It's a warm late-summer night in New York's West Village and I'm on my way to rendezvous with a woman I met on the Internet. Or more accurately, a stranger that my mom met when she was pretending to be me on her phone. She'd arranged the meeting through Tinder, my Tinder, in hopes of finding me a girlfriend. I only knew the woman's first name, and as I got closer to the bar where we'd agreed to meet, I saw a young brunette just outside. This had to be her.

I heard my mom's voice in the back of my head from a few days earlier. "You could get a lot of sexually transmitted diseases," she'd said over the phone, swiping through a carousel of pouty female twenty-somethings."I don't think you should just hook up for casual sex. I think you should get to know people."

When I gave my mom control of my Tinder, I thought it would be funny. I did not think we'd talk about casual sex, but here we were.

"Oh, my god. Here's one that matched you," she said. "This one is NAKED! Yuck."

Mom, there are no naked people on Tinder.

"Well, that's a no. I swiped her off," she said, another potential soulmate discarded left into oblivion. "Just because you have it doesn't mean you have to show it."

"That's something that I would think about," she continued. "But I'm a mom."

This all began because my mom thinks I'm going to die alone.

Or, at the very least, that's what I thought when we finalized plans to go see the Broadway show Hamilton together.

"We got four tickets," she told me a few months before the date of the show. "Dad, me, you, and, you know, if you have a friend by then you want to bring."

A friend "by then"? So, like, not one of the friends I already have? Like, a girlfriend? You're talking about a girlfriend, aren't you, Mom?

I'm 26 and single. I have not had a girlfriend for four years. When she was 26, my mom was married to her high school sweetheart, the man who took her to the prom in a goofy Volkswagen Beetle. By 28, she'd have her first baby. That baby was my brother, who at 26 had already been with the woman he would marry for six years.

And then there's me. Single. Slowly dying. Constantly fifth-wheeling at Christmas.

But unlike when my mom was 26, there is now, quite literally, an app for this. It's called Tinder, and it's a floating box on your iPhone that you can touch when you have no one to touch. To me, Tinder had always been merely something to do to pass the time, like a sexually charged version of Candy Crush. More than being with someone, Tinder creates the illusion of not being without anybody, a way to remember that there are indeed a lot of fish in the sea, and a great number of these fish might want to have sex with you. And if my mom is so intent on my having a girlfriend, then why shouldn't she just go out and find one for me? So I pushed her into that sea, disguised as me.

At dinner in Manhattan one night, I set up Tinder on her phone, showed her how to operate it, did some right-swiping (even got a match!), and then deleted the app off my phone, the fate of my love life* in the hands of my mother.

*Not to mention my soon-to-be-besmirched reputation on the Tinder Nightmares Twitter page. "Who is Clay Skipper and why is he asking me about snacks?"

Her mission was to spend a few minutes each day doing some swiping and chatting with women who'd already been right-swiped, and right-swiped back. If she made a good enough impression as a six-foot-one, 26-year-old GQ writer and was granted permission to take a match for a drink—or a walk in Battery Park, as it turned out she constantly kept offering—she would give them my cell phone number, they would text me (the real me), and we'd figure out a time and place.

We left the restaurant, my brother and his wife went back to their place in Chelsea, and my mom went home to my dad in Connecticut. I went home alone.

Thirty minutes later, I was back at my place. I had two voicemails from my mom. The first from 9:51 P.M.:

"Oh, hey, it's Mom. She [the match] texted me back. I asked if she'd like to meet for coffee or a drink. She texted me she was in bed. Is that code for something?" Here she let out a big laugh, like maybe it was code for "sex" and that was funny. "I texted her back and said, 'Well, it doesn't have to be tonight.' Anyway, not sure what to say. I don't even think we picked Alex*. Did we? Maybe she just picked you, from your Tinder page. Anyway. Alright. Bye."

*Ed's Note: Names have been changed

The second, 31 minutes later:

"This is your mother, calling again with your Tinder replies. I also have a conversation going with Kelsey. She said, sure, she'd like to meet you for a drink. First, she said, 'Molly.' Anyway, I don't know what else to say to these people. I'm soon going to give them both your number. Okay. Bye."

I wasn’t shocked my mom didn’t know what Molly was. I was, however, shocked that she’d been so forward, that it had worked (!!), and that she’d played it off so well. “Catch you then”? Was that a phrase moms knew? Did my mom have better game than me?

I called her. It’d been less than two hours since I installed the app on her phone.

“What do you think we should do with these girls?” she asked, upon picking up the phone. “Should I set you guys up, or should I just ghost on them? Maybe we should ghost on them.”

Who are you, and what did you do to my mom?

My mom is 58, has short hair, stands a tiny five-foot-two, and takes no shit. She grew up the daughter of a minister and ran our house with a similar hand—not tyrannical but firm, the matriarch of two boys. Three if you count my dad, and she does. She was almost always bad cop, an imposer of midnight curfews with that uncanny mom ability to be deep in sleep at 11:58 P.M. and, if you weren’t home yet, wide awake at 11:59 P.M. She would call me as I was racing back, only to say, “You shouldn’t be talking on the phone while driving!” when I picked up. Like most parents, she was on the receiving end of much teenage vitriol and almost none of the deserved gratitude.

