Desi Girls Date Online. But Coyly.

(Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan is the author of three books, with a fourth Before And Then After releasing in early 2015.)

A lot of my single friends are experimenting with online dating. Some of my friends in couples download Tinder "just to see" but I'm fairly sure that "just to see" is about the same as shopping for a new person when you're bored of your old one. What is there to see?

Scores of singles lined up for your choosing, with a flick you dismiss them, with a come-hither gesture you let them know of your interest. One friend had a brief period of luck with the app, meeting a man she thought was nice enough to date, but mostly, it's been dismissed to me as "everyone on the app is only looking for sex, ya."

There's also the dating website OK Cupid (which matches you based on common interests, and more importantly, is free), but in India, using it is very much like going to a dive bar. You stand a chance of being the only likely woman in the room and so "within a few seconds," says a friend who tried it, "my inbox was filled with weird messages." With such a scarcity of women, especially women who use online dating apps and might possibly be interested in you, OK Cupid's male users believe in spreading their net far and wide, whether or not their "match" percentage with you is only a measly 20 per cent.

The "only looking for sex" aspect of Tinder should not be a surprise to people who have used the app longer than us. It is popularly the "hook up" app, the straight version of "Grindr", which has enjoyed popularity in India in an underground way, the assumption being that gay men are more upfront about what they want.

But with online dating, Indian women have to acknowledge their biggest juxtapositions: women who want sex but who also want marriage and babies and the whole hog. Too often, my friends say to me, "I don't want sex, I want to date someone." Sex isn't dating. Dating isn't sex. Once they get married, their sex lives might peter off, the twice-a-week might become twice-a-month, if they're lucky, but that's not what marriage is for. Marriage is for having the home together, taking holidays together, going to a large family wedding and watching your spouse fit in. When Indian women date, we're usually just auditioning for that role.

What chance does Tinder have when even on a first date, we can dismiss a man (these are all real reasons people have given me) for a) not having the right accent; b) being a vegetarian; c) not wearing the right kind of shirt or d) not ready to be exclusive. ("On the first date?" I exclaim, "Do you want to be exclusive on the first date?")

I came of age before Tinder. We all did-whoever's using Tinder now wasn't born to it-but I do remember that pre-dating apps, there was an IRL (in real life) method to it, and it was called "speed dating." I attended one such event as a journalist to cover it for my newspaper, and it struck me as the least successful way to date ever. Basically, much like the Tinder app, you were meant to meet each person for two minutes, and if you liked them, you'd check the box next to their name. If two people checked off each other, they'd be contacted and told they had a match. "I've checked off everyone," said one male participant, running from table to table in excitement, "Who knows who'll check me off, I don't want to miss them," This is basically the mentality of most people trying online dating in India.

My friends who use Tinder now aren't usually people who have grown up with dating. They used the Internet for other-more conventional-things. This is all new, uncharted territory for a lot of them, and so they fumble. There's the whole shame thing, which no one really likes to acknowledge, but it's there, usually in your mother's voice or your grandmother's, depending on how big a family you live with, going, "Looking for a boy on the internet! Just take out an ad in a newspaper, why don't you?"

For that reason, any of the people I know who have been successful with internet dating, never mention they met online. It's far too embarrassing, they think. There's the whole society thing: if I meet a boy I swiped right on, will he think I'm too eager? Will he think I'm a slut? And so, no matter how excited you are about the date, you play it down, letting the man shower you with attention if he must, and if he doesn't, you dismiss it, "I guess he wasn't that into me anyway."

No, there should be a guide for Tinder, a way to navigate it for people like us: trying to be modern but secretly, inside our heads, super traditional. Expats who live in India use it, and are baffled by the whole new set of rules they have to follow once they swipe right. "Everyone" knows Tinder is a hook-up app, and yet, "everyone" can't stop hoping for a happy ending.

Meanwhile, I can't stop thinking of the gay couple I met last year, an older man in his fifties, with a younger man, in his twenties, both perfectly content in each other's company, the younger man curled into the nook of the older man's arm. "Where'd you two meet?" I asked and they looked at each other and smiled and said, "Grindr."

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