"What happened when I let a 40-something swipe on my Tinder account."

Excuse me, but I have a theory about Tinder.

I believe that the dating app, which has more than 50 million users every month, offers an experience not all that different to how people dated 20 years ago.

Obviously they didn’t have phones. Or Internet. I’m fairly certain the camera wasn’t invented yet, and everything was in black and white anyway. They rode around on a horse and carriage and had to wear dresses down to their ankles. It was a weird time – everyone knows that.

But people interacted in much the same way.

When you went to the…barn dance or whatever people did all the way back then, you made a snap judgement. There had to be, as there always is with dating, a moment of initial attraction.

I understand that sometimes that grows. You might not be sure at first, but once you get talking to them it blossoms. Or the opposite – once they start speaking your attraction disappears. But what we do on Tinder, which is make an assumption about a person based on their age, appearance, occupation and interests, is something we’ve been doing for bloody centuries. Us millennials hardly invented it.

So I got my colleague and good friend (until I ask her what it was like before roads were invented…) Jacqueline Lunn to give it a go.

And let’s just say that after 30 seconds…she definitely didn’t hate it.

Footnote: I do understand the chronology of Australian history, and that Jackie grew up in a house with a television and a car. Just please, don’t tell her that.