I Spent Seven Hours at Wrestlemania on a Tinder Date

I love professional wrestling. I grew up watching it in its 1990s heyday, and I now think of it as the ideal form of entertainment. Wrestling has it all: inoffensive violence, cartoonish archetypes, tons of hair oil, and an oddly tenuous boundary between the performance and the real-life egos that drive the business. To me, it's strange that anyone would not enjoy a soap opera starring muscular dudes in slogan-bearing T-shirts and no pants—and yet, few others in my life share this passion.

So when it was announced that Wrestlemania came to the Bay Area for the first time this year, it proved difficult to convince any of my friends to spend the several hundred dollars and an entire Sunday watching grown men pretend to punch each other at Levi's Stadium.

Faced with this dilemma, I did what any reasonable person would do: I turned to Tinder. I curated my photos to make myself appear fun, edited my description indicating my intent, and swiped right on the next 100 people. Age and looks were irrelevant. There were only two requirements: Do you enjoy wrestling enough to make the two-and-a-half-hour journey to Levi's with a strange woman? Do you have a pulse? Great, then let's do this.

Despite this utter lack of discretion, it took several weeks to lock someone down. I received a couple dozen replies, but was quickly able to weed out serious inquiries. Generic greetings—"Hey, how's your night going?"—suggest that they didn't read my description. Others expressed interest, but only because they were more interested in the other kind of wrestling. Hilariously, one asked me to confirm that I was over 18. I had to convince almost everyone it wasn't some elaborate catfish, and that I was serious about going—under the condition that it was strictly about the 'Mania.

Some dropped off the map when it came time to coordinate tickets. Many others—like users of Tinder in general—quickly moved on to the next shiny object. To put it in marketing terms, it was tough to "convert."

It was mere days before the event when I finally did. With wrestlers and fans flooding the Bay Area for a weekend of festivities, I landed on a 32-year-old man from San Francisco. We talked briefly on the phone, verifying that that the other was on the spectrum of normalcy, and met at Caltrain on March 29, the day of the event.

Normally when meeting a stranger, I'd construct an exit strategy—a prior engagement, a "work emergency"—in case he sucks. But on Sunday, there was no such option. There would be two long hours together on public transit to Wrestlemania. Match after match in the midday sun, stretching into the twilight hours. Almost four hours to get back home, amidst the sweltering masses of Brock Lesnar fans. The only way out was beer.

Fortunately, we ended up in a party car heading down to the event with a large group of revelers who passed around booze as disinterested Caltrain employees wandered the aisles. By hour two, I knew my Tinder date's entire work history, the sports he played throughout high school, his opinion of Jed York, his opinion of "Big Data," and his favorite type of cracker (he likes Triscuits). Like so many 32-year old males in this region, he works in software sales, and since this is San Francisco, we were swapping app ideas and pledging intellectual property rights in solemn, slurred tones by hour three.

By that point, mercifully, the wrestling began.

If you've never been to Wrestlemania, it's basically a marathon of matches interspersed with pyrotechnics, over-acted confrontations, and video sizzle reels. It's the Super Bowl of the wrestling world, so they trot out all the favorites: crossover figures like the Rock and 90s superstars who emerge with gray-flecked goatees along with the present-day cast. The event was MC'ed by Stephanie McMahon, the villainous executive, sometime-wrestler and daughter of WWE chairman Vince McMahon. The title match was Brock Lesnar—a Viking-like veteran who just re-signed with WWE after a stint in UFC—versus Roman Reigns, the swarthy upstart with perpetually wet hair and a flat affect. With the possible exception of some of the kids in the audience, everyone understands that wrestling is scripted. But the crowd's investment in the acrobatics, the visceral smack of flesh on the mat, and the storylines that unfold across several years, is delirious. The women's bathroom lines are also nonexistent. If you ask me, Wrestlemania is well worth the price of admission.

By hour five, it's impossible not to find yourself doing things you never expected as you're subsumed into a 70,000-person mass of emotion. By this point, the Tinder date has ceased to exist: We've merged into a group of fans whose names I mostly don't remember, reacting with uniform euphoria to the drama, spectacle, and surprise unfolding on the tiny, distant ring below. You may find yourself cheering reflexively as a video of Ronald Reagan flashes across the Jumbrotron. "Tear down this wall!" demands Reagan, as the WWE's "Russian" wrestler, Rusev (who is actually from Bulgaria), enters the ring on a tank to deafening boos as the Russian national anthem thunders in the background. In this Bay Area crowd, the jeers turn to cheers, and back to halting jeers, as Republican soundbites fill the arena.

By hour six, beneath the punishing daylight, John Cena's constant entreaties about "Respect" rub off on the crowd. I accidentally splash Coors Light on the shirt of a child in the first row. Oops. His father stands up, puffs out his gut and orders my Tinder date:

"You need to apologize."

"It was me. I'm very sorry," I explained.

Ignoring me, the 400-pound, tribal-tattooed man insisted to my date, "It's about respect."

It seemed like the wrong forum to bring up the gender politics involved here. I leaned out.

My date apologized.

It's amazing how much, yet how little, you can learn about a person from spending four hours sitting on public transit after Wrestlemania. The Coors Light is consumed, the souvenir shirts are bought, and Seth Rollins has inexplicably won the WWE title despite being not scheduled to perform. And as the buzz began to wear off, along came the clarity that we would never associate with one another again. All that was left was a creeping dread of work in the morning, and a bizarre depth of conversation that can only take place on a Tinder date that's gone on eight hours too long.

On the Caltrain platform back to the city, we had the least insightful discussion about particle physics that's ever happened outside of a college dorm.

"It's the idea that there are other you's out there."

"Wow, dude."

"Hey, where's that weed smell coming from?"

As hour nine lurched into hour ten, I learned that he had been admitted to a prestigious science and technology program at 18 but declined for personal reasons; I learned the we lost a parent in the same year, in the same manner; we spoke of about early experiences that make up the sediment of one's memory.

At this point, I realized that I might know more about this person than I do most of my friends. But once we parted ways, his identity instantly retracted back into a Tinder bubble: photos, name, an age, a set of mutual friends and interests. Much like the outcomes of certain Wrestlemania matches, specifics on Tinder are lost in a swell of predetermined excitement. But nobody goes to Wrestlemania for the specifics.

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