Candace Bushnell Calls Tinder What It Is: Absolutely Miserable

Candance Bushnell, who catalogues what it was like to start dating again as a divorced 50-something, is now very familiar with the depressing experience of being on dating apps, specifically Tinder. In an interview with Vanity Fair promoting her new book, Is There Still Sex in the City?, Bushnell says:

“What was interesting about Tinder was [that] everyone was on it, but nobody seemed to like it. Is that how dominant technology is? Nobody likes it, yet we are obliged to use it?”

Actually yeah, that’s exactly how this works! Bushnell did not use other dating apps, of which they are many, because it would have taken up too much time—further proving her point:

Bushnell did not explore other dating apps as well; that pursuit alone, she said, could comprise an entire book.

If Carrie Bradshaw had to deal with Tinder, Sex and The City would have been a very different show. While Bradshaw maybe would have been pleased to discover she could invite men over to bone without ever leaving her couch, maybe she would have just opted out of dating entirely. At least two seasons could be dedicated to her downloading the app, trying it for while, deleting it, and re-downloading it and trying again, and then repeating that process roughly 56 times. A subplot would be trying Bumble and getting no responses. The series finale is she joins OkCupid.

Like Twitter, Tinder may just be oversaturated with people screaming into the void; dating, at its best, should be tolerable, tipping over into enjoyable when something goes well—and yet something about Tinder feels like homework. A better dating app, I fear, is not the point. Like Marianne Williamson said, we need a return to love, and I’m not sure how, exactly, we’ll get it. But at least Candace Bushnell agrees with me.