In June, Vindya Tajeshwar saw a man on Hinge she thought might have potential. Tajeshwar, 27, has a master’s degree and works at a hospital; she is extroverted, easy to talk to, and “can make a conversation out of thin air,” as she put it. The man was a nurse practitioner, which demands at least a master’s degree, so she was surprised that his grammar was iffy. In his typically brief missives, he often misspelled words and mixed up homonyms, asking her, for instance, “what are you’re thoughts on god/higher power.” She figured that maybe he’d be a better conversationalist in person, so she kept their communication going.
Then he surprised her once more. When he asked her what her dream trip to take with a partner would be, she wrote him a detailed message about Iceland, naming some of its unique natural attractions and describing how she’d love to tour the country’s libraries and other sites connected to the Norse and Viking literature she had studied as an undergrad. His reply demonstrated a newfound set of rhetorical skills that sounded so off to Tajeshwar that she felt like she was talking to “a spokesperson.”
