On a 30-something’s Refusal to Use Dating Apps

It’ll be a typical morning that I log onto Twitter, perusing my timeline as I groggily jam some toast and tea into my facehole, and read lamentations of my peers who had yet another bad date off of OK Cupid, Tinder, or whatever the hell all you kids who need to get off my philosophical notion of a lawn are using now.

Then I’m out at my usual haunts where I can plunk down my laptop to work and people-watch, and it’s inevitable I’m going to see cyber dates morph into IRL meetings in the wild. In fact, shortly after I started writing this, I found myself hankering for a sandwich and to get out of the house so I hopped the bus to the Co-Op City Panera. Aside from being one of the few options for public meeting spaces with plentiful seating and outlets up here, it’s also primetime people-watching. You get everything from Meetup.com groups to app dates to LinkedIn connections meeting in here, and more often than not the dating ones are intensely stilted.

It typically starts as a casual observation as I work and shitpost over my latte that quickly turns into a forcefield I can sense from across the room. This time, the forcefield spans the petite square table overlooking the Bay Plaza parking lot as I’m drafting a consulting client’s sales strategy. I don’t know what app the two people across the room met off of but it looks like this man is far…