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Tinder is not an app people seem to use to find "the one". From speaking to people who use Tinder (I settled down some years ago, so my experience of online da

Tinder is not an app people seem to use to find "the one". From speaking to people who use Tinder (I settled down some years ago, so my experience of online dating was limited to OKCupid and PoF which were big back then), that the traditional route of finding a future spouse is still open, and Tinder is for hook-ups, one night stands, short relationships or maybe finding "friends with benefits" type relationships. None of them are thinking they're going to find their future spouse on Tinder, that would be a nice bonus. Tinder is an app for getting laid. When I was single and I went to a bar because I wanted to get laid (and I'm prepared to admit I was shallow enough to want to do this on occasion), my search parameters were very, very different than when I decided I wanted to settle down and find somebody to share my life with. I don't think I'm unusual in this. This article takes a slim premise and develops a hypothesis as fact that is too large a burden for it: that because on Tinder people are making flash judgements based on attractiveness, long-term relationships will change in their fundamental structural nature as relates to attractiveness. This is nonsense. Tinder is an asynchronous singles bar. It's the same behaviour that has been going on for hundreds - perhaps thousands - of years, but you can raise the bar of what you're looking for in terms of attractiveness if you yourself are attractive because you are not time-bound to last orders at the bar, and you are less likely to drop inhibitions because you are hopefully not constantly drunk whilst using it. Sure, people might get married after meeting on Tinder, just as they do after a hook-up from meeting drunk in a bar. But falling in love at work or based on a long social relationship is not suddenly going to stop happening because of Tinder.

saturdaysaint 11y ago
If you haven't been in the dating pool for a long time, this is sort of like someone in Duluth making sweeping statements about Silicon Valley culture. Sex is undeniably part of Tinder's allure, but consider that the lascivious media stories and coworker jokes make it a lot less likely that couples that met through Tinder are going to volunteer the information. You're going to be misled by quite a bit of sampling bias if you just go by what you've heard. As someone engaged to someone I met on Tinder, and I met a lot of attractive, relationship-minded women, Tinder is just far and away the most efficient way to meet attractive women. Even if you're looking for a relationship, the idea of placing any weight in elaborately written profile statements (which often tell you far less than 10 seconds in front of a person) and sending messages to random women on OK Cupid seems like a waste of time. Tinder takes all of the most awkward "breaking the ice" parts of looking for a hook-up OR a partner and turns them into a fun little swipe game. I'll also add that most women I met on Tinder weren't above a hook-up but not-so-subtly had a relationship on the agenda, and that this affects guys behavior. If you sleep with an attractive, compatible woman a few times, it's not unheard of to start to form a friendship, at which point most (not all) guys in our society start to blanche at the idea of her doing the same with other partners. There's also the fact that for many of us, hook-up sex isn't even the best sex. So there's a natural draw to exclusivity.
- touristtam 11y ago
  All these is nice, but quite anecdotal.
- talsraviv 11y ago
  This coheres with my dating experiences as well. The medium may have changed, but we're all still people, with mostly the same spectrum of motivations we've always had. My issue with dating apps is that they're too efficient. Our attractiveness fluctuates dramatically based on context. If we're doing something we love, doing something interesting, or exhibiting a particular behavior or trait, we can be far more attractive than any five curated photos will show. And vice versa. Dating apps remove all contextual variety and flatten us out. And in that case, "efficiency" is actually inefficient.
- marpstar 11y ago
  wasn't Tinder originally named 'Bangs with Friends'?
  - agopaul 11y ago
    Nope, you're talking about DOWN https://downapp.com https://downapp.com
- ebrowndowntown 11y ago
  As a 30-something year old woman on Tinder I agree. Among my female friends, everyone is sorting through Tinder for relationship-signaling behavior. What does this mean? Clear pictures (hopefully one in a tie), a witty tagline with correct spelling and grammar, maybe a dog or picture of you doing something you are good at (i.e. surfing, dancing). Men might try to use Tinder for hook-ups, but the higher quality female users sort out male users who project this image. I would 100% rather swipe right on a bald guy with a picture of him dancing with his niece at a wedding than with a muscular 25-year old taking a shirtless selfie in a dirty bathroom mirror. I think that's what the original article gets wrong. Men who can signal their potential as a good mate on Tinder get matched with higher quality women, even those who are more attractive than them.
alistproducer2 11y ago
This is not true of people older than 26 on the app (at least here in the Atlanta area). The profiles of that segment overwhelmingly signaled they were only looking for relationships.
- FilterSweep 11y ago
  Being from the same area, do note that that message in the profile is often used as a deterrent from creepy one-liners and overly aggressive first messages.
