There’s a certain math to Tinder that makes the entire prospect of online dating seem like a momentous endeavor. There are a lot of options, yes, but only a few really work out for you.
Let’s say you browse a thousand profiles on Tinder, and swipe right on a hundred of them. 50 of them match back, and as you try to strike up conversations with some of them, you realize that 30 of these people are too shy (or even bots), and of the rest twenty, five of them send you unsolicited dick pics and ten of them come off as too eager during conversations. Of the remaining five, only three get the courage to ask you out; of these three, two of them promptly chicken out with a variety of excuses, leaving you just one individual who you get to meet on a date. Even then, they might forget or ghost you before the big day.
That means that, to get that elusive Tinder date, you have to browse through three thousand profiles and swipe right at least three hundred times. That can seem daunting, especially to yours truly, who probably hasn’t interacted with more than two hundred people in a year.
In actuality, for some people, things are much, much worse: Sebastian Stadil, a 31-year old software engineer from San Francisco, swiped right on 203,000 women on Tinder. He is still single.
Of course, online dating is a much steeper climb for men: on average, men have to engage eighteen times more to get the same results as women. But that makes sense, since men usually initiate the process in real life as well.
Of course, there’s lots of other problems with Tinder, such as violating privacy by selling off personal data, but it’s undeniable that the advent of Tinder has made dating a lot more accessible. Of course, it’s still known mostly as a hookup app, but the number of stories of couples who met on Tinder has been rising for the last couple of years. You meet all kinds of people on Tinder, who try to scrutinize your profile picture (and your description) to death. Take comedian Hana Michels, for instance, who had been using a picture of herself in a bathrobe brushing her teeth as her profile picture for over a year. In that one year, twenty three men contacted her just to let her know that she was using the toilet paper the wrong way.
Not everyone who’s on Tinder is there to date or find a long-term relationship. Often, people run into tourists: they are there just to window shop.
There’s a good chance they are either already in a relationship or are taking some time off from dating. However, their curiosity got the better of them, and that’s how they ended up on Tinder. There are those, of course, who have seriously considered dating but still feel self-conscious about putting themselves out there. They might swipe right from time to time, sure, but they rarely check their inbox for messages.
Then there are the pen pals: those who are up for conversations, full-speed flirting and everything else that comes with dating, minus the actual dating, of course. I have been guilty of doing this too: I was trying to enjoy the process of getting to know people without actually committing to dating. These are the people who are actively trying to avoid any meetups. If they do agree to a date by accident, expect them to no show or bring up an excuse at the last minute.
What about the people who do show up and actually look like their pictures? They can run the whole gamut of personality types, actually.
Sometimes, people who regularly use Tinder set up two or three dates at the same time. Alex, who met Nancy Jo Sales from Vanity Fair at a pub, says that it’s because people are constantly on the search for something better. It’s also about male competition. Guys are constantly trying to brag about sleeping with the most number of hottest girls. Of course, that’s different in somewhere like Bangladesh, but here too, we are all too familiar with the concept of fuckboys. Nonetheless, while men are often on the lookout for casual sex, most women are searching for something more meaningful. “If I were like, Hey, I just wanna bone, very few people would want to meet up with you,” Alex said to Sales.
Despite the prevalence of hookup culture (that Tinder itself is often blamed for), many find meaningful connections through dating apps. A survey by Smart Texting shows that the number of meaningful relationships formed through dating apps isn’t much- only 13.6% of users ended up getting engaged or married. Still, that number is significantly greater than nothing.
“At the end of the day, I owe Tinder some credit,” wrote Morgan Olsen for the Chicago Tribune. “I used it to meet a guy I’m wild about, and that counts for something. I’m not mad we didn’t randomly meet in a bar; I’m not mad we don’t have an “organic” offline love story that involves pumpkin spice lattes. Tinder is a big part of my love story, and for that I won’t apologize.”
Tinder is just one method of many that you can use to meet people. Is it messed up? Yes, in a lot of ways. But finding meaningful connection has always been a messy process. So if you have found that on Tinder (or have been trying to), don’t be ashamed. It’s just as valid a platform for finding love as any other.