Adventures in Swiping Right by Sarah Byrne If Tinder was a party, then I showed up when everyone was already drunk and passed out on the couch. Although I’m pretty sure that nearly everyone on Tinder is drunk and passed out on their respective couches anyway. When I first downloaded the app, I was very discerning as to whom I swiped right on. My biggest fear (an extremely arrogant one) was that I would somehow meet my future husband on Tinder, and then we’d have to tell everyone how we met. And, if it was on Tinder and he wasn’t at least attractive, my friends and family would judge me forever. This is the way my mind works — I didn’t choose it, but I can’t control it. I am constantly hearing horror stories of friends who are harassed by creepy people on Tinder. When I say “harassed” and “creepy,” I do not mean someone with a quirky pickup line. I mean some being persistently rude and aggressive, even after being turned down, as he (usually they’re boys) insists that the girls are into them, because clearly they are, having already swiped right. Unless you’re living in Nicholas Sparks novel, it’s probably impossible to convince someone to be attracted to you. My rough hypothesis after hearing all of these stories was based on the assumption that my friends, like me, were being quite selective in their right-swiping, and that they were therefore matching mainly with relatively attractive guys. Because these guys were attractive, they were used to being liked without putting in much work, and they were thus more prone to sending messages like “dtf?” Quite simply, they were matching with a lot of people, so they had little to lose by being rude to one or two. What logically follows this theory is that the people with a less attractive Tinder profile would be kinder, or at least be subtler in their propositioning. Maybe, just maybe, fewer girls were giving these guys a chance, but when given that chance, they would turn out to be the gems of Tinder. And maybe, girls complaining about guys on Tinder are just missing out on the proverbial “nice guys” of the app. So, I decided to find out. The Great Tinder Experiment began at approximately 1:17 a.m. on Friday night, and lasted until about that same time Saturday night. I swiped right on everyone. I’ll say it again: I swiped right on EVERYONE. This is not to say that I spent every minute for 24 hours on Tinder, swiping through every person in the greater Ithaca area. Rather, every time I would have gone on Tinder anyway, I swiped right on every person who came up, regardless of what I would have normally done. My friend Caroline also did it with me, just for the fun of some comparison, and all observations that follow are based on both of our experiences.

There was no validity to my hypothesis about the “niceness” gradient based on attractiveness. Like, when I say none, I mean none. If anything, people who came off less attractive based on their pictures turned out to be, on average, creepier and more insulting. Across the board, the boys on Tinder were extremely weird and sometimes unsettling. Not that this isn’t something I already knew from life, but there is something about Tinder that really lowers people’s inhibitions. As one of my friends observing the experiment said, “Once you match, they already feel like they’ve done all the work.” And it was true. My matches felt like they already knew me. They called me by my name. One of my pictures is of me wearing a baseball cap for a specific team, and on numerous occasions they felt the need to condescendingly ask me if I was really a fan, and then ask me to name players on said team. Originally, the goal of the experiment was to respond to all messages, but this soon became both physically and mentally impossible. There was not enough time, nor enough stamina, to endure this barrage of faked familiarity. The first Tinder message is a magical time of possibility. A Schrödinger’s relationship, if you will. There is one chance to make an impression, and it’s usually the boy who’s doing it. So, here comes some advice, if any boys have made it this far: Come up with a clever Tinder message! I received hundreds of horrible pickup lines, but the ones that were funny made me want to respond. However, there were also the ridiculously absurd messages, to which I could not have responded and still been able to live with myself. For example, “Are you the Gulf of Mexico? Because I want to drill you and make a big mess of you.” I accept the possibility that this person may have just been having fun sending weird messages to girls — he should just know that this is never going to lead anywhere. In the end, I really enjoyed the experiment. As someone with a verging-on-chronic fear of commitment, I like chatting without any strings attached. I thought I would hate the rampant creepiness of my matches during the swipe-right rampage, but I was amused, because I didn’t feel threatened by them. And for all of the complaining I’ve done so far, I actually had some nice conversations with people, including a great one about the musical Jersey Boys and one guy who played Connect Four with me via Emojis. For the record, that’s what they should be used for — not weird sex pictorials. Despite a less-than-ideal verdict, I’ll admit that my experiment takes Tinder out of its social context, away from its intended purpose. Maybe, if you have really thought through someone’s profile before swiping right, the work has already been done, and you can skip a few steps in the relationship. For now, I’m going to return to my normal, low amounts of time on Tinder. I’ve had enough for a while. But, here’s what I learned: Tinder is pretty wonderful. It allows us to meet people while still feeling comfortable behind the security of our smartphones. It can actually lead to

real-life relationships, but it doesn’t have to. No pressure, no “percent compatibility” and no blind dates. It epitomizes our generation’s desire for comfort and casual relationships. And, in four years or so, when some of us overcome our commitment-phobia, I can’t wait to go to my first Tinder wedding.

