I like Tinder. Let me qualify that.

I have covered and written about a lot of dating games and rituals in my time as a relationship columnist.

I played matchmaker many times and wrote about the common sense rules of blind dating. I tried speed dating and effectively predicted that it would die a natural death in less than three minutes. I screened matching sites and when I finally found a local one, was appalled at the forms that had to be filled up with questions like income range. Seriously period and seriously question mark + exclamation mark. The exercise seemed like a credit check than a dating profile.

I was hopeful when some friends – who also admitted they were skeptical at first – met and married guys they met on line on dating website. They swore that for people over 30, on-line match ups were the way to go. It totally opened up the borders of the “meet” market. But again, there were pages and pages of information that had to be filled up. 

What was with all the paperwork?

So you can imagine how happy I was to find Tinder which makes matching a fun game again.

Just “hot or not?”

When you sign up on Tinder, you get a slew of personal profiles that you can filter according to location (the nearer the better), age and gender – only men, only women and both men and women. Then all you have to do is swipe right for someone who’s hot and swipe left for someone who’s not. Well, okay, you can also choose to press a heart or an x.

When you have a match – meaning you both swiped right – you get a fun snappy notification that makes you feel like you’ve earned a point.  Imagine hearing ting*ting*ting bells and whistles go off in your head.

Then Tinder encourages you to start chatting each other up with prompts like: 

Staring at that photo won’t start a conversation.

It’s okay to say “Hi” first.

What are you waiting for?

Saying “Hi” isn’t memorable.

It was fun, it was simple and it offered something that the Manila dating sorely lacked: variety. Tinder widens the dating pool beyond the usual friends and friends of friends.

As 20-something P puts it. “Meeting guys is not a problem. Meeting a guy I want to date. Different story.”

“Nobody says they’re ‘dating’ anymore,” P wailed. “When you get asked out, we usually say ‘Do you wanna hang out?’ and that’s very vague and can mean many things. Rule of thumb is that unless the other person explicitly expresses interest, it’s fair game.”

Because Tinder is a dating app, you can somewhat assume that people are there to find a date. Though, the wedding pictures, group pictures and snuggly photos with the significant other can throw you off.

The dating black hole

Then there is the dating black hole, the gap left by people looking to settle down and the people looking for sex. For those in settling down mode, there are the matching sites. Those looking for fun have just about any other kind of technology at their fingertips. (READ: Sex at the drop of a Tweet)

But what about those people in between who just want to date and as P said, “hang out?”

Tinder somewhat fills in that gaping vortex.

A guy friend and I both tried Tinder with the understanding that we would not swipe right if we came across each other’s pictures. Having come almost full circle in the dating ritual (he was also the guy friend who trooped along with me for the speed dating), we compared notes and marveled at how fast everything was.

“One girl that I was matched up with sent me a message with just two letters and a question mark: BJ?” he told me.

I had a similar acronym story to share. “Yeah, one match wrote as his first message: ‘DTF…’. He used ellipses! It wasn’t until the third message that he said, ‘Hi’.”

It seemed that everything was served up in code and to be digested and deciphered based on the punctuation marks used.

One friend has a friend who met her boyfriend on Tinder but sadly, I couldn’t track them down for a happy ever after Tinder story.

A guy I chatted up on Tinder said he met one girl and they dated for a while. We would’ve had coffee and hung out, but he was on a tour in southern Philippines. It did not seem to faze him when I told him that I was writing about Tinder for this column. We’ll see if we can have coffee when he gets back next week.

I’ll agree with friends who say that Tinder is neither a good thing nor a bad thing. But I will say that as a dating app, Tinder does one very good thing: it gives you options beyond your usual circle of friends and within your geographical location. In short, it can take you out of a stifling dating rut.

After that, it’s up to you to take your chances and the necessary precautions when meeting someone…all’s fair in love and Tinder.

(In case you’re wondering, the use of ellipses is deliberate.) –Rappler.com

Ana P. Santos writes about sex and gender issues. Seriously. She is a regular contributor for Rappler apart for her DASH of SAS column, which is a spin off of her website, www.SexAndSensibilities.com (SAS). Follow her on Twitter at @iamAnaSantos.