Hopeless love and the trials of Tinder

During a particularly frosty Friday night in Leeds, I found myself - rather optimistically - trying to warm up my basement bedroom using candles alone, wavering my hands over the flame as if it were a sort of sad, student-y bonfire. My heating was being temperamental; and I had been slowly moping about the house with a blanket draped over my shoulders,  wearing slightly battered, calf-length (yes, calf-length) teddy bear slippers that are so embarrassing, I am currently questioning why I didn't leave them behind when I entered my twenties. It's too late now. They're not going anywhere.

The image I am trying to create for you here, is that I looked completely ridiculous. The time had come where I had to begrudgingly accept that Summer was officially over. Nights were getting darker, and my Yorkshire tea consumption was getting more extreme. Afternoon had drifted into evening, and suddenly I was sprawled out on my bed repeatedly listening to Queen - Somebody to Love. It was around the middle of my twelfth repeat, when I received one of the most hard hitting notifications yet: I had run out of Tinder swipes. The App immediately asked me if I wanted to upgrade to premium. I did not want to upgrade to premium. The last thing I wanted was to pay £3.99 just so that Brad, 23, from Manchester, could tell me how he is ‘glad to have finally met a girl with depth’. Luckily for him, he would be blissfully unaware that his backhanded, devastatingly misogynistic ‘compliment’ had already made me fling my phone across the room in horror. These are the joys of Tinder. Slightly offensive compliments, messages that say nothing other than ‘legs’ with a few heart eye emoticons and people asking me if I’ve ever watched Fight Club. The worst, though, undoubtedly being the people who act like you owe them an immediate reply, as if swiping right on a picture of a man in his mid-twenties wearing a Hawaiian shirt in a club were the equivalent to a marriage contract. Is it?

I’m not even completely sure why I use Tinder, other than so I can occasionally 'match' with long haired musicians and boost my own ego. I’m definitely at a sort of crossroads at the moment where I’m not desiring anything really casual, but equally wouldn’t want to delve into anything super serious. So, to establish some sort of middle ground, I decided to change my bio to ‘Not looking for anything serious, just someone willing to adopt a cat with me.’ It didn’t work, of course. Exactly a minute later, a man messaged me saying ‘sex?’

I didn’t reply.

There are only so many times I can tell someone what I study at University, no I don’t have a strong Welsh accent, yes you can see a picture of my dog, no sorry I really don’t want to meet up with you for a ‘spoon’ at three in the morning when you haven’t even said hello to me yet and your profile picture looks like it was nabbed from Google images. This isn’t me slating dating Apps, though. For some people, Tinder really works. A lot of dating sites do. It brings people, who might not have met under any other circumstances, together. It allows you to get a quick insight into another person’s life, through a few photos and maybe a witty bio. Or just a bio with lots of emoji faces in it, but that’s usually ironic. I think. As you can tell, I haven’t been able to establish this yet.

But, all aubergine emoji’s and ‘looking to leave the single market before we do’ lines aside, I had to ask myself how I had managed to swipe through so many people in such a short space of time. It was crucial that I considered what was compelling me to fill that hopeless romantic void within me; the one that occasionally becomes a little deeper whenever I watch Notting Hill, or every time I see somebody on my Twitter timeline getting engaged to the love of their life. Maybe I’m clinging on to the annoying little romantic ideas that tell me my person is out there, and if I don’t actively look for them, they’ll just slip away and we will never cross paths.

I recently read Dolly Alderton’s personal essay called ‘Hopeless Romantic’, written in collaboration with The Pound Project. There was one line in particularly that struck me. Dolly explains how one day, walking through Soho, she glanced through the window of a candle-lit, cosy restaurant and decided that it would be her place, with her person. I had never related so deeply with someone else’s description of ‘hopeless’ love. People like me are constantly waiting for our Julia Roberts to walk through the door of our travel book shop, or for our Harry to run through the streets of New York on New Year’s Eve so they can confess their love. That’s what us romantics do, we write film scripts inside our head. We create worlds full of love and passion only to have them shattered every time people, who we have completely embellished inside our own heads, stray from being the William Thacker’s we convinced ourselves they were.

The difference for me now is that romantic love does not feel like the missing puzzle piece in my life. It is merely a cherry on top. My life is full and rich because of my family and friends. I have laughter and happiness in my life every day. I have inside-jokes that hold so many layers to them that it would take three days to explain what they mean to a stranger. I am not searching for romantic love, I’m simply open to it. And considering a few months ago I wrote about how I had fallen out with the idea of it all together, I think that’s pretty good progress.