Hooking up on the Tinder meat market

Oliver Roberts asks whether the instant choices offered by Tinder just make you unhappy and confused, or whether the dating app is merely appealing to our shameful basic instincts

Too much choice makes you unhappy. So goes the claim of several psychologists, including American Barry Schwartz who wrote The Paradox of Choice on that very notion.

Schwartz was mostly referring to the overwhelming number of choices the average American faces in their supermarket, but the same idea could just as easily be applied to the meat market that is Tinder.

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Launched in 2013, the smartphone dating app currently processes more than a billion swipes per day, correlating to about 12 million matches.

By the way, if you don't know what a "swipe" is, it's this: Tinder will display profile after profile of potential matches in your selected age group and geographical range, to which you swipe either left or right.

Left means "I'm not interested"; right means "I'm interested". Two matched right swipes enables the users to start chatting with each other.

Online dating is nothing new. I fell into it in the early 2000s as a gangly peroxide-haired 20-something loitering in HTML chat rooms looking for lurv. It was hard work back then.

You had to spend unyielding hours (I did, anyway) wooing nothing but a username that you assumed and hoped was female (this was waaay before the comfort of Facebook profiles), all in the hope that your textual charm might lead to a phone number and/or an arrangement to meet at a coffee shop in the East Rand Mall on a cold Sunday evening in August.

In the maybe two years that I subscribed to this method of trying to get a girl to like me, I had approx four successes, and by successes I mean two of the "matches" ended up falling for my best friend (who I no longer associate with, obvs).

One ended up being lovely but had just finished a stint in Tara for an attempted overdose, and the fourth had sunken cheeks and lived in a caravan park near OR Tambo International, a prospect too far and too depressing for someone with negligible petrol money and post-teen, Nietzschean angst.

Nowadays online dating is apparently a kind of paradise. I say apparently because I've never used a dating app (in subsequent years I somehow upped my game and got a pretty girl to like/stay with me), and I also say apparently because, at first glance, an app like Tinder - which is essentially a hook-up app - seems to be something that instantly solves the issue of going through the arduous effort of getting to know someone well enough/getting a person to like you enough, to sleep with you.

We're bombarded with so many real sexual/companionship possibilities that it's becoming really hard to choose just one person to form a meaningful bond with

(I've also just now realised that my over-use of the word "apparently" might have had something to do with two of my erstwhile chatroom matches preferring my friend).

But let's go back to the idea of choice and how too much of it leads to anxiety and general FOMO. This is the disease of the age, is it not? For all its fantastic uses, the internet/social media has made us increasingly aware of what's out there, and it comes with the assurance that it's all just a click or, in Tinder's case, a swipe away.

How does the human brain cope with the possibility that feverish, anonymous sex/someone you believe you could fall in love with is just a swipe and a five-minute drive away, while at the same time knowing that that same feverish, anonymous sex/someone you believe you could fall in love with is just another swipe and perhaps a 10-minute drive away?

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Not all that well, apparently. Since our Tinderisation, sociologists, psychologists and other types of 'gists are suggesting that all this swiping and instant gratification and gamifying of sex is starting to eff with our biology and general sense of contentment.

They're saying that instead of doing things old-school - that is, finding someone you like and can get along with without there being too much shouting and crying and ruinous emotional manipulations, then sticking with them because by the time you're 40, even though you might feel a little ho-hum, it's just too much effort to go looking for someone new.

We're bombarded with so many real sexual/companionship possibilities that it's becoming really hard to choose just one person to form a meaningful bond with.

I mean, hell, why overlook the fact that your man picks his toenails in bed, or your woman puts on an awful pair of nappy-like tracksuit pants the moment she gets home? Why endure this in the name of "love" and "commitment" when you're pretty sure that someone who doesn't do these heinous things is lurking on your smartphone, tonight?

And, yes, you could say that Tinder is simply unveiling just how bestial we humans really are, attracted primarily by looks and programmed to have sex with as many people as possible before we succumb to the wiles of a sabre-tooth tiger.

This is probably true - we do still wrestle with certain primal urges; it's why marriage counsellors exist - but we've also learnt to compose ourselves and become a little more civilised, because we've realised that if we yielded, en masse, to our basic whims to eat and have sex, very little would get done in the world.

Meaningless hook-ups aside, Tinder is supposedly very useful for eliminating the pesky rigmarole of "having to get to know someone" on a first date, only to find that you don't like them at all and you just wasted time and money.

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The app implies it gets all of that out of the way before you even meet. And although there have no doubt been plenty of success stories, I know a few people - all very likeable and intelligent and hygienic - who have gone on countless dates with theoretically perfect Tinder matches, only to find, with stunned surprise, that their date's online persona doesn't quite match their in-person one.

The thing is, you're dealing with humans - changeable, conflicted, horny one day, far more interested in stage 14 of the Tour de France the next.

With all the choice in the world, we're always going to be looking for something better.

Conversely, when faced with limited choice - like in the "old days" - we still end up seeking novelty and the forbidden because it's a diversion and because our evolution compels us to in order to survive. Both are maddening impulses, but at least you're not feeling the latter vibrating in your pocket or handbag all day.

• Tell us: What have been your best/worst experiences on Tinder? E-mail lifestyle@sundaytimes.co.za