To Swipe or Not To Swipe?

The other night during my usual pre-bedtime tinder swipe-fest I came across an unusual “profile”. It was Tinder himself! (Herself?) Aged 25, 1km away and as of now, was active 1 week ago. I’ve included the three profile photo screenshots in this post for your reference. The profile asks, “Have a cool tinder story?”. I was intrigued, so I swiped right.

To give you some backstory, I first joined tinder back in 2013 when I was working as an associate producer on CBC’s “Steven and Chris”. My brother had just recently met his girlfriend on the app and suggested I also give it a try.  She seemed lovely and they seemed to hit it off so I thought why not. I would say back then I’d give my entire tinder experience the average rating of being “fine”. After going on one or two tinder dates that ended up feeling like a bit of a waste of time I deleted the app. I was busy working on this fast paced show during the day and was preparing for the GMAT at night, so to be completely honest I probably shouldn’t have been going out on dates anyway, let alone expecting anything to come from them.

So, fast forward about two years later and I’m finished the first year of my MBA (yay, passed the GMAT, Smart!) I can finally breathe again and am being reintroduced to my social life with a summer free of classes and assignments. Mind you, I had a summer internship with Etsy, but it generally left my evenings and weekends free, prime dating times! So I reinstalled tinder with little expectations and the simple goal of going on a few dates. Dates that without the help of this app would probably never happen because Toronto is a cold, anti-social, cliquey city and meeting people out at bars and social events just doesn’t seem to happen. I hope other people feel the same way, otherwise….awkward…

So tinder it was! And this second time around I saw a massive change in the app. First of all, after only two years there were soooo many more tinder users. Also, I was coming across people I knew IRL much more frequently, and it seemed that I shared a mutual connection with every other person I swiped by. I found people to be much more forward with their purposes for going on tinder (dating, hookups, threesomes, swingers …if you can name it, its on tinder) and in the end I met some lovely people and had some nice dates. I also met some gross people too but that’s for another type of blog I think or for when I have too many drinks and think they're funny stories to tell. 

Anyway, fast-forward to last week when I came across this tinder profile asking for my tinder stories. It has me wondering, what is tinder up to? Apparently if you email them a cool tinder story, could be anything about “friends, dates, adventures, marriages, travel and everything in between” you can win free tinder gear.  I highly doubt Tinder is doing this freebee giveaway out of the goodness of their hearts. They are up to something! So to find out, I’ve emailed them a story and I’ll let you know if they get back to me (and what likely useless tinder gear I get). But aside from possible prizes, what I’m most curious about is why Tinder is collecting these stories? My television producing background makes me think they’re developing some sort of show, which given the level of garbage on the air these days, could be very likely. Is tinder writing a book? Starting a radio show or podcast similar to “the moth” where real people tell real stories, but they’re all focused on tinder tales? I think this initial call out for stories could be a number of things. Could gathering casts and stories from dating apps like tinder be the new way of casting reality television programs? It may sound crazy but I could definitely see it happening.

All in all, I wouldn’t say I’m bothered by tinder’s request for stories but I am definitely curious to discover the end goal here. Let me know what you think might be going on!