For years, during my mid-20s, I slept almost exclusively with skinny hipsters. (Real talk.) It can get a bit formulaic: You meet for an overpriced cocktail at some Brooklyn bar with a faux-1920s interior, where the waiter writes down your order on an old-timey pad; you talk about the freelance work you both inevitably do for Vice and someone brings up David Foster Wallace; you go back to the guy’s loft (being careful not to wake his roommate, the guy who works at the coffee shop you like); you awkwardly climb into his mezzanine bed; you ask him what his tattoos mean; you bang, pass out, and in the morning maybe walk to get a $4.75 cold brew together. Rinse, repeat.
My friends would constantly complain that we needed a new pool of dudes. We’d always joke that we should go to the Financial District for after-work drinks, “to see what it’s like to fuck a banker.” We’re curious women! But we never went. It was too much effort. And anyway, meeting people in bars is always a bit tragic, isn’t it? We were doomed to our social scene. Then came Tinder and the dating-app revolution and the world of sex cracked open.
Last month, after watching Magic Mike XXL (I was on a plane, relax), I became obsessed with the idea of sleeping with a cheesily attractive meathead jock. I tend to date frail Jewish nerds in Warby Parkers who can barely lift their backpacks, so the idea of being with a guy who could throw me around and who had a more complicated skincare routine than me suddenly seemed very exotic. Amazingly, with dating apps, you can actually make this happen. (Maybe I’m late to the game realizing this, but I only recently became single.) Fuck going to Wall Street to prowl for bankers: Tinder is a catalog of every type of person you can imagine. Thus began my search for Mr. (Swipe) Right.
I soon matched on Tinder with a guy I’ll call Matt, a 26-year-old G.I. Joe type whose main photo was of him lifting a dumbbell, shirtless. Our initial message exchange literally went like this. Me: “Hi! What’s up?” Him: “Hey. Just finished CrossFit. Going to get some brunch with the boys, then hitting the gym again. U?” I felt like I was reading the highest form of bro poetry.
Matt is a finance guy who lives on the Upper East Side and does CrossFit eight times a week. We met for coffee and talked almost exclusively about body-mass index, the proper way to do a squat to encourage butt lift (he demonstrated in the café), and “the market.” We barely got any of each other’s references, but it was strangely liberating to be with someone for whom you have no context. I realized I could present myself to him however I wanted. Not that I necessarily wanted to lie, but I definitely shifted some words around to make myself sound more important. “Oh, you know,” I said casually, “I write about social and sexual phenomena and its intersection with pop culture and life in general.” LOL. He seemed impressed. (When I meet a guy through friends, he generally says something like, “Oh, you’re the girl who wrote that blow-job article, right?”)
Turns out Matt is sober, which I was admittedly wary of. I just hate any social situation where someone is highlighting their moral superiority. Like, I get it, you remember what happens at parties, congratulations. But Matt could bench 360, which is something I suddenly cared about. And honestly, it was kind of cool to sleep with someone who I could objectify for once. It was a nice role reversal. And Amy Schumer’s right about buff guys—it’s like fucking an ice sculpture.
On our second date, I got clever. We went out for yet more coffee, but beforehand, I hid a tiny bottle of vodka in my bathroom garbage. Then, when I invited him over, I repeatedly pretended to pee, and instead drank vodka by myself while hiding in the shower. For some reason this didn’t feel tragic at the time, but reflecting on it afterward (and again now, ugh) made me a bit scared of myself. I realized that being with a sober person makes me feel like an alcoholic, and I’m not ready for that level of self-reflection. But meeting Matt made me realize that, with apps, dating can be like anthropology-lite. Curious what it’s like to be with a yoga person? Now you can find him though your phone, from the comfort of your bed. If you want, you can steal a new life, just for a night.
Some people like the idea of dating someone in their social scene because it’s a way of vetting them. (The dating app Hinge, which connects you to people you have mutual friends with, plays on this preference.) In a way, your date’s actions are accounted for. For instance, a person is less likely to be cruel to someone on a date if there’s going to be social repercussions for that behavior within their shared friend group. But this social monitoring can also be restrictive, especially for women, in a culture where female sexuality is already policed.
