Tindernesia

I’ll admit I was very excited to try Tinder. When I was in Australia in early 2014 I remember hearing my friends talking about it and was interested. I didn’t have a smart phone at the time so I couldn't try it. When my $20 Samsung phone eventually broke, I finally caught up with the real world and got myself a smartphone. A month or so after that, I found myself single and bored and downloaded Tinder.

I will start by explaining that Tinder and most online dating websites work a little differently in Indonesia. In Australia, Tinder seems to be used to find a quick hook-up or casual sex or whatever you want to call it. In Indonesia, people mostly use these applications to find their soulmate or at least a serious relationship. 

Tinder seemed fine in the beginning. It was just fun and involved a lot of swiping left. I swiped left when I saw the guy with weird hair, the guy who used a photo of him on the toilet, one of my students and the countless profiles of guys in group photos (how can you tell which guy it is??). Then, I saw one of my housemates on Tinder. That was actually a little funny because Tinder said he was 2 miles away and I could literally see him upstairs. I swiped left. I saw a picture of a guy with masking tape over his mouth in the boot of a car pretending to be kidnapped. It seemed original so I swiped right. I saw a few other interesting people. I got a few matches. I started a few conversations. It all seemed to be going well. Only, it seemed like the conversations got a little bit too serious too quick. Where are you from? Where do you hangout? Where do you live? Where do you work? I didn’t really want to give out any personal details so most conversations ended with me using my favourite function of Tinder:  the “unmatch” function. I did actually meet up with one guy from Tinder at that stage (the guy with the kidnapping picture actually) but it didn’t go anywhere so I took a bit of a break from it all.

Several months later, I reinstalled Tinder. It was the same old story all over again: too many questions from the beginning or people wanting to meet up immediately. Eventually I met a guy who actually seemed nice. We talked for a bit. He seemed to have gone through a lot and we shared some stories with each other. I definitely saw him more as a friend than anything else but he was very nice. One night,  things got kind of weird. Out of nowhere he said this:

“At least, I wanna you to know what im planning to us. First, I want be relationship with you. An then im trying to ask you to be mosleam. An then we marry, have 1-3 childs. And die happyly.”

I didn’t really know what to say to that because it seemed like he had it all planned out and as someone with nothing planned out, I was confused.  The next morning, he apologised profusely and said that he had taken some medication and had a weird reaction and didn’t remember saying any of that at all. I decided to give him the benefit of the doubt but made it clear that I just wanted to be friends. Several weeks later, there were no more weird comments so we met for lunch in TP and he actually turned out to be a really nice person. We still chat sometimes but I will keep you posted if he has any other weird reactions to medications.

I deleted my Tinder account for a long period after that because I lost interest in dating but reinstalled it again in February during my trip Palembang. A few weeks after that, I was in hospital recovering from surgery when I started playing with Tinder again (due to boredom and my phone being my only source of entertainment in the hospital). At that time I met a 21 year old guy called Adit. I actually swiped right because I noticed from some of his photos were taken in Melbourne. I thought that maybe if someone was well-travelled they may be more open-minded and less likely to say/do something weird. Adit and I chatted for a while. He seemed nice. We exchanged Instagram usernames. He said that he wanted to be friends. I was happy with that. You can’t have too many friends right? One day, he asked if I wanted to get a coffee. I agreed and we met in Historica for coffee.

From the moment Adit came in he seemed very shy and nervous. I tried to keep the conversation going by asking a lot of questions. He answered with very short answers and the conversation never really got anywhere. I got a phone call at one point and decided to answer it (I wouldn’t usually do that but things were a bit awkward and the phone call seemed more interesting than anything else). Not long after that, I made up an excuse and went home. We would have spent less than an hour together. When I got home I already had a message from Adit asking if I wanted to meet up again. I decided to be honest and said that he seemed a little nervous and maybe it was better not to. He assured me that he was a cool guy and that he was just nervous when he first met someone but that he would be fine after that. I suggested that we could possibly watch a movie sometime. He seemed to like that suggestion and messaged back: “Ok cool. When? Tonight? Tomorrow?” I hadn’t really expected to meet in the next 24 hours so I just said: “I’ll let you know.”

Later that day, I got an Instagram notification: Adit has tagged you in a photo. I looked at the photo and quickly realised he must have taken a photo when I had answered the phone without me knowing. I felt a little weird about that. The final straw was this message that I received a day later:  

This was too much for me and I have now uninstalled Tinder (though I briefly reinstalled it to get the screenshot above) and am moving on with my life. Overall, I don’t recommend using Tinder unless you just want some weird stuff to happen to you so you can write a blog about it. For anyone looking to find your soulmate for real, I will blog again soon to let you know how it's really done.