My bittersweet experience using Tinder as a porn addict: a story

Ana was a stunning piece of beauty.

Long legs, curvy body, beautiful tanned skin — a Mexican goddess straight out of a telenovela. Next to her came my date Silvina. At around 5 feet and 5 inches, slightly chubby but still pretty, she embodied a more realistic South American stereotype.

We all awkwardly said hi, then Silvina and I headed to a tiki bar for some drinks, while her friend went next door into a Thai restaurant where she would find her date, a balding but adventurous DJ in his late thirties. The girls' plan: to schedule their dates in the city at the same time so that they could share an Uber there and back.

My advice: don’t show up to your Tinder date with a friend that’s way more attractive than you are.

It’s not a good start.

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Mia was full of surprises.

Coming to the date I was suspicious. She looked pretty in the pictures — perhaps a bit too pretty. It wouldn’t have been the first time I show up to a date just to be met with what could only be defined as a wax museum version of the person I had seen on Tinder.

Mia’s first surprise was therefore the lack of surprises. She was just as pretty as in the pictures, and I went into that date a little bit nervous, as if having to prove myself. Mia’s second surprise came later that night when she reached down my pants and grabbed my dick in the middle of the bar, clearing out any doubts I might have had about my attractiveness.

We were not even done with our second drink when we started making out on that bar’s couch like two teenagers without a car. Her bold, escalating move caught me off guard and I have to admit that a part of me felt violated. Not that I was going to complain, anyway. I don’t consider myself to be a passionate person, and I would have never dared to pull such a move in a public place like that, but hell, if you want to take me for a ride I’ll hop on and ride along gladly.

We got lost in the heat of the moment, and as it turns out something else did too. Once we both reached our cooking temperature and decided to leave the bar to find somewhere more intimate, I found out the night had one last surprise in store for me.

Our phones, which we had laid down on the couch next to us, were gone.

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Kristine was a racist b*tch.

I’m sorry, but she was.

I’ll reproduce here our conversation, and you judge for yourself:

— So, you said you are an au pair? How do you like it?
— Yeah, I work for this family and, like, stay with them and everything. They have two kids, four and seven years old.
— Nice! At least you don’t have to be changing diapers, right? Do you get along well with the kids?
— Yeaah. The thing is, this family, they are, you know… — then she leaned closer to me and, in a lower voice, she said — …they’re black.
But they’re still nice… — she added — and the kids are sweet.

So there I sat, in front of her, politely nodding and smiling but looking like a maniac because my eyes were wide open and in my head I was thinking goddamnit I didn’t know there were people my age that still think like that and, even if she does, why the hell is she being so unashamedly open about it when we just met.

But instead of speaking up, I discreetly changed the topic and let the date follow its course.

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Natalie is an artsy girl with a kind spirit and a cheerful personality. Or at least that’s what I can deduce from her pictures. Gloria is a refined person who takes herself a bit too seriously. Mary is a basic woman with an egotistic attitude and 32DD breasts.

Scrolling through Tinder profiles is even more exciting when I do it during my working hours. As I sit on the toilet in the office restroom, phone in hand, amidst the smell of a yet unflushed hunk of shit, a part of me feels like I’m getting paid for checking these girls out.

With a pile of work waiting for me on my desk and a growing boner between my legs, there’s no incentive for me to go back and every reason to stay locked in this stall. Eventually I conclude that the best thing I can do is jerk off right there and then and thus come back to my senses.

I swipe and swipe until I find the right candidate. Lynn is a showy girl with a great body and an interesting display of bikini and party dress pictures in her Tinder profile. She’s the kind of girl I could never match with — so much so that I won’t even waste a right swipe on her — yet she’s the perfect match for this job. I scroll through all her pictures over and over, side to side, building a mental model of her body, then pick my favorite image and, staring at it, picture myself having sex with her as I masturbate, ejaculating quietly on a piece of tissue while my colleagues walk in and out of the restroom around me.

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My date with Silvina was reminding me of Back to the Future. It almost felt like I had traveled back in time and was dating my mom — only my mom wasn’t fun and attractive in her youth like Marty McFly’s.

The date was boring. The conversation was plain and my attempts to make it interesting kept banging into her prim-and-proper personality. Yet somehow our date must have been looking much better from her side of the table because she was showing signs of being into me.

I recognized the opportunity and, without much excitement, looked her in the eyes with as much passion as I could fake and asked her for a kiss. She blushed and, hesitant, confessed that she wasn’t expecting this to happen on our first date, and that she was wearing a kind of lipstick that would leave its mark all over me. "Don’t worry about it", I said, and kissed her tightly closed lips like two kids kissing in the schoolyard, leaving her a bit fired up as if we had just done the naughtiest thing.

When we left the bar, her friend Ana was already waiting by an Uber, and I couldn’t help but wonder how far I would have gotten had she been my date instead. I awkwardly said bye to Silvina and walked back home. The next day, I messaged her saying how nice it had been to meet her, and how I didn’t see anything happening in the future between us — then I proceeded to brush off her attempts to stay friends.

