A highly specific Tinder problem

What’s the biggest problem you run into while using the popular dating app Tinder?

Is it that almost all the children of the Earth seem appalling when reduced to four photos and the opportunity to describe themselves in two sentences? Is it that you are a busy modern creature with precious little time to message the people in your life you already care about, much less strangers about whom you know nothing? Is it your terrible reflexes, never more inconvenient than when you have only a split-second to get someone else’s unbidden genitalia out of your face?

Or, like Circuit Breaker writer Ashley Carman, is that you never know how or when to save a person in your phone? Ashley wrote about this on The Verge a few weeks ago, regaling us with the charming anecdote of the time a boy saved her in his phone as a fishcake emoji. After her post went viral in Vox Media’s Slack rooms and out loud in Verge HQ, we (myself and Verge culture reporter / news editor Lizzie Plaugic) knew we had to congregate in a very dark closet and talk about it at some length.

So we did it! Using anecdotal evidence and one impromptu phone call to a former romantic interest, we figured out the best way to go about saving numbers in the age of Tinder. Spoiler: it’s definitely not to refer to people by their first names, as 108 percent of the male population of the United States is named “Matt.”

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