Mayank Shekhar: Love me Tinder, love me true

Tinder makes one introspect on what's a deal-breaker in dating. Pic/Getty Images

Like you, I'm in a relationship with my phone. Except, my situation is a lot more literal. Over the past few months of navigating on Tinder, currently the world's most addictive time-pass for single people - swiping left/right to random picture postcards on the cellphone - I have gone from being a complete stranger to someone making a match, befriending, sharing intimate thoughts, getting even closer, developing comfort level, to gradually, an ever wid­ening communication gap, minor upheavals in the relationship, and finally, a break-up.

This, without even having ever met the person! Maybe because there was just no time to meet, or perhaps even less inclination from either end.

Have dating apps wholly redefined rules of human contact? Have they liberated us from the burden of int­ense relationships - possessiveness being the flipside of love - and potential heartbreak? Too soon to tell.

Here's what it's done for me. Vastly expanded my circle of female acquaintances - from high-school teacher, owner of a hosiery products company, flight attendant, real estate agent… They're all out there, oddly willing to share life's experiences with a person, who isn't too sure, is even a proper journalist!

What's changed? Have women just become more open to sharing space with unknown men if it's within a socially distant, yet sufficiently close corner of a cellphone? Possibly. This is a new privilege, especially for the Indian man. God knows he's lived under the shroud of a really bad rep/press, often clubbed together en mass as the creep - the stranger who tactlessly expresses his sexual desire to a woman, on the street, at a bar/house-party, on the train, by the bus-stop...

Yeah, that stranger is danger. Women have rightly exercised precaution, shunning him (and the few ‘good men', as a result), preferring to remain secure in the company of family, and friends from school, college, or the professional network. Even chat-rooms of the early Internet - the precursor to Tinder - were chiefly populated by men, some of whom even pretended to be women.

Sure, my experience with Tinder has been an interesting mix. I've pissed off one person for sure - in Lucknow, asking the girl, "Woah, frickin eh, women in Lucknow also on Tinder?" Khatam. I've been surprised by sudden spike in the looks department while swiping in Ludhiana. The women showing up on my screen were from Lahore, which is only 160 kilometres away (so much for banning Pakistani artistes!).

Then there was this woman, who within a minute of a match, on a lark, in the dead of the night, showed up at my apartment door, only to reveal that she wasn't the picture I'd seen on the app, turning this into a bizarre blind date, with me half-wishing I was blind in the first place.

Frivolities aside, Tinder makes one seriously introspect on what's a deal-breaker in dating. And I don't mean this by way of colour, caste, religion, etc. One would like to believe the evolved of the species are past that already (okay, that's another conversation). I mean it more along the lines of - drinker/non-drinker, morning person/night person.

And well, this moment of epiphany that occurs, as they all do, while I am stoned, in Banaras, imagining a replica of the Eiffel Tower, lit in pink (which actually turns out to be true, near Assi ghat), and my phone beeps. The girl who I could have met for a bit in Delhi on my way back, writes, "Hey, you remember the car accident I'd told you about?" "Of course." "I didn't tell you this, but since we're meeting, I lost my legs in that crash." My heart sinks. I begin to re-examine my conscience. There is silence on the screen. And then she writes, "I was kidding." I'm sorry. This is not a joke.

Besides several floozies, and a couple of psychos and married men that they've accidentally encountered, my female friends' experiences on Tinder oscillate between, "It's fun", to "too laborious." None of their ‘Tinder relationships' last beyond a month tops. Sensing an inherent flaw in an app that's designed like a slot-machine, with people playing to win, and then going back to swipe more, rather than message and settle on the person that matched, Hinge, Tinder's main rival, recently revamped its platform to make it more about people's personalities rather than looks. Judging someone on personality over physical features is also a judgment, by the way.

I don't know how many people go to Hinge. Here's what they don't get about Tinder. It's not about building intense relations. It's about validation. God knows how many men (and I'm sure women) seek that all their life. And then there's this gent I meet at the party bragging about how he swipes left to all the hot women on the app. They've rejected me forever. This is my power. I reject them. Dodo, she doesn't know!

Mayank Shekhar attempts to make sense of mass culture. He tweets @mayankw14. Send your feedback to mailbag@mid-day.com