You Will Fall In Love With Your Best Friend, And Other Lies By Sarah Byrne

I will admit freely that as a child, I watched Disney Channel a lot. With a slightly larger twinge of embarrassment, I will also admit that I watched quite a bit of Hannah Montana. Besides telling me that it was possible for any of my friends at school to be secret pop stars, which I didn’t believe even as an impressionable youth, the show had some other long-lasting lessons for young girls. One of them is perhaps one of the most perpetuated tropes in all of romantic media: the myth of the best friend turned lover. There is a song from Hannah Montana, and the lyrics are, “If we were a movie, you’d be the right guy, I’d be the best friend you’d fall in love with.” While it might seem that here Disney Channel was trying to debunk the myth of ending up with your best friend, in fact Lilly and Oliver, Miley’s two best friends on the show, end up together. The same is true in almost every other sitcom; if the main character does not herself end up with her best friend, it is only because another close friend ends up with him. I am here to stop this madness, this insanity fueled by movies like Friends with Benefits / No Strings Attached (still don’t care enough to tell the difference between them), where two people start having casual sex and then end up in love with each other. In real life, no. This. Does. Not. Happen. Maybe sometimes, you do fall in love with your best friend. But then it turns out that he actually has a girlfriend, has had one for some time, or is interested in someone else. Or maybe he just plain isn’t interested in you. Shocker. Or maybe he sleeps with you just to sleep with you, because it’s some sort of weird thing guys do to feel close to their female friends. And then afterwards you think it means more than it does, because to you it means a lot. Don’t be fooled, it doesn’t. You may have heard people say that sex is never just sex. This is partially untrue, because sex is quite frequently “just sex” to

one of the people involved, and deeply meaningful to the other. If you are the person who cares, you should know that just because you guys took mud baths together when you were four years old does not mean that he will wake up one day, when you’re about to leave New York for a job in San Francisco, and jump into a taxi in his pajamas because he can’t wait one more minute to be with you, and buy a random plane ticket to get past security, and find you moments before you leave, to make you get off the plane with a grand romantic speech. The reason that girls and boys cannot be friends, from this girl’s perspective, is that society tells us that boys and girls are not just friends, ever. Even if you meet someone and pretty much hate each other, just give it ninety minutes and you guys will be getting drunk together, making out, and confessing your deep mutual love and affection. For a long time, I’ve thought that one day I would realize how in love I am with a boy who I hadn’t even considered until that moment. Probably even a boy whom I have always consulted for romantic advice, if the movies are to be believed. But then I thought about it, and rewatched a few rom-coms (after all, what else is Thanksgiving break for?). In these movies, even though we’re told that both people are totally blind to their chemistry, they are hard-core, ridiculously flirty from the moment they meet. We suspend our disbelief because we want to believe that everyone around us could secretly be in love with us, but the truth is that attraction is a lot more obvious than Katherine Heigl leads you to believe. So don’t wait around for someone who seems like they don’t like you to wake up one day and sprint across Manhattan. Odds are, he really and truly just doesn’t like you.

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E X A M I N I N G C O R N E L L ' S S E S Q U I C E N T E N N I A L

B Y S A R A H B Y R N E ( H T T P : / / 1 5 0 . C O R N E L L S U N . C O M / A U T H O R / S A R A H B Y R N E / ) / A P R I L2 7 , 2 0 1 5

HERE IN THIS PLACEou will fail for the first time. And the second. And the 100th.

You will stay up later than ever before, doing things that feel more importantthan anything before. Everything feels more important at 5 a.m., though. You willlearn to sometimes let it all go and just go to sleep.

You will cry. In the bathroom of Rockefeller a!er you get back a prelim. On thesidewalk outside Dunbar’s. In Olin when you get the email telling you that you gotthat internship for next summer. When you feel like everything is falling apart. Whenyou feel like everything is finally coming together.

Freshman year, you will think the campus is beautiful, coated gently in the firstblanket of freshly fallen snow. One week later, you will curse the heavy cloudswaiting to dump slush onto your head while you trudge to class. You will forget yoursnow boots at home, and your feet will be drenched, and you will have one morething, on top of everything else, to complain about as you down lattes in Libe Café.Four years later, the snow will be just as beautiful, you’ll just have to look a littleharder, a little longer. You will remember your snow boots. You will learn, and grow,just more slowly than you might have imagined.

You will become less idealistic, as you study gravity, grammar, gentrification — theseemingly immutable forces that govern the world we live in. You will also becomemore idealistic, as you see the drive inside your peers, your teachers, yourself — theforces that will one day change the world we live in.

Your life will be governed, at least for a while, by the curve — you will become

perhaps a little too invested in what everyone around you is doing, and thinking,and studying. Then you will forget all of that noise and find what you are supposedto be doing.

You will climb all 161 steps of the clock tower whenever you need to be remindedthe particularly extraordinary, improbable nature of everything around you. That weare all here, in this place, at this time, sharing this particular slice of our personaland collective histories. Your heart will be broken, and you will feel so certain thatyou will never be whole again. Then your best friends will bring you a CTBLT and abottle of wine, and you will spend the whole night laughing about the jokes that areyour respective lives. You will sit through the most boring lecture of your life, andthen attend a life-changing one, in the same day, because life is messy and full ofcontradictions, and so is this place.