Dear Tinder,
Swipe left, swipe right... the mindless dating app sweeping the college nation who you have become has quickly become one of my least favorite things to ever happen to our generation. However, there's not just one thing about you that bothers me, but many, and it's getting a little upsetting.
To start off, let me go by just saying up until yesterday I still had you on my phone. You're an addictive app simply used to meet people you find attractive and base an entire relationship based off of that. A little vain, but in reality, people do that in real life too, so it's not that big of a deal for me. You are, however, a humongous waste of time simply because when I had nothing to do, all I would do is just go on and swipe when I could have just done something productive with my life, but instead, I slaved away swiping left and right on hundreds of guys I knew I would never actually talk to.
However, my number one biggest complaint about you is what you do to a person's mind.
When I first got you, I was a self-conscious 17-year-old (that's right, back in the day when you didn't have to be 18+), and by getting so many automatic matches, I will admit, I felt amazing. All throughout high school, I was never in any serious relationships and never really actively sought out getting into one, so you can imagine that getting 7+ compliments a day from complete strangers who I also found attractive was a major confidence booster for me. So, I began to get my validation from guys online who would tell me I'm beautiful and who told me they would do anything just to meet me once, and I was thriving off of it.
Then I realized my problem.
What once was just an app used for fun and boredom, had quickly become a way for me to measure my self-worth entirely based upon if a guy thought I was pretty or not, and that was not OK. This doesn't just go for girls, by the way, even guys I know became obsessed with you because they thought it made them good enough because girls they thought were attractive liked them too, and it made them feel better about themselves.
Once I started to realize this, and it took awhile, I began to feel worse about myself. I realized all those compliments meant nothing, and it was just an artificial way of trying to make me feel good about myself, when in reality, all I had to do was just focus on me.
Love myself.
Feel good about the person I am and who I'm becoming.
I didn't need an app to tell me that, and neither does anyone else.
So in some kind of twisted way, yes, I did find what you were initially made for. I found love. Not to sound cheesy (I bet you can see where this is going), but yes, with myself. You made me realize I didn't need you or any guy to tell me how great I was because I realized that all on my own. So thank you, Tinder, but for now I'm swiping right on me.
