Tinderly yours...

I am in a relationship and only recently downloaded Tinder version 3.0.2 for the sole purpose of writing this piece. The last time I was actively looking for men was in September 2013 and nobody ever talked about using Tinder in Manila.

MANILA, Philippines - I had been waiting for something like Tinder since 2009.  Back then, I was based in New York and all my friends were about the gay app Grindr, because all my friends were gay men. Seeing how much fun my posse was having, I, too, wanted a free geo-location-powered mobile “dating” app that was really designed for almost-instantaneous meeting up with guys for dates.

Fast forward to my present life in Manila: Grindr is a hit with the gay community and Tinder turns out to be everything I had expected it to be in this city, minus all the gratification.

The stigma against meeting people through the Internet, romantically or otherwise, was never an issue for me (sorry, Mom) because I’ve always been a progressive kind of gal. Now the digital media blitz allows us to mix and evolve with one another at breakneck speed with no physical interaction required. This paradigm shift espouses a casual and nervy attitude to override the slow-paced, rickety, and traditional mores that built the glass houses we were raised in. Gay men are very good when it comes to breaking down all sorts of walls, for it takes a pioneering brother to rise above the static crowd and be courageous enough to disrupt an antiquated structure. That is why Grindr came first, so they could show the heterosexual population how it is properly done. 

Full disclosure: I am in a relationship and only recently downloaded Tinder version 3.0.2 for the sole purpose of writing this piece. The last time I was actively looking for men was in September 2013 and nobody ever talked about using Tinder in Manila. I met my boyfriend the old-fashioned way — drunk at a bar!

It’s going down, i'm yelling tinder

Tinder is gaining some momentum in Manila. Rosette Pambakian, Tinder’s Los Angeles-based publicist, told me that “the Philippines is currently in early-stage growth.” The local user base is growing over three percent per day. On a global scale, Tinder is doing over 600 million profile ratings and over 6 million new matches daily. Since its inception a year and five months ago, Tinder has made over 750 million matches.

As of this writing, I’ve been active on Tinder for 13 days, having used my Facebook account to sign up. The app extracts up to six photos from your profile-picture album. I chose images that portrayed me in my natural state: fabulous and unsmiling. Tinder also informs you if you share any mutual friends with potential matches.

Even if it’s just a game that you can “keep playing” after you’ve been “matched,” there’s still a pecking order. Tinder isn’t a democratic free-for-all if you take into consideration the socio-economic backgrounds of people who have iPhones and Androids in the Philippines — how small and self-selecting that pool is in a city fraught with extreme income inequality, let alone those who have enough balls and coin to go out on random dates. You are bound to run into people you know, have already slept with, and completely want to avoid, on Tinder. 

Currently I have 41 matches on Tinder, which were determined by my and another user’s mutual interests. You are only “matched” when you both “like” each other’s pictures. Tinder is a shallow app with very minimal information about whomever you’re evaluating, but I did try to strike up conversations before eventually dropping most of them. 

I’ve communicated with 38 of my matches in varying degrees. Frankly, I only consider three of my 41 matches to be above-average in terms of looks. There’s the Aussie tourist, an ostensibly humorless Dane (I stopped responding to both because the former went back to Hong Kong and the latter bored me), and the one person I did manage to meet up with … more on that later. Had I been single, I probably would have tried to bed the first two. Tinder’s relevancy algorithm had figured out that my market consists of AFAMs (A Foreigner Around Manila/Makati).

My goal was to go out on casual dates with two or three of my Tinder matches without revealing to them what my real intentions were. I could do away with the ethical conundrum of transparency because, conveniently enough, it didn’t bother my conscience as long as I wasn’t hurting anyone. Strictly speaking, it was a social experiment that I would later write about for a leading newspaper. Not to say that I didn’t mention my motives to some men. None of them wanted to bother with seeing me in person after my confession.

I actively perused profiles that I “liked,” which didn’t amount to much.   I thought that, much like in real life, I could be choosy on Tinder because I had a pussy. No big deal that the screen read, “There’s no one new around you” 90 percent of the time I spent looking at it. It made me giggle to think that I had exhausted all the males between ages 26-40 who were looking for females within an 80-kilometer radius.                      

