The day has finally arrived, where we can all openly admit that we're active Internet daters and not be embarrassed about it. I myself first started doing it when it was desperately uncool - in the days when it was just for people who wore ill-fitting jeans and national health glasses without any sense of irony. I was one of those people, but at least I had the decency to have lenses in my glasses.
I've been on the old dating circuit for about ten years and in the last eight of those bad-boys, I've managed to clock up an incredibly impressive relationship total of - zero.
Why? Well, because I was an addict of course. Internet dating is a very addictive monster, especially if you're somebody that had been eternally friend-zoned before the days of digital lust.
Dating sites are like sexy Panini sticker albums. You find yourself sitting there for hours, nodding to the screen, saying 'need, need, need, need, need, would probably swap.'
Of course with the online dating site, you have a full informative profile to read about the person. Imagine chatting someone up in a bar and already having acquired full knowledge of their pets, ambitions and drinking capabilities?
Well this is all very well and has been for years, but alas - as a race, humans are evolving fast. One particular way in which we are evolving is that our attention spans are dwindling at an alarming rate.
First of all there was Twitter, where we could only be bothered to read generic messages that were 140 characters long. Then Vine came along, where you could just about be bothered to sit through a grueling six second broadcast. Then there was Tinder.
Who wants to spend an enormous amount of time (4 or so minutes) reading a profile on a dating site, when you can just decide whether or not you want to go out with someone there and then by just swiping their face? Nobody, that's who.
That's precisely why I decided to give up Internet dating, so I did. Then, during the Edinburgh festival last year, a friend of mine told me about Tinder and I was hooked. It's like crack for the serial dater.
Tinder is an application where you simply swipe left if you don't like the look of somebody or right if you do. If that person then decides to also swipe right, then you get a match. If you get a match, you get to chat and if you get to chat (without ballsing it up), then you get a date. It's instant and shallower than a sparrows' bath.
There is little or no information about that person except for the way they look. For girls this is a nightmare, as the height requirement obsession that is rife in the world of Internet dating often becomes the first topic of conversation.
If you pass the height test and refrain from being a sex pest, then the likelihood is that you will score yourself a date. So what's a Tinder date like? Well some say that Tinder is simply a hook-up tool, but I think that this is due to it sounding almost like Grindr.
Grindr is an application that homosexual gentlemen use to hook up with each other within the immediate vicinity. It's a location based application, where you can see who's up for a bit of sexy with immediate effect.
I certainly wouldn't tar Tinder with the same brush. I've managed to not have sex with most of the people I've met from it. However, my housemate ended up chatting to somebody at 10 o'clock on a Friday night and jumping in a £50 minicab to somewhere outside London.
When he arrived at her front door, she was something of a 'Tinder Surprise'. A Tinder Surprise is basically somebody that looks a hell of a lot better in their profile picture than they do in real life. I turned up to a Tinder Surprise recently and her hair was a completely different colour to that as advertised. I was quite polite though and said 'Actually, grey is my favourite of all the colours.'
Anyway, my housemate still had sex with this woman and even took another £50 taxi home. So although Tinder is a free app, it's still a costly old business.
Because of the amount of people using this thing, it becomes ridiculously easy to get a match and rack up a load of dates, thus fuelling the addiction of meeting new people all of the time. Nobody using that app wants to settle for just one person.
Maybe this is a ploy from the government to control the population growth eh? Who needs a zombie apocalypse? Come to think of it, we may already have one.
Anyway, I've written a book about all this stuff and it's great, so please help me get it published by pledging right here:
http://unbound.co.uk/books/your-place-or-mine