Earlier today, as I was singing ‘How deep is your love’ in the shower, something compelling jerked me back to my timeless existential crisis. I cannot call it my own dilemma though as I could instantly remember 69 known faces staggering through what can be called ‘the classic discipline of I still do not understand what makes me happy’. Oh lord the vicious cycle of love!
As I put on my face and drag my corporate body out of the house, the people in my bus and their quantitative obsession with their Smartphones give me the jitters once again. Just when I was about to submerge myself in judging and adjudging of these perfect strangers, my phone beeped with a viable notification from Tinder. And thus started yet another superficial role-playing of puppy love, the uncontrollable need for a partner, denotations of affectionate messaging, the conscious trap, stress, sleeplessness, compromise, institutional plight and it kept getting worse.
Back at home, as I ponder over why Tinder could not suffice my own needs for emotional compatibility for years now, it got my practical senses to form a cluster in my head.
Between how my parents describe romance to how I deal with it differs on one gradient only. Technology and its stupendous glamour that has made me consider feelings as yet another fragment of my materialistic existence. If one swipe was enough to take me to the man of my dreams, I would not be writing this analogy in the first place. I need my apocalyptic touch and the poetry in my conversations and not the virtual syndrome of texting. And in the end, it all comes down to the quintessential confusion of ‘Shit, I do not know what I want!’.
Am I an amateur just looking to mate or am I to accept the first thing I see? Tinder has leapt over the strategized meaning of love. It is not easy. A scope for a chance encounter? Well, maybe but I do not count on it. I need my morning mist and the obscurity of a torrential love. Tinder might give me three fake smiles, a cup of cappuccino, a movie and sometimes if I get lucky, two weeks of hormonal thrill; but where is my intensifier of cinematic and poetic emulsion?
In the end, life has never taught me more than to be an individualist of moral standards. I do not want to pursue an identity of mixed diabolical personalities who I cry over in movies. If it takes 20 more years, I am more than ready. Technology has closed my doors of subjective opinions on everything under the sun. I feed off of this vast online distortion and I am done for good.
However, though, I am addicted to Tinder as my preying eyes look for the embodiments of cosmetic attractions near my area. My instincts cannot stop. After all, I too have been trained to disappear and emerge with renewed recognition in a world that may or may not exist. Till then, I will manage with reconsiderations and procrastination like everyone else is.
