Moncton — A marketing consultant with an Ontario-based web startup, visiting Moncton on a business trip, failed to generate any matches on the hook-up app Tinder, and ended up weeding out every single available male in the province, according to reports.
Rebecca Wilson, 28, was in the city to visit a client, but was looking forward to enjoying some downtime during her evening, and was open to meeting up with any of Moncton’s eligible bachelors for a night out on the town.
“I know Moncton isn’t a very big city, so I knew pickings would be slim,” said Wilson, after going for an evening stroll downtown only to find out the city centre was essentially one street of empty bars and closed restaurants that took all of 15 minutes to cover on foot.
That’s when Wilson turned to her Tinder app, a favourite among young, tech-savvy singles, to help find a date to show her around town. The app displays profiles of local singles, letting users swipe left to reject a potential match, or swipe right to try to connect and chat.
After her initial criteria (young male between the ages of 25 and 35 with a good job, decent education, and appreciation for arts and culture) yielded no results in the downtown area, Wilson expanded her search by several kilometres, only to find the resulting sample of profiles not to her liking.
“It was just a lot of photos of young wannabe thugs flashing gang signs, douchebags in V-neck shirts, profiles riddled with spelling mistakes,” she explained. “Some profiles were empty except for photos of rusted-out Honda Civics with homemade spoilers, or blurry photos of dirty ATVs parked out in the woods somewhere.
“A lot of the profiles didn’t even use real names,” she added. “One just said ‘Victoria Park Golfer’ — what does that even mean?”
Wilson soon found herself browsing profiles of men on the outskirts of Moncton, extending her search to Shediac, Salisbury, Petitcodiac, Sussex, Oromocto, Quispamsis, on to larger cities like Saint John and Fredericton, branching outwards to Woodstock, Bouctouche, Miramichi, Saint Andrews, and Blacks Harbour, muttering “no no no” as she swiped left on every profile, each man seemingly more repulsive than the last.
Before finally retiring for the evening, Wilson got a faint glimmer of hope in the form of a profile for a young man in Balmoral, but upon further inspection, it was clear he could not speak English, and she swiped left, thereby eliminating from contention the last available single man in the entire province.
When reached for comment about her experience with New Brunswick’s casual dating scene, Wilson said: “I’m going to bed early, I have a flight in the morning.”