Tinder's new Matchmaker feature leaves much to be desired
Most of us don't need friends and family meddling in our dating business
Dating app, Tinder, has just officially announced a new “matchmaker feature” called Tinder Matchmaker that enables users to grant other people access to their account for 24 hours, so they can suggest likes for you. The idea is to allow friends and family to recommend potential matches.
Um, no thanks.
Some of you know I was on Tinder for a while. It’s actually how I met my second husband. For those of you who don’t know that I recently got remarried, yes—I did! That’s the reason for the name change: Emme Witt-Eden.
So no—not knocking Tinder here. For a while, I loved the app. Not only did I find love again with the help of Tinder, but it enabled me to go on a whole dating journey that rocked my world.
I met men who delighted my body with new pleasures after a dark era of near sexlessness during my marriage. If you’re interested in reading about this experience, I’ll have a memoir out in January, entitled Confessions of a Middle-Aged F-Girl. I’ll be sending out a link to pre-order the book soon.
But alas, while doing all that Tindering, would I have wanted my family and friends to select matches for me? No way! That was the whole point of app dating. It gave me the freedom to meet men without having to depend on my friends or family to set me up with people they thought I’d be good with.
Honestly, I never once found any luck with my friends’ help. They never totally understood my type of guy and were always trying to set me up with Mr. Wrong.
My sister, bless her heart, was never very helpful either. She never understood my taste. She only ever pushed me to meet acquaintances of hers whom she would want to date if she weren’t married. And yeah, my sister and I are very different people.
And forget about the rest of my family. They hardly get me as it is; so why would they ever comprehend what type of man I want in a partner?
Plus, in the period that I was dating after I left my husband, it was all about exploration, about meeting various “randos” so I could figure out what I wanted. I was in a state of flux and so I hardly think that anyone could have helped me with my dating journey at that point.
That said, for a while, I was helping my ex with his dating journey. I know that might sound weird. He cheated on me while we were married and we have definitely had a lot of rough patches in our relationship. I owed him nothing, and still, I took photos of him for his dating profile and even gave him a lot of dating advice. But then again, my reasons for doing that were quite selfish: he was depressed and this was affecting our children. I wanted him to get into a stable relationship so he would be a better dad.
I also knew it would be easier for me to leave our kids in his care for longer periods if he had a woman to help him. Pathetic as that may sound, my ex has always had difficulty handling our kids on his own. So yeah, my reasons for wanting him to find a stable mate were really so my life would become easier.
However, I did notice something while helping him with dating. He kept chasing women who were at least a decade (sometimes two decades!) younger than him and, well, women who were way out of his league. My ex has really let himself go in the past few years. It was my opinion that he had to reassess his priorities when it came to finding an appropriate partner. He wanted to date a Playboy Centerfold while he was hardly a Hugh Hefner.
Maybe you think this makes me sound like a jerk, but come on, he needed to be pursuing women his own age. And if he wasn’t Mr. Super-Fit Gym Rat, then he needed a woman who didn’t look like she spent most of her life in Barre class.
Honestly, I would have really liked to have taken control of his Tinder account. But I doubt he would have liked any of the women I would have selected for him, even if they were better matches.
So, Tinder’s new feature? I don’t think so. Maybe it will work for some. And perhaps some people (like my ex-husband) actually do need others close to them to pick out their matches. But I have trouble believing this feature will be beneficial for most people.
Let me know if you disagree.