Marisa Meltzer contemplates the “vicarious Tinder fantasies” of the settled-down:
“They want to save you, the married friends,” said Karen Luh, who is a lawyer in Los Angeles. She sighed audibly. “I was having dinner with a friend and talking about losers I was dating. She said, ‘You should use this thing Tinder.’ She had seen it at a baby shower. She presented it like she wished she could use it, too.” …
Perhaps, at least in part, the envy isn’t even about wishing they were single and seeing what’s on the menu out there, but about fear of being left out by new technology — or way of life. “It’s America, so people are always worried about getting old and out of touch and obsolete,” said Emily Witt, who profiled Tinder in GQ earlier this year and whose forthcoming book, Future Sex, is on women and sexuality. Married people feel like they’re “missing out on this new kind of socialization, which isn’t to say they should be jealous of us,” she said.
Or for some would-be Tinder voyeurs, maybe it’s simply a way to get their significant other a little bit jealous. One night last winter Gio Muniz and Ruth Reader were at a bar in Brooklyn, and the topic of Tinder came up. “We were talking to a friend who had just started messing around with it and telling us how someone finally figured out a hookup app for straight people,” she said. So they downloaded it on his phone and started browsing. “It lasted 22 minutes or so,” said Muniz. Then, “Ruth was like, ‘You’re gonna delete that, right?’”
The Dish 