Serendipity, and nice girls on Tinder

I have an extremely high tolerance for serendipity. Once, living in Singapore, my friends and I met a cute Yale girl to plan alumni activities. Within the hour, she invited me on a trip with her friends. The spur of the moment trip turned out to be to South Africa and her friends were soon unavailable.

One should determine if one absolutely does not get along with a girl well before you are on a plane, landing on a different continent. In the plane, she angrily asked why I had seated us together and moved to a row where she would likely sleep across three seats. She picked fights about why I was taking so many pictures of lions (then begged me for the ones with her in them). She kept complaining she was not paid enough but emphasizing she refused to work past 4 p.m.

People surprisingly still consider it a big deal to use technology to help serendipity along, even if dates from hell can spring forth from traditional starts as much as technological starts. On a dating website, for example, everyone is theoretically single and willing to mingle, skipping all that theorizing whether she would come with her brother or has a discreet ring. You can pull up your quarry’s pictures and age instead of sneaking furtive glances (though you have to decipher deceptive poses). You have a short writeup to gauge personality and start conversation. Finally, technology allows you to quickly skip nonprospects at a speed real life cannot match.

A friend’s wedding video was an advertisement for eHarmony.com. She got exactly one match but I knew it was true love when she showed us the life-size Iron Man statue she bought for him.

Unfortunately, eHarmony is suboptimal in Manila because so few girls use it. If one asks for people with college degrees living in Metro Manila, one might end up with a list of one or two.

But serendipity goes beyond dating programs. Back in Friendster days, I chatted up someone from my sister’s high school after she posted a hilarious college graduation picture. I was several months into Accralaw and sneaked several evening calls to her by hiding inside Sen. Ed Angara’s old office, the one place no partner would ever enter. She would talk about her exchange student stint and her sports. I soon left the country to study, but we kept in touch, and she even sent jokes the night before the New York Bar Exam.

I once spoke to a med student who liked my Facebook writer’s page and also turned out to be from my sister’s high school. I asked if she wanted coffee after a funny description of how med students practice techniques on each other. She replied that she was never presentable after hospital shifts and to try again after two months and her exams.

Today’s most fun channel is Tinder, a smartphone app that filters users based only on age, gender and geographic distance (via GPS). It is an intentionally superficial app, showing only a

user’s photo and very brief writeup. If you both “swipe right,” you can message each other.

Tinder arrived from the United States with a reputation as a hookup app. This led to hilarious misencounters here where naïve male users thought it was proper for one’s first message to ask my place or yours. My legal ability was sorely taxed at an Inquirer lunch where Winnie Monsod asked me to explain Tinder and cite statistics on how many permanent unions it has formed.

No technology is going to have hordes of women prowling the Internet for casual sex anytime soon. Rather, people began looking for genuine conversations on Tinder. The ease of setting up an account is a game changer, unlike the elaborate questionnaires of typical dating sites. Since one can join Tinder in a couple of minutes while egged on by playful girlfriends, I have seen quite a number of accomplished female friends there, though they all disclaim that they are just “checking it out.” The ease of entry means there is a real pool of girls.

Several hundred swipes later, perhaps finding one interesting person in a thousand is not a bad ratio, given how quickly one can go through them. One can laugh off all the transsexual warnings, condo ads and massage offers, and I personally skip profiles with blank writeups. One can gauge a person after speaking for a few sentences, and poor grammar or bored replies can end conversations quickly. I had conversations with several and had coffee with a few, all normal girls in their 20s, from a PhD student to a preschool teacher. The most dangerous thing was being invited to a second date to meet her mom.

One girl practically broke my heart. She was 24, studied communication and finance, had a keen interest in painting, theater, singing and debate, and initiated the conversation so self-assuredly. The litmus test came when she said that she lived in far off Binondo and did not drive. Instead of canceling, I called Carlos Celdran to ask for good places. She rushed out to look for my car and I realized the girl walking down a dirty Binondo alley in a cocktail dress and heels was even prettier than the girl in the picture. We spent the night under a large umbrella on the Bayleaf Hotel roofdeck, and I realized I could spend hours listening to her voice and raindrops. Unfortunately, she stopped texting one day and confessed that she had a long talk with her ex, so that ended as quickly as it began.

Each year, we have dozens of attractive, intelligent friends who whine on Facebook on Valentine’s Day. This is the year to tell them they still have a few days to get on Tinder and break the

vicious cycle. As for me, I guess I need to start swiping through another thousand profiles to find another girl like the one from Binondo.

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