had to awkwardly and silently unmatch when he subsequently messaged me, “hey beautiful.”

My first foray into the world of internet-facilitated hookup culture was messy. I swiped right far too often, resulting in matches who manic-pixie-dream-girled me and professed their love within four exchanged messages. I matched with one seemingly acceptable person, agreed to a date, did not enjoy the date, agreed to a second date (???), then proceeded to participate in the worst second date of all time, a literal three-day living nightmare that included a screening of “Interstellar” and a cleaning spree at a hoarder house covered in mouse poop. I don’t know which was more excruciating.

That experience aged me 10 years and quickly taught me a lesson: be ruthless in your judgment. After a while on Tinder, you learn to swipe left 97 percent of the time. You also learn to take people at face value, figuratively and literally. If you’re not that into Greg’s sparse goatee, you are under no obligation to engage in an underwhelming conversation with him. And when he tells you, with bad grammar and a string of emojis, that he’s been cheated on before and now has trust issues, or is “sometimes an ass hole,” or proclaims himself as a vape god, you should assume that the red flag he’s offered up front looks 100 times more crimson in person.

Sure, swiping left isn’t foolproof. I once swiped left on a man whose only photo depicted a tree. He found my Facebook profile, sent messages and call requests for a full six months, then posted angry online reviews of my place of work trashing its terrible reporters. But you save a lot of time, and avoid many requests for nudes, if you discriminate mercilessly and hit that red X habitually.

Even then, swiping gets depressing. See enough negging bios, ball gags (no joke), extraneous maple leaf emojis, surprise appearances from your exes, photos of pickup trucks and professors whose age range definitely should not be set that low on a college campus, and you can start to lose hope in humanity.

In my approximately two weeks back on Tinder, I’ve matched with nine people, messaged six, and met zero. I’ve ghosted, I’ve spurned super likes, I’ve encountered three people in a row who listed their favorite song as “Thank God I’m a Country Boy.” Despite my previous online dating successes, I’m almost ready to delete the app and commit to a life of solitude. Until then, I’ll stoke the embers of this perhaps futile fire and stay swiping.