Dating : Drunken Tinder With a Side of Fish

If anybody could fail at a dating app, that would be me (hand raised). I get nervous meeting men even in everyday life. That whole “getting to know you phase” drives me nuts. All the overthinking to find the right words to say gives me anxiety. If I could skip the “getting to know you phase” of dating, I would totally get an A, but right now, I deserve an F. I am working on it, give me a break.

So, if I am terrible at engaging with men I am interested in, how did I end up on Tinder you ask? Well, I was out drinking on a Wednesday evening after work. I know it was a Wednesday because I was at a “Wine Down Wednesday” event in downtown Orlando. I was out with a coworker and a friend of mine. Girls’ night out.

My coworker was on Tinder swiping left and right and showing us the guys on the app that she matched with. In my drunken stupor, I said out loud, “that looks like fun, I wanna play too.” I barely got the words out, when my coworker grabbed my phone, found a pic in my phone that she described as “hot”, inputted a few random information, and in less than 5 minutes, I had a Tinder profile.

Well, that evening was fun because Tinder was literally a game for me. Drunken Tinder was amazing. I could see why people loved using the app. It was like I was shopping, but for men, I was hooked. I equated swiping left or right to shopping for shoes and this girl loves shopping for shoes, well, back then I did. Ugh, writing that made me cringe because men are not shoes. But I digress.

After a few days on the app, my coworker and I shared profiles of men we thought were perfect for us, we exchanged and laughed at the horrible pickup lines we received, and we exchanged stories of our Tinder matches. She brought up that a lot of the guys on Tinder were shirtless holding a fish in their profile pic. I hadn’t noticed that, but after she brought it to my attention, sure enough, the fish became a common motif.

Maybe it’s a Florida thing? Or, did the fish have a different hidden meaning? To indicate that they were straight. Whatever it was, the shirtless guys holding the fish were everywhere.

Needless to say, I had a few matches, but nothing ever became of them. Unfortunately, I didn’t make the effort to communicate with any of the men outside of the app. I used the app when I was bored or tipsy and needed to play the game and that’s all it was, a game.

Unfortunately, it became overwhelming to keep up with all the connections on the app. What started out as a fun drunken game morphed into a full-time commitment. And to top it off, I kept seeing male coworkers on Tinder, oh hell no, not them. So, I was out and uninstalled Tinder from my phone and never looked back.