Then I remembered that I had a deadline to meet. I manipulated my settings and relaunched the app countless times in an attempt to generate new prospects. The number of guys I “liked” climaxed as I quickly dropped my standards. My matches jumped from quality to an increase in quantity.

I was aggressively following up with guys on a Thursday night, suggesting that we grab drinks “before the week ends.” The 30-year-old Finn canceled our 7 p.m. and stopped responding. A 25-year-old Filipino became so guarded and suspicious when I proposed that “We’re gonna get drinks, Draft at Rockwell?” He started asking me all these questions like, “By ‘we,’ do you mean us or you and your buds are inviting me?” and “I hope you don’t mind, but what’s up?” 

Dear Man of Manila, uh, we’re both on a dating app, I’m an eager girl cruising for a boozing, is there a problem here? It was almost ironic that I was having such a hard time finding a date on the fly. On Tinder! You straight guys are doing it wrong! Best, Hannah

It’s not like no one asked me out. I purposely ignored guys who wanted to do dinner and really meet me because I felt the sincerity. Or rather, I wanted to avoid any sincerity. We talked about gun-control laws and disaster-risk reduction. Keeping in mind that my participation on Tinder was purely for a writing assignment, I did not have it in me to keep playing games with their hearts. There’s no point in torturing the hungry by dangling a piece of meat in their faces and telling them they couldn’t have it, unless you’re the kind of bitch that gets off on that.

Nazi, you so nasty

So, about that one guy I had a drink with — and by “a drink” I mean singular, one, isa lang — because I didn’t want to prolong the agony of listening to his douche-speak. Let’s call him Bruno. He and I share 27 friends on Facebook and I checked his references with two girls I know. I got the impression that he was a man-whore, which made him perfect for my use since sluts like us are less prone to taking rejection heavily since we can move on pretty quickly.

From a physical standpoint, Bruno is hot. Attitude? Not! He invited me to have coffee on a Friday evening at the Starbucks in his apartment building. Since I wasn’t born yesterday, I reasoned, “The least you could do is try to get me get me drunk at some bar/restaurant before you eventually invite me to your place for casual sex.” He replied that I had a “valid point” since he was “off coffee anyway.”

Mamou was our designated meeting place because I love Bloody Marys and the location was a convenient walk-away point. Like if I wanted to, I could just get up and walk away, which is eventually what happened. So we were shooting the shit and yes, he was the man-whore I expected him to be. This guy will hit on anything with a pulse, unless the girl happens to be black because “they are too much like animals.” I screamed, “You’re racist!”

I asked Bruno to justify what he had just said in his Swiss-Germanic accent, but I wasn’t even paying attention to his prejudiced logic by then. He was really dry and unapologetic, lacking any wit or charm. I made a remark about how he probably grew up in a town full of ignorant inbreeds, to which he countered with, “We have a lot of immigrants coming in.” I was finishing off my drink when I sarcastically said, “Well, you’d better keep your borders closed.” 

Then came the icing on the cake. He did the Nazi salute, replete with an exclamatory “Heil, Hitler!” I repeat: He did the Nazi salute, replete with an exclamatory “Heil, Hitler!” I was like, “What the hell was that?” I grabbed my purse and calmly told him, “That’s a deal breaker and this date is over,” before standing up and walking away.

He chased after me and explained that it was “OK” for him to make that joke because he was in Asia, but he would never do it in Europe. I politely left him on the curb after thanking him for the evening and taking his phone number as a gesture of goodwill. I later received a Tinder message from him asking, “Where is your phone number?” It’s hiding from Bruno. 

I feel unsatisfied, unresolved; because all I really wanted to do was kick Bruno in his bigot balls. So, yeah, I don’t think Manila has the prime conditions for the Tinder pandemic that is currently afflicting other cities. There is no volley of knockouts blowing up your phone. Spontaneity is lacking and the selection insufficient. Just because it takes off elsewhere, doesn’t mean it’s going to be a huge success here. I’m still encouraging everyone to download Tinder, hoping that my heterosexual community proves me wrong on this one.