Chapter 103
Joyce
I wonder if you know about Tinder.
I had heard about it on the radio, and I’d heard jokes about it, but I had never seen it before Jason showed me.
If you know what it is, then you can skip through this bit.
So Tinder is for dating. You post pictures of yourself on an app.
An app is like the internet, but only on your phone.
Jason showed me some of the pictures. The pictures of the men are usually on a mountain, or chopping down a tree.
Sometimes the pictures have been cropped down the middle to cut out a former partner.
Thanks to my picture in Cut to the Chase, I know how they do that now.
The pictures of the women are often on boats, or with groups of other women and you’re not sure which one you’re meant to be looking at, so as far as I can see it’s a bit of a lottery.
I asked him if people use it for one-night stands and he says that, by and large, people use it for little else.
Well, that’s a bit of fun, I suppose, but the whole thing felt unhappy to me.
And the more smiles I saw, the unhappier I felt.
Perhaps that’s just me. I met Gerry at a dance I had decided to go to at the last minute to spite my mother.
If I hadn’t gone, then we never would have met.
So I know that’s an inefficient way of finding true love, but it worked for us.
From the moment I laid eyes on him, he didn’t stand a chance. The lucky thing.
So, on Tinder you scroll through photographs of single people who live nearby. Or sometimes married people who live nearby. There is a picture on Tinder of Ian Ventham in a karate suit, even though he’s dead.
Every time you like the look of someone, you swipe their picture to the right (or to the left, I can’t remember). Meanwhile, somewhere nearby they are scrolling through pictures too, and if they like the look of you, they also swipe to the right (or left), and the two of you are a match.
Honestly, it breaks your heart to scroll through. It reminded me of those photos of lost cats you see on lampposts. It’s all that hope, I think.
Anyway, when Jason swiped left (or right) he was confident of a match. And he was confident that match would be the killer. I trust his confidence on the first matter; I am more dubious about the second.
There is another dating app for gay men called Grindr. Perhaps it’s for gay women too? I don’t know, I didn’t ask. Would they use the same one? That would be nice.
So Jason imagines he has solved the case. And perhaps he has, though I doubt it very much. He says it’s obvious, but often in these matters the answer isn’t obvious at all.
At least I have discovered that online dating is not for me. You can have too much choice in this world. And when everyone has too much choice, it is also much harder to get chosen. And we all want to be chosen.
Good night, all. Good night, Bernard. And good night, Gerry, my love.