Day 70 of 100 Indian Tinder Tales
M from Bangalore shares her story.

“E and I swiped right on each other in Hyderabad on Valentine’s Day. We both were visitors to the city, and we eventually were unable to meet. I lived in the hills, 2000 kms away from him. Tinder, for me, was simply a way to meet and befriend new people when I was in the plains, now that the shackles of self-consciousness had fallen away with my twenties. If ‘benefits’ accrued, no harm done. I had had fun. I had had drinks with and swapped Ogden Nash lines with intelligent boys or giggled with my girlfriends over unsolicited bad poetry from overeager suitors.

I was happy to keep chatting with E, even if we couldn’t meet. A month went by as our correspondence grew. He offered to visit the hills. I was both overjoyed and terrified. I said, yes, please do come see me. Then the terror won and I rescinded my invitation. He withdrew from me. It gnawed at me that I had probably made the biggest mistake of my life. We lasted only five days apart, but those days made us acknowledge how indispensable we had become to each other. This time I said that I would visit him, in a month’s time. Magical things began happening in this period. We discovered that we had spent the previous week listening, unbeknownst to each other, to the same arcane song from four decades ago, thinking about the other as the music played.

Two and a half months after we’d met on Tinder, I made it across the country to where he lived. He rode up to me on a quiet street, storm trees fallen all around us, clambered off his bike, and pulled me close. When I breathed him in, he smelt of the rain. His jacket was bedewed with cool raindrops, but his t-shirt was warm. Until I met this man, I had been a pragmatist, not a romantic; I had made the best of most situations, I had wondered how much to disbelieve people who told you that there was someone for everyone, and I had been unaware of how close two souls could be. That night, however, when we looked at each other, I felt as if we had always known the other and as if I had come home.

It has now been a year and a half. It has been embarrassingly easy building a life with this man. We will marry later this year.

I want to say before I end this that, contrary to widely held perception, Tinder wasn’t crawling with assholes. We all have our filters, and we often find what we’re looking for. Admittedly, I had not been looking for love, but the road to the love I did find was paved with evenings of great company and conversation with strangers and the happy realisation that most people are lovely, even when they aren’t your soulmates.”

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