A year to know if it’s possible to find your love on Tinder

Technology is more and more advanced and is mainly reflected in our cell phones, making our lives look more and more like the Black Mirror series, in which people get to know each other through apps and receive a percentage of love compatibility. Is the series so far from the reality we live in? Is it possible to find our soul mate only through dating apps?

To try to answer these questions, today we are going to tell the story of a guest of Incrível.club who, for an entire year, actively tried to find her great love on one of the most used apps today, Tinder.

Hi, my name is Julia and I use Tinder. This sounds like the beginning of a speech by a person who goes to a meeting for addicts, like Alcoholics Anonymous. And to a certain extent it is.

My epic on Tinder started a few years ago. Two of my friends were already using the app. After listening to all kinds of stories, many of them super fun, I decided to give it a try. But I wanted to meet someone for a serious relationship, not just someone for something quick.

And I got lucky on the first try: I started dating the first guy I ever met.

But life is not always like a fairy tale. After a relatively long relationship, we ended up breaking up. And that’s when Tinder got me. That’s why last year was definitely the year of meetings (laughs), from which I drew many conclusions and which made me experience the most fun situations. And these are the stories I’m going to tell.

Most of the time we are invited for coffee or just for a walk. The cinema is part of the program of a second date, because during the session it is not possible to talk. If we are invited to a club or party, it is a sign that the person does not want anything serious.🇧🇷 In fact, it means that the person is simply looking for a companion for an event. I once invited a guy to a music festival so I wouldn’t be alone. That is, if you are invited or invited to an event with a lot of people, better keep an eye on the person’s intentions.

But once something different happened. I arranged to meet a boy downtown. I quickly felt good energy, but right after we greeted each other and he decided to take me somewhere else, I asked, “Where are we going?”. He replied, “How so? Let’s see the game”. We actually went to see a football game with his friends. Not that I have anything against him, but he hardly paid any attention to me, and that’s why we didn’t see each other again.

I once lived a very emblematic story in this regard. I met a guy who was on vacation in Spain. He had several photos in his profile: in two of them he couldn’t see his face, in others he was sitting on a chair, with his legs crossed, and he was in profile. It didn’t seem strange to me because, from the messages we exchanged, he seemed like a very interesting guy. Also, in addition to texting, she sent me a bouquet of flowers and got two tickets (for me and a friend of mine) to an amazing festival I always wanted to go to.

When he came back from vacation, we arranged to go out. He had the detail of picking me up at home, even though I lived on the other side of town. I went out and didn’t find him. He told me: “But I’m here, next to the red car”.

And that’s when I saw a boy who was beating my chest. That’s when I felt (and this happens a lot when you use Tinder) that I wanted to go back in time., but I had to go on, because he had already seen me. I continued, already imagining the conversation I would have with my friend Anna about this meeting over tea in her kitchen after it was all over. But I told myself that maybe all was not lost, and we went downtown. The entire conversation was actually one big, super boring monologue about how he adores his dog. His tone only changed when he spoke in his Cadillac, something that happened often. I wanted to kill myself right there, inside that damn Cadillac.

This is something completely inexplicable: when you see a person, you immediately understand whether or not you could have a relationship with them. Even if he seems like the man of your dreams, in some cases you feel like it just doesn’t have a future. I tried to convince myself otherwise, but intuition, as usual, won again.

Another example was when I met a guy who, at first, seemed like the ideal man. He was handsome, traveled a lot, talked about work in an interesting way, and in general he was an interested person: he talked about environmental problems, he showed me films and documentaries, etc. And look how few times people think about subjects that are not related to their own biography. The only negative thing: in the profile picture he appeared without a shirt. And a picture with a bare chest is always a sign of one night standthat is, that the person is in the mood for a relationship that lasts just one night🇧🇷 Intuition told me one thing, but my mind told me: “Look how interesting he is, he might be different from what you think”.

Want to know how it all ended? When we started writing more often, he was in Rome, and we never saw each other in person. When he came back and wrote me I was at the cinema and he (attention!) was on his way to the studio to get a tattoo of his ex-wife’s initials off his chest. I laugh out loud, in the middle of a thriller movie.

But the situation was quite sad: he was really sad because he couldn’t forget his ex. He filled his schedules with as many activities as possible: working, playing sports, traveling, watching documentaries and using Tinder, of course.

I usually only went out with the guys once. Only once did I date a guy 3 times, but he came back to the States to study at a music academy in New Orleans. But from him I learned a lot about American culture, music and travel. As you can see, Tinder can greatly expand our horizons.

A little about the ethics of Tinder: yes, in the opinion of both parties, the meeting was not very good, but that is not a problem, the two people simply forget after saying goodbye: “Well, then, bye, we’ll talk”. If you don’t like a guy, you usually ignore his messages. Yeah, that’s not very nice, but it’s better than saying you didn’t like it.

As for me, only once did the guy I liked not ask me on a second date. But fate brought us together, though not in the way I had thought.

One day, I went to the movies with a gay friend. We were in line to buy popcorn and out of nowhere I see this guy walking towards me. We look at each other, smile and shake our heads. He entered a room. Now, attention: the cinema had about 20 screens. My friend and I went to see an art movie and we sat in the front row, what we call the ‘introvert’s seat’.

Well, we entered the room and he was next to me. He was smiling with satisfaction throughout the movie, as if to say, “You still make those dates, hahaha.” As a result, my friend ate all the popcorn, because my throat was just dry with nerves from the uncomfortable situation.

If a man writes you something like “Hi, you’re beautiful”, you already think “Wow, that’s lazy. Next”. But you also get messages like “Your facial features are very delicate”, or “Oh, those freckles…”, and you think, “Well, at least it’s a little more original”. But these less trivial messages are no guarantee that you’re talking to an interesting person. Even when you decide who you’re going to talk to, that’s no guarantee that you’ve chosen a good profile. It’s worth mentioning that I never wrote to anyone first until one day I thought: why not? Before that, I played hard to get, but after nearly 15 failed meetings, I realized I had to take responsibility for myself.

One day I wrote to a young man who seemed very nice. One afternoon, when I was having lunch in a coffee shop, he wrote to me saying that he was close and that he could see me. We met and when I said I was a dentist he told me he was coming from the dentist and started showing me pictures of his new tooth. It’s not bad enough to break the ice, is it? He asked me to assess whether the job was well done. I looked at the photos and said that ideally the work could have been done more anatomically, but overall it was fine. And he: “So you mean they ruined my tooth?” When he said that, I realized that in calling the shots on me, I ended up having lunch with a bloody hypochondriac.

As a result, he told me about the damn tooth for an hour, only to interrupt his rant to say he was going to the movies with his friends. He went to the movies and I went to my house. An hour later, I got a message from him. I thought he’d say he enjoyed our date or something, but he said, “After how long can I eat or drink when they do this damn thing to our teeth?”

He wrote to me several times about the damn tooth, and in the last message, he said he didn’t want to live like that.

Interestingly, a few months later, I went to the most popular movie theater in town. Behind me was a drunk guy with a girl, and it was clear he was bothering her. She would say, “No, not now!” There were few people in the room, he kept nagging and the two of them went out and in a few times. At one point, he bumped into my armchair. I turned around and it was him, the guy with the tooth. Again, an awkward encounter.

I once exchanged messages with an ‘ideal boy, your grandmother will love’: smart, designer, hardworking and with a profile picture in which he appeared in a t-shirt and with a cat on his lap. We lived close to each other and he invited me to his house. As it seemed harmless, I ended up accepting it.

How did it all end? We were talking, the cat was next door, we were drinking wine and suddenly the guy started telling me how he had cheated…