Say I lived in a small city and could meet people only through friends and work. Well, people talk, so if you’re dating within a network, people tend to know your business. Depending on how open-minded your social scene is, sleeping around even just a little bit could give you a bad reputation or discourage you from having casual sex altogether. But dating outside of your network gives you anonymity, which increases your autonomy.
Another amazing thing about dating apps is that not only can you bang a total random, but if you’re in a foreign city, that random can also become your default tour guide. For instance, last week I was in Paris, making the incredibly difficult decision of whether to stay in and read or go out until 4:00 a.m. (I’ve yet to find a middle ground.) I ended up choosing the latter, after I “crushed” with a guy on Happn (an app that connects you with potential matches whom you’ve recently crossed paths with). Happn guy—let’s call him Pierre (why not?)—was 25, studying law at the Sorbonne, and one of his profile photos was of him playing golf in khakis and a sweater-vest. You get the idea.
Pierre liked the fact that I was American because it meant he got to seem impressive by talking about Parisian architecture as he walked me around the city at night. He showed me the Medici Fountain, Luxembourg Palace, the church of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, which is the oldest church in Paris. (I’ve spent months in Paris before, but I’ve only been to the wrong places, or so said Pierre.) Dare I say, the evening felt genuinely romantic.
Eventually we went back to his house and had sex on his terrace. It was good, although he was being a bit weird about me touching myself during sex. “Girls don’t do that in France,” he said. “I’m sure they do,” I said. “I would know—the French invented sex,” he insisted. To which I replied, “Okay, but we improved it. Just like French food. Have you had steak frites in New York?” This made him a bit angry, which made the sex better. In the morning he served me tea out a cereal bowl, which maybe was try-hard avant-garde, but I bought it. He held my hand and made out with me in the street before putting me in an Uber. “Guys don’t do that in America,” I said. He liked that.
After Paris I became slightly obsessed with the app situation. I had Tinder, Happn, Raya, 3nder, and Bumble on my phone and was switching between checking all of them. Eventually I started talking with a 41-year-old Irish guy who works at an NGO. We had zero mutual friends on Facebook. He was relaxing in New York for a couple of days after the recent U.N. Summit. God, he was hot. The sort of guy who looks like he could get into a bar fight but would also give you very sensual head—a powerful combination. Over drinks, he told me that he works as a peace negotiator in the South Pacific, dealing with tribal warfare and gender-based violence. I said that complicated sentence again—the one that makes me sound important.
We got drunk and I told him that I thought his accent was sexy too many times. He didn’t know who Justin Bieber was, which blew my mind. We went back to my apartment. It’s cool how with older guys you feel younger and with younger guys you feel older. Afterward I expected him to leave, but he didn’t, and I ended up bringing him to a party at my friend’s place—a guy whose parents left him an apartment in Soho, which makes us all love and resent him. We stayed out until 4:00 a.m. In the morning he told me that he’d message me the next time he visited New York, which he had no plans of doing anytime in the near future.
When I was a teenager, the Internet truly felt like a tool for meeting people outside of my world, through forums and chat rooms. In the post-Facebook age, our online interactions are almost exclusively with people we have “mutual friends” with. Social media lets us know exactly how and to what extent we are connected to everyone, and online dating websites further encourage this behavior, with algorithms rating our “compatibility” based on location and similar traits and interests.
Dating apps are different—more random. They connect you with anybody and everybody, and sometimes they feel like the only escape from our increasingly self-referential social circles. Forcing ourselves out of the pattern of our lives can be a really good thing. Okay, so maybe you won’t marry the zany South African orthodontist who can’t name a single Beyoncé song, but not meeting up with him simply because he isn’t The One seems like a missed opportunity for . . . something.
Karley Sciortino writes the blog Slutever.
Hair and Makeup: Ingeborg
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