Tinderella

The thing about Tinder is that it’s one of the first things to have removed the stigma surrounding online dating – you don’t feel like a desperado if 90% of your friends have it too.

Weirdly enough my ex-boyfriend told me about Tinder, describing it as ‘a cool app which shows you who you might know where you are.’ After this massively false advertisement I downloaded it and very quickly realised that that was not what it was… at all.

Within the space of about an hour I felt thoroughly weird about the whole thing and decided I DEFINITELY had to delete it. However, inexplicably another hour passed and I began to develop what can only be described as a god complex, swiping left on those I deemed not worthy, who were actually probably very nice people.

Nobody likes house that much Owain.. Reject!

Amidst the sea of vest wearing young men having a laugh with ‘da boiz’ at some unspecified-festival-on-sea and the nice but astonishingly boring guys partial to an emoticon or two: ‘hi ur pretty’, there was a man called Chris.

Where’s the chat Thomas?

Before I go any further I feel I have to say that I never ever thought I would actually meet up with ANYONE from Tinder, because frankly (and I say this realising my former Tinder persona was naive and drunk with the power of rejecting five men a minute) I thought it was weird and definitely desperate. I digress, after about a week of texting (never phone calls because I would have definitely been a boob and blown it) I realised he was actually very nice, very normal and really funny.

I decided the time had come to just stop dicking around and actually go on a date with him. I told myself this wasn’t mental and he couldn’t kill me because we had mutual friends and that would just open a big old can of worms for him. I was late, acting like a bit of a freak and low level sweaty because I’d done three laps of the pub shouting down the phone to my long suffering friend that I literally could not go in at all. Ever.

I think maybe the whole first hour was just me saying words that made no sense, whilst he did the decent thing and completely humoured me. He was very cool and I was the exact opposite. I am completely unsure why but I decided to introduce him to my older sister and our best friends half way through the date – I might as well have just said I want you to father my children and be bloody done with it.

I’m unsure of the events that followed, but somehow it’s a month down the line and we’re holding hands in the aquarium. I never really wanted to have to say it but Tinder’s weird approach to relationships only went and actually worked on me. Telling people, including my parents, was not as horrifying as I thought. Although we originally decided to make up a big lie about how we met, I think after this article it’s safe to say the cat is firmly out of the bag.

Tinderella and Prince Charming

So I suppose the moral of the story is whilst Tinder may be a laugh a minute with endless novelty weirdo’s around the corner, there are some absolute gems to be found amongst the purvey rubble. I wholeheartedly and unashamedly recommend it. To quote Ronan Keating’s magnum opus – life is a roller coaster; you’ve really just got to ride it.

Do you have a Tinder success/horror story? Send it to [email protected]