My swipe addiction
I’ve always had a pretty firm opinion about relationships, which was that we don’t need one to feel complete. We should strive to be happy in ourselves and our own company and the person you end up with will only add to that feeling of completion. Kinda like when you get your very first smart phone, you don’t think your life could be better with it and then BAM, you wonder how you survived outside of the house without it. So what does this have to do with the title “swiping addiction”.
Like many people out there I have a bit of an addictive personality. I’m the kind of guy who hears a new song and then plays it on repeat for hours till it loses its magic, I’m also the guy who’ll always play the same character in a video game. So I did the same with Tinder, pouring hours of my time into it, analyzing, testing and figuring out what worked for me. It became second nature to pick up my phone and swipe whenever there was a lull in daily activities, there’s a little rush and excitement you get from getting matched with someone along with a little entertainment in the likes of “Hot or Not”. Not to mention the excitement you get when talking to someone new and the mystery of the first date, but like an episode of Black Mirror it slowly gets out of hand. I unconsciously developed a need to connect with random people on Tinder on a very weak emotional level and it felt strange not having someone to flirt with. When one castle of cards tumbled, I almost immediately started to build another with a different individual. Almost like I wasn’t trying to find someone in particular and more trying to beat Tinder and dating.
“What’s that saying? Too much of anything is bad for you, it’s true.”
I put myself in the mindset of “enjoy it while it lasts because one day you won’t be able to” and threw myself into two to four dates a week, talking to several people on Tinder at a time and re-acquainting myself with a pain I thought I had conquered, the spiky mallet of rejection. Mother fucking rejection.
The Damage:
The thing about rejection is that we all have to deal with it in our lives, some of us develop safe guards, some aggressive and spiky, some cold and unmoving and others hilariously illogical. Whatever armour you choose, they can usually take a whack or two from the Mallet before needing some time to repair and adjust. What happens if you don’t give it the time it needs to adjust, well it starts to open up little cracks of insecurity, and that’s when shit really starts to get weird. Now I’m a pretty self assured guy and I consider myself a hoot to be around but I began to question if even that was true, I developed a small insecurity about my height and started to think I was setting my standards too high. One epic night of clubbing was enough to cure me of that nonsense but it got me thinking, if there’s nothing wrong with me then what the heck am I doing wrong?
The Perks:
It’s not all terrible though, it was a new experience and I gained a lot of insight, friends and new sense of self worth that I probably wouldn’t have gained had I not been hit by the mallet of rejection over and over again. You could even say that its one of the reasons I’m even writing this blog in the first place. I became more aware of my own value as a person and understood that it’s best to let a castle of cards crumble when you’re the only one making the effort to build it.
