Swiper no swiping!

Hey, I’m Kat. Italian. Outgoing. Love animals; I have a cat and a dog. Enjoy being outdoors. Book nerd. Gun lover.

This is how my Tinder profile reads whenever someone wants to learn more about who the girl is in the photo. I’m newly single and decided one day to throw myself into the dating app world. I’ve of course had friends offer me tips and ways to meet men, but I live out in the middle of nowhere. The bars I can visit have nothing but young college children at them and they aren’t at all what I am looking for. But then again, I don’t even really know what I am looking for; we will get into more of that later.

I jumped headfirst into Tinder and Bumble, both dating apps that require you to swipe left or right if you think the person in the photo and their profile matches with what you are looking for. I’ve always grown up being told do not judge a book by it’s cover. Something that has been ingrained into my brain since I can remember, but here I am doing exactly the opposite and judging someone based on their five photos and how they describe themselves in under five hundred characters. It’s unfair to look at someone and think they could be a good person or a jerk based on the limited information shared, but such is life I suppose.

I started on Tinder first due to it being the most popular. The first few people on the app I swiped left to. Then my coworker grabbed my phone and tried to look at the profile but… she swiped instead. Then she started panicking and kept swiping. I finally just had to take my phone off of her so she could stop swiping to everybody. I couldn’t help but laugh as this was all unfolding due to her facial expressions as she was swiping. She was either completely disinterested in the guy or intrigued for me.

Later that night I was able to sit down at my house with some peace and quiet and really get a feel for the app as well as for some of the men on there. Now I’ve heard the stories how everyone on there is looking for a hookup and only wants nudes or something along those lines. But as I started reading more and more profiles I realized that that was not necessarily the case. A lot of them stated to not even bother swiping right unless you were serious about them and weren’t looking for a quick hookup. I completely understood the disclaimer, hell I so desperately wanted to put one on my own. The beauty of Tinder is I have the power to match with these guys, so if I didn’t like who they were from their short bio then I knew I could just swipe left. I didn’t really see anyone that night I found enthralling, or worth a swipe right.

As I laid in bed that night thinking back on the day of people I had viewed on the app all I could hear in the back of my head was Dora the Explorer screaming “Swiper no swiping!!” I couldn’t help but laugh to myself thinking the one thing I remembered from that show that actually related to my life boiled down to a dating app…