That started to change when I went off to college and, with some perspective, realized I was stupid and she was smart; when I realized that all she cares about is ensuring that her children don’t fuck up too terribly, and that, since “playing N64 at Dan’s house” really means “stealing all of Dan’s dad’s beer,” sometimes it’s okay to say no—even if your moody teen thinks you’re a fascist. And since she was, in fact, always right, we talked often. I had pressing questions, like “Can I mix these antibiotics with vodka…No, like, a lot of vodka?” and “What’s the best way to get sriracha out of a suit…Yeah, like, a lot of sriracha?”

She had concerns, too: Can you explain to me where the iCloud is? Why does my iPod only play Christmas music? What’s sriracha?

As far as I can remember,* we talked about sex only once, when I was 22, freshly graduated from college, and the two of us were eating dinner on the back porch of my childhood home. She said, unprompted, “You should wear condoms.” Did she think I was having a lot of sex—or none at all? I changed the subject.

*After I sent her this story, my mom wrote back: “I feel certain we discussed condoms in high school and college... Did not leave that conversation for age 22!” Worth noting that “I feel certain” is not the same as “I am certain.”

Now, four years later, she’s trying to set me up on a date with an Internet stranger.

I didn’t know what was most unsettling about these messages—the spam (“which I think were prostitutes looking for business,” she told me); the fact that she thought “aspiring writer” was a good way to market myself as an enticing match (she had to reassure one girl, saying, “But I do have a steady job at a magazine right now”); or her enthusiasm about finding a “good contact in case of job loss!” Does my mom live in a perpetual state of thinking her son is going to be fired? Did she hate my writing that much?

I had deleted the app from my phone and had to rely only on the intel my mom reported back to me via texts that were riddled with her adorable but bizarre penchant for capitalizing random words, which, when read back in my head, gave her this unnerving talk-SHOUT-talk cadence:

“Lots of swipes NO. MANY ARE young. Some old. Some with too much boob showing.”

“I doubt I am SMOOTH. I AM NOT LOOKINg for sex. ”

A live look-in at her correspondence would have revealed that she was, in fact, correct. Despite her propensity for hip phrases like “catch you” and “ghost,” she was far from SMOOTH.

Do you really think these pickup lines are going to work? I ask her.

"My Tinder messages I consider conversation starters. Not pickup lines!"

And they were working to start conversations—well, sometimes—even if those conversations were with classmates I'd forgotten I'd attended high school with, or about where my mom used to work…and go to the gym…and buy organic groceries. But, days in, even with her increasingly deft ability to start conversations, my mom still had not found me a date. We were running into problems:

First of all, she sometimes talked like a robot.

To a girl who had broken her ankle when she "partied too hard for America" over July 4th (her own description) and mentioned New York as a bad place for limited mobility, my mom responded with, "Correct on bad city for broken bone navigation." (She then also asked "Are you athletic?" and "Do subways even have elevators??")

Secondly, she wasn't great at "playing the game," if you will. (Translation: My mom has no chill.)

"I can't ask two questions in a row?!" she asked me, incredulous when I told her that was a no-no. "That's bad?! Why would it matter? Maybe I should ask three or four questions! 'Where do you live? What do you do? Do you have any animals? Do you like long sleeves?'"

(She would text me soon after: "Did not hear back from those messages I sent yesterday!! Guess a mistake to ask two questions at once.")

Things really went south, however, when she read Vanity Fair's takedown piece about Tinder and today's hook-up culture, in which appears this appalling, almost-too-perfect-to-be-believable quote: "'It's like ordering Seamless,' says Dan, the investment banker, referring to the online food-delivery service. 'But you're ordering a person.'" (Thanks, Dan, the investment banker.)

"Is it mostly a site for sex???" she texted me after reading. "Because I am not for that!"

This is the problem with pushing your mom into a sea filled with fish who might want to have sex with you: At some point she's going to tell you what you already know, what will likely make you uncomfortable, something mom-ish along the lines of, You know, it's not always all about sex.

"It's not always all about sex," she said. "There's intimacy and there's sex. Intimacy is about being kind, being nice to somebody. Patting somebody on the back, or holding hands. There's a whole range of things that make you connected to somebody that has nothing to do with the act of sleeping together."

Well, yeah, mom. You don't think my generation gets that?

"I'm not sure you do, no," she said, clearly jaded by a week on Tinder. "I don't know if people are still raised that way. Maybe that's old-fashioned."

My mom met my dad in high school when they were both on the yearbook staff. She didn't notice him until he offered to drive her to a meeting on a snowy day. That turned into a date to see American Graffiti and eat donuts, which turned into a marriage, which turned into me.

