Czech and Date

I first used Tinder in 2015. I had just moved back to Seattle from Minneapolis and I wasn't really sure of my relationship status at the time, so I hopped on the app with a notoriously simple UI. After a few cautious swipes I got a match! My first match! What should we name our kids? What will he think of a color scheme containing seafoam and taupe?

After some further investigation, I discovered my future husband and I had around 60 friends in common from Facebook. Of course, he was a comedian.

Tinder is such a mystery to me because I've seen people use it like a sperm donor donation guide but also in a hot-or-not rating system way just to innocently pass the time. None of the matches I ever made came to fruition. The furthest I got was moving from the app to text messaging with our real phone numbers. No movies, no dates, no walks along Alki. A daily "hey how's it going" turned into a weekly "what are you up to this weekend?" I wasn't crazy determined to meet anyone every time I've used Tinder, and I spent most of my time swiping left to find people I know and giggle over how they chose to represent themselves through six Instagram pictures and their recent Spotify artists. 

Honestly, meeting someone from Tinder sounded like a lot of work.

Are they going to like me? I'm leaving the country soon so I could ruin his life. I'll ruin his life. I'm running out of foundation. Is this guy worth scraping the bottom of the tube with a q-tip just to give off the illusion that my skin is decent?

I'd rather stay home and watch Brendan Fraser movies with my cat (this ended up happening a lot). 

For the first three months I was in the Czech Republic, the only person I thought of was myself. Initially this idea is selfish, but when transitioning to a post-communist country with a lot of people who have been through some shit, I had to make sure I was doing okay before I even considered romantically invited someone into my life who may have very different societal ideologies than myself. I redownloaded the app and edited my profile with more recent pictures and a few notes about my eating habits (cheeseburgers), my drinking habits (there isn't one), and my love for sitcoms (not that there's anything wrong with that). But even after ten minutes, I could tell my main issue would be the language barrier. 

Most people here who are under the age of 30 speak English to some degree. It is now taught in primary schools as opposed to German or Russian. The more profiles I went through, the more I realized that I'm either going to have to find someone who speaks English or I'm going to have to learn Czech very quickly. I'm very sparing with right swipes, so any dude who I became interested in superficially had to meet a certain set of criteria: not all of their pictures should be of them drinking, they need at least one photo someone else took of them, no gym selfies, and they had to indicate they spoke at least some English. After a few minutes on the app, I saw a popular pattern emerging among Czech men:

(I accidentally swiped left on a couple of these goobers so I'll update if anything happens.)

If you guessed "men on vacation wearing sunglasses," congratulations! Most of the profiles I saw had an absurd amount of men traveling and being active. If you swapped all of these pictures out with American girls who recently studied abroad for all of two months, there would be zero difference. I shied away from making contact because I think I was intimidated. I know myself well. I don't surf. I don't mountain climb. I don't go to places where I can't at least buy a snack. I like being comfortable and where there's no threat of large crowds or riptide or bees. There is a residual fear of not being able to connect with any of these people because I like movies and writing and typically things that involve being indoors for an extended period of time. What am I going to talk about? How I found a good Russian cam rip of Isle of Dogs or what subreddit deserves more attention?

I only had one successful match where the conversation lead to WhatsApp and eventually a date at a teahouse. He looked like a young James Spader and majored in astrophysics. In his spare time, he's working on getting his pilot license and spending time with his family. English wasn't his first language and my first instinct was to correct his actually pretty decent grammar, but it was so harmless and cute I almost couldn't take it seriously. And that's why I think I'm largely unsuccessful with dating apps: I can't take them seriously. 

Every profile becomes a joke to me. By the end of my perusing I've given half the guys ambiguous Slavic accents and butchered their English while they talk about the differences between good and bad dinner rolls. Tinder has now replaced Reddit as the "hmm what else can I do" entertainment portion of my evenings. It's incredibly mindless and I only login after I'm convinced I've read the entirety of the internet. I forget I have Tinder. I open it maybe once a month, and each time I open it I have to reacquaint myself with the conversations I left dangling or the five guys named Martin and the three guys named Ondrej or the couple of guys named Pavel. I'm also convinced there's only seven Czech names for men and that's why I can't keep any of them straight or differentiate them from one another.

I wonder if Tinder is worth my time because it slowly came to feel like a chore. I became more content with continuing to spend time with myself than muster the effort to meet someone who may not understand me, both emotionally and linguistically. James Spader understood my jokes and we texted a few times after our date, but we haven't talked in maybe two weeks. Things fizzled out and I think neither of us saw the point of carrying it out any further. I also have my own suspicion he lost interested when he found out I don't drink or go clubbing. The only thing in common was our age. It was tough to build a cultural connection in such a short time, but maybe it was for the best. I always feel safer when I'm alone. The act of procreation is really popular here, and I don't mean the euphemism for sex, I mean actually procreating to make children, so the older generation urges the younger to make offspring. I can't even start my job, let alone a family. What I'm getting at is that I don't know how I'll measure up to Czech expectations of how life is supposed to proceed. I'm on a very different unpaved road and I'm not trying to rush into anything. For now, Tinder is only a source of entertainment, a digital carousel of traveling millenials and Adidas tracksuits. I'm not desperate. I think the only person I need right now is me.