Lexicon ·
unmatching
verb
- Stated meaning
- Removing a match you are no longer interested in, so neither party is left holding a dead thread.
- Operating meaning
- A closure performed with a tap, which deletes the thread on both ends and requires no sentence, so the party ending it is spared the only part of ending it that costs anything.
- Origin
- A button. Tinder added it so a user could remove a match they felt unsafe talking to, conversation included, from both sides at once, which makes it the only term in this lexicon that is also a piece of software.
- Synonyms
- unmatch
September 9, on an app. The evening before had run 135 minutes at $148.33. She messaged that night to say she had got home safe and wished me the same, I replied that I had and thanked her, and the following day I unmatched her. Neither of us said anything about it, because the button has no field for that.
Every other term here is something people say. This one is something people press. It was added to the apps as a safety feature (opens in a new window), and like most product decisions of that kind it also removed a social obligation that had survived every previous technology, which is that ending a thing with a person required addressing the person.
There is no course in this. The advice economy cannot sell instruction in a button that takes one tap and no preparation, so it sells the other side instead: what it means when it happens to you (opens in a new window), and whether the disappearance was a statement. A market that cannot teach the act teaches the interpretation of it, which is the same business as reading tea leaves with a subscription attached.
Under load the button does something a sentence cannot. On Tinder it deletes the thread from both ends (opens in a new window). There is no thread to reread, nothing to compose, no reply to receive and no version of events to disagree with. A silence has two parties in it. What the button produces is an absence of the conversation, and the person on the other side is left with an accurate account of nothing.
Three accounts on this site have closed since September 3, all 3 by me. One took a message I thought about overnight and sent on September 6, and it produced a friendship that is still running. One took a declined invitation in a text thread at 11:30 pm. One took a tap on September 9, after 135 minutes and $148.33 and a message wishing me a safe drive home, and it produced nothing at all, which is what the button is for. The cheapest closing in the file is the only one that left no record, and I am the one who chose it.