John Wilkes, the eighteenth-century radical, rake and uglybug, claimed that it only took him half an hour with any woman to talk away his face. Tinder gives you 500 characters. It’s not enough. I am not saying that I am, like the old libertine, a shocking dog to look at, who ought not to be exposed to pregnant women’s view – Tinder hasn’t, yet, destroyed my self-esteem quite that much – but I think I probably need slightly longer to talk away my photos than the length of this paragraph.
I had hoped that I had dodged dating on the apps – I was married the year before Tinder was launched in Britain – but that optimism lasted no longer than the marriage. I had been an early adopter of internet dating, but back then photographs were considered unnecessary (and would clog up your dial-up connection to no purpose). You just found someone with the same interests and wrote a message about those interests. ‘I see you like… stuff’.
I always felt they made a mistake by only listing things you liked; generally, you bond with people over things you both hate. When Mr Wilkes dined with the Tory Dr Johnson, things were ‘aukward’, Boswell says, until someone mentioned Scotland and the two of them vibed by disparaging Scotchmen together. There was an app in America where you could select a partner who hated the same things as you, but it went bust, squeezed out by the market leader, Tinder.
