tinder

Sometime last week a good friend of mine, who is also someone I work with, and another work colleague got right into tinder.

Listening to them on the office was fairly amusing;

'No. No. No. Yes. No. Why's he got a girl in his pic? No. No. Headless, but he's got a nice bod. No. Yes. No. No. OMG I swiped the wrong way, how do I go back?!'

They suggested that I get in on it as well, which I ignored. From what I can tell, tinder is an app mainly aimed at one night stands designed for the heterosexual world. That was the reason I had ignored it for so long. I had no place there.

Dating apps for gay woman don't seem to exist. There is Her, but I've not really gotten along with it, and it doesn't work in the same way that tinder or Grindr does.

So on Friday night, just after enjoying a vegetable biryani, my mate convinced me to download tinder. So I sat there setting it up on my phone while we waited for the bill.

I started swiping a long, a couple left, a couple right, and in under a minute, to the amazement of my friend, and myself, I got a match.

I got home and in under an hour I managed 15 matches and had a couple of conversations on the go. I felt bad for misjudging tinder. I hadn't been expecting that many gay girls to be using it. Had I been wrong all along?

Not quiet. The girls I have been chatting too are queer ladies (phew!), and my matches seem to be a mix of gay and bi girls.

The problem with tinder, for me, is that a lot of the woman on my screen are straight woman looking for men. I suppose in a way it's not much of a big deal, if I swipe right for yes on a straight woman, the only way we are going to match is if she does the same for me, which isn't going to happen. So it is fairly harmless. But it does mean that a lot of my 'browsing' as it were, is probably a waste of time.

The other glaring issue is that despite selecting 'only woman', I still get a load of men being shown, who I obviously have no interest in.

Where my straight friends quickly make a decision to swipe whatever way they do, which is why they also keep swiping the wrong way, I have to go into peoples bios to look for clues. Some girls declare that they are gay or bi. Others don't, so I scroll through their pictures to help make my mind up.

If tinder could iron out these little bugs, it would be really good, until someone comes up with something better for the LGBT crowd.