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Olivia was easy.

Our conversations online had been heating up leading to our first date, and by the time we said hi we were already primed for a bang. There was only time to have two quick drinks before we left the bar and headed to my apartment.

I didn’t realize how bad things were until we were already there. She was swaying from one side of the flight of stairs to the other, genuinely struggling to climb the steps, and there was no denying that this girl was drunk as a skunk. Later I would find out that she had been nervous about our date and had had a few drinks before with a friend. At the time, her intoxication was a bit puzzling but blatant enough that it forced me to make a decision.

Unfortunately, I made the wrong one. Instead of calling an Uber to send her home, I suggested she could stay over and sleep it off. She agreed, and I had to reject her drunken attempts to have sex with me until she knocked out in bed by my side.

The next morning, she woke up completely hungover, next to a guy she barely recognized from Tinder, not remembering much of what had happened the night before. She was cool about it, thank God, and we even ended up having sex that morning, but none of that was an excuse for my careless stupidity.

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Racist Kristine kept talking about inconsequential stuff.

It was for the best, honestly. Touching on current events, anything cultural or, God forbid, politics, would have only further exposed the immense gap between our characters. I tried to wrap the date up as soon as possible and, claiming it was getting a bit late, asked for the check despite having a quarter of my beer still left.

She seemed a bit disappointed, and her reaction triggered something somewhere inside of me. As I paid for the drinks and picked up my jacket to follow Kristine out of the bar, I started to ruminate. "She’s kinda hot, after all" — I thought. "This was awful and there's no way I'd date her again but… does that mean tonight has to end right here?". And so out there on the street, waiting for her Uber to come and listening to her boring chitchat, despite an almost unbearable date with more awkward silences than signs of interest, I felt strongly tempted to throw a Hail Mary and see how far this ball could go.

In the end, her Uber came before I could make up my mind and we just said goodbye — only one of us knowing it would be our last. On my way back home, I messaged Olivia to see if she was in the area. Forty-five minutes later, she arrived at the building and came upstairs — nimbly this time — and we spent the rest of the night battling my erectile dysfunction in several unsuccessful attempts to have sex.

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We all have become quite dependent on our phones these days and, for some people, losing theirs is just as traumatic as losing a fucking arm. Mia was one of those people. I wasn’t. My phone was secondhand and shitty and I got it for free so I couldn’t care less. My biggest distress at the time was the certainty that this whole incident meant I wasn’t going to get laid that night anymore.

I was already back on Tinder while riding my Uber back home — courtesy of a friend of Mia that happened to be in the bar next door to save our asses. I continued swiping in bed once I got back. I tried out a few different openers on the handful of matches that I got, but none of them gave me an immediate response so I kept on swiping — the sky is the limit when you are paying $8 a month for Tinder Plus.

After more than one hour of swipes, the last minutes of which were spent with my non-swiping hand under my pants, I decided to close the app and move on to the next level. In porn, the variety of girls is just as wide and the gap that your imagination has to cover, much narrower. I opened up one of my go-to porn websites and thus started a session that would not finish until late into the night, at around 4 am, the memories of my date earlier that day eerily distant.

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The Boss used to sing that you can’t start a fire without a spark — what he failed to mention was the number of sparks that you have to start before something bursts into flames.

For years, my addiction to porn prevented me from having any sort of dating experience. When I discovered Tinder, I found in it a perfect way to put myself out there while remaining behind the cover of what I knew best: a screen. Swiping on profiles became an exciting habit and I threw myself into it with almost as much eagerness as I had done before with porn. My Tinder sessions would extend and often mutate into long porn binges. Unlike with porn, though, at least I was getting something out of this whole Tinder deal: I was finally meeting girls and going out on dates — even if the ratio was one match for every one hundred right swipes, a single conversation out of a dozen matches, and seven of those chats just to get to a date.

To all the girls I met on Tinder, I would say sorry. I was lost and careless. Yes, it’s jungle out there when you’re dating, but that doesn’t justify everything. I ghosted girls, I misled them, I desperately tried to make things happen in times when I shouldn’t have, playing with others in a way that was manipulative and unfair. I treated some of these girls as if they were disposable and I completely neglected their feelings, and for that I apologize.

To Tinder, and in spite of everything, I would say thanks. It was a love-hate relationship what we always had. That app could boost my self-esteem and crush it the next minute, and it fueled a dating life that was for me as necessary as it was turbulent. Yet Tinder played an important role in the changes that shook my life up, getting it out of the tight spot it was stuck in, and for that I am grateful.

It took a great many sparks, and at times I would almost lose hope, but eventually my whole world was set on fire.

If it hasn’t, I hope one day yours does too.

 

Thank you. It took so long to get there, honestly. These stories happened in my mid-twenties, I was just starting dating and one could tell, because there were tons of awkwardness, mistakes, problems with sex... a lot of which I blame on the addiction to porn that I had for years and years (and still had at the time).

 

Honestly I pulled that number out of my ass, I don't remember what it was exactly but it felt like a terrible rate at the time, so I'm guessing it was probably closer to what you are saying.