"People used to meet in person somehow," my mom would later say, bemoaning one of the Internet's greater miracles: the ability to eliminate physical distance as a barrier to finding love. "In a work setting where you see them all the time, or a club you belong to, or a school situation, or church... Something you have in common that you interact with them on a regular basis and then you can kind of see, 'Do I like them? Are they assholes?' Rather than: Oh, I'm presented with this picture and I liked this picture. And now: Oh, they liked me! So what do you say?"

"You don't even know: Do they even live in New York?" she continued wondering, not recognizing the great irony that in these interactions she was the one very much not in New York. "But I guess that's the way of the world now."

I ask her: Do you feel like you missed out on having Tinder as a young woman in your twenties?

"I wouldn't. I definitely wouldn't," she says, in what has to register as good news to my dad. "But you have to remember, Clay, it was so different when I grew up. It was just different."

My middle-aged mother is sitting at home on early mornings in Connecticut, using her phone to connect with her youngest son to send emojis (My mom! Using emojis!) and talk about girlfriends and intimacy and all those things we'd never really talked about before. In a way, she and I were communicating more than ever. It was different.

Days later my mom, having overcome the minor Vanity Fair–triggered setback, managed to land me a date. After an extensive conversation on Tinder, my mom asked a brunette named Anna if she'd like to get a drink. She said yes, and so my mom sent her my phone number. She texted me, and we agreed to meet at bar in the West Village. She was waiting outside when I got there.

Anna was not my type. She was, evidently, my mom's type. (At least those weren't the same, I guess.) I offered a hug and a "Hi, nice to meet you," which was—unbeknownst to her—the first interaction we had ever exchanged.

The date was bad. We had nothing in common outside of the fact that we both had eyes and jobs. We spent an hour together and had two drinks each. If I asked her any of the things we had already "discussed" on Tinder previously, she made no mention of me bringing it up again here. The plan all along was to tell her that it had actually been my mom talking to her, using my Tinder, but I very quickly had a crisis of conscience. I realized that many people do use the app as a means of connecting with new people (with success!), and I didn't want to make light of that by telling her: Really, it's my mom who's interested in you. Of course, not saying it didn't make it any less true, which doesn't make me feel great. The date ended and we went our separate ways. Sex was not involved.

I would later ask my mom what exactly made her right-swipe on someone, to get some insight into what she'd seen in Anna.

"I was looking for somebody that was cute, but then had something else to say rather than seems like she just wanted to get right in bed," she'd tell me. "I was looking to have a conversation and then meet for a coffee, or meet in the park. So I was more drawn to the ones that liked to sky dive, or liked to ski, or play lacrosse. [Maybe] they had a dog."

Of course, the goal of this experiment was ridiculously, impossibly aspirational. ("I think you can't find love just by swiping," my wise mom had said.) It was never going to work. It didn't.

The date of the Hamilton show came and the fourth ticket went to my friend John. John is not my girlfriend.

When this was all over and, a few weeks later, I re-downloaded Tinder to take some snapshots of my mom's conversation with Anna for this story, she was nowhere to be found. Maybe she deleted the app—or maybe, in a karmic twist that was almost too perfect, I'd just been ghosted on.

I thought about how easy it is to pop out of an iPhone and back into the real world, to flicker back and forth from 2D to 3D and back again. I thought about my mom and dad. I wondered if, nowadays with an endless stream of people to be right-swiped into your life, you would notice the guy on the yearbook staff who drives you to a meeting on a snowy day—or would you be in the passenger seat, swiping through pictures of thirsty dudes you don't even know? I wondered who you might miss seeing if you were always looking.

Not long after my mom failed to find me Internet love, a friendship with a girl I'd met about a year before grew into something more. Her name is Katie [Ed's Note: No, it's not.]. She's 30, has a real, actual pulse, and has never been on Tinder in her life. (We met in person and then reconnected via Twitter DM, a romantic device my mom is definitely not yet familiar with.) We don't live in the same place, and we aren't dating, though we try to see each other when we can. We're good where we are, and happy not to define it. When I tried to explain that to my mom after I flew to the Bahamas to be with Katie over Christmas, she didn't really get it. My grandma recently asked me how my new girlfriend was, even though I don't have one. It was just different than what they grew up with, I guess.

Recently, Katie and I went out to dinner in the West Village. The restaurant was crowded and humming with the auditory heartbeat of a Friday night in New York. We sat at the bar, and as the date wound down, a somewhat intoxicated woman behind Katie leaned over.

"You two are going to get married," she said.

Which seems like a grossly premature prediction, given that we aren't dating. But, intrigued, I asked her: So, what's our story? How do you think we met? She leaned back in.

"You met on Tinder," she said without hesitation, because this is 2016 and if two young people look like they might be getting ready to get married, they obviously met on a smartphone.

Katie looked at me and we both laughed. We paid and weaved our way past couples sharing candlelit tables. And as I walked the two blocks back to my apartment, no longer alone, I thought, Man, wait until I text Mom about this.