LEARN HOW TO SURVIVE TECH-BASED HOOKUPS WITH, IF NOT DIGNITY, AT LEAST A SOLID CHANCE OF A BLOWJOB. HUSTLER’S MAN ABOUT TOWN TESTS A FUCKTON OF DATING APPLICATIONS AND REPORTS ON THE HEARTWARMING RESULTS.
“Well, Gandhi was anti-vax, you know…” I don’t know. And I don’t care. That’s Helen. Helen is a woman I met on Bumble. Bumble is a dating app. Somehow, in a fury of smartphone thumb-swiping and looks-only vetting, I had failed to see that Helen was not quite all there mentally. So I’m sitting in a hip leather booth at some hip new bar, with my second expensive cocktail freshly placed front of me, staring into Helen’s blue doe eyes as she tells me that fluoridated water and vaccines are government control mechanisms. This is my fault. I did this to myself.
A few days before, I had been sitting at home with a half-finished can of beer on my chest, counting the cracks in my ceiling, when my iPhone emitted a buzz. Then another. And another. In short order notifications were making my phone purr erratically like a meth-addled kitten. My friends don’t like me that much, and I was pretty sure I didn’t owe anyone money, so it had to be the fact that, in the service of true investigative journalism, I had registered for every dating app and hookup website I could find.
Upon registering, I created the widest possible radius around my L.A. home. Then I swiped right maniacally and clicked checkmarks like crazy for days on end. I maintained a policy of swiping as liberally as possible. I swiped right in the bathroom. I swiped right in bed. I swiped right in traffic. I swiped right and multitasked with power tools. Soon enough, like sexy, sexy magic, my phone figuratively blew the fuck up with messages, buzzes and bells from every manner of desperate woman with broadband.
You see, I am the first person to ever write about dating apps. Yeah, that’s me. I’m the first one. Ever. You don’t have to look this up; you can take me at my word. We now live in an era where dating apps have been tailored to every preference and inclination, and they encourage human sexuality in remarkable ways. With the stigma of lonely basement-dwelling mouth-breathers mostly removed from technology-based wooing, many men and women are making short work of exploring new possibilities one swipe at a time. You’ve heard. Your mom has heard. Dating and hookup apps are a thing now. “There’s an app for that,” mugs your grandpa as he pops a blue pill with a wink and heads off for a slice of that Tinder pie.
I could get all scientific and use control studies and wide sample sizes to demonstrate a bunch of facts about what’s happening. However, I am not a scientist. I am just an average white bearded dude in his mid-30s with an average income and an even more average lifestyle looking for The One. Or a ceaseless train of middling to decent Ones to keep the scarier wolves of my libido at bay until that one One shows up. So yeah, I tried all of the dating apps.