Grishnakh 11y ago
>From speaking to people who use Tinder ... Tinder is for hook-ups, one night stands, short relationships or maybe finding "friends with benefits" type relationships. My experience is that this is a giant load of crap, sorry. Every woman I see on there explicitly says "no hookups", all the ones I've met are not looking for hookups, they're looking for serious dates. I'm guessing you're under 25 years old. In that age range, Tinder is indeed for hookups. For people in their mid-30s and up, Tinder is absolutely not, except for the very occasional swinger couple I see there.
- peterwwillis 11y ago
  Seconded. Almost every profile I see on Tinder, if there is a profile, explicitly says "not looking for a hookup". (Which is ridiculous to me - how do people expect meaningful connection from just looking at pictures?)
  - Jtsummers 11y ago
    hookup = sex with no strings in this context, so it's not ridiculous. They want to talk, and they want a date (or that's what they're asserting). Sex may happen, but that's not the initial intention, that's a part of the eventual goal (steady relationship).
  - Grishnakh 11y ago
    There's nothing ridiculous about it; it's no different than any other dating site, except it doesn't have as much room for your bio. People naturally develop romantic interest in each other based on looks first. Tinder, like any other dating site, is just giving you a venue to meet people who available for dating. What better method for meeting people do you propose? Go look at the article: online dating is now the #3 (IIRC) most popular method, just behind bars and through friends. Meeting through friends is falling fast, and all the other methods have gone down the tubes: church, school, through family, etc. In a society where people are more mobile (i.e. they move around the country with job changes, they don't live in the same place they grew up or went to college), are less religious, online dating makes the most sense for anyone who isn't a big drinker.
xentronium 11y ago
I don't see why the trend described in the article shouldn't apply to other forms of online dating/matchmaking as well. "But I have a wonderful personality" will know no one ever, as long as your mug is ugly. Consider this: at least in the bar you have your chance to make a good impression. In online dating you're one click away from being ignored forever.
- golergka 11y ago
  > "But I have a wonderful personality" will know no one ever, as long as your mug is ugly. Hm. So, how come average and below-average looking people with good personalities have stable and happy long-term relationships after thirty, when gorgeous and sexy party animals and drama queens (of any gender and sexual orientation) keep marrying, divorcing, and end up being mostly single after 40?
  - neverminder 11y ago
    What does attractiveness have to do with stability of relationship? If anything, attractive people will always have more attention/choices/distractions that is a negative factor in relationship and the opposite will be beneficial for the not attractive ones.
    - golergka 11y ago
      > What does attractiveness have to do with stability of relationship? That's exactly my point, so I'm surprised that you phrase your comment as if you're arguing with me.
      - neverminder 11y ago
        I may have misunderstood you, since now I realized your comment is a single very long question.
      - coldtea 11y ago
        Your point is not arguing with the article however. The article is not about how hot people find eternal stable relationships, but how they have more chances to get into relationships. That you noticed them often break an older relationship and get into a new one corroborates the article, doesn't negate it. And if we take away the stigma of divorce, which is supposed to mean some kind of personal failure, that's good for them. It could also entail "ugly" people also wanting to divorce/play around more, but as they fear not having the same chances, they play it safe (and miserably). So, yeah, it might not be that a less attractive person will "know no one ever" (absolute), but it will probably be that they'll have limited chances to get to know other people, and when they do, they'll tend to stick with them.
cageface 11y ago
This seems to be less true outside the US. I've seen Tinder pick up a lot in Vietnam in the last two years but people use it to find more traditional dates or just to network or make new friends. It's not a hookup app here.
- Scea91 11y ago
  Yes, it is the same in Prague. I've met my current girlfriend of one year in Prague and I don't believe that I am an exception. Many of the girls were looking for a long term partner. Maybe it's just about selection. If you are looking for a hookup you will surely find it there, but it is no problem to find long term partner instead.
  - vincentkriek 11y ago
    Agreed, in the Netherlands dating apps are having serious troubles because Tinder is free, easy and quick. Dating apps now try to sell there "privacy aware" attributes because you don't need facebook with them (which you do need with Tinder). Personally I have no experiences with it, but in my circle I see tinder being used as a dating app.
    - Mark222 11y ago
      Out of curiosity, what are those other apps?
  - MasterScrat 11y ago
    Same here in Switzerland. So far I have met 3 couples who are together for over 6 months who met on Tinder.
    - TaylorGood 11y ago
      All would be great if my Tinder app in California would load Switzerland profiles..
- majani 11y ago
dnr 11y ago
Please don't generalize outside of areas that you have experience with. In the gay community (male at least), tinder is more relationship-oriented than your description (because there are already many other apps for hooking up).
- jamesrom 11y ago
  But his generalization is apt. It's a generalization. It does not apply to your specific circumstance. Nor mine, actually. And further to the point, his observation does not change if you find and replace 'tinder' with whatever app you DO use for hooking up.
  - adam-a 11y ago
    I don't think his generalisation his accurate, and lots of others agree. Not only the idea that Tinder is majority used for hook-ups, but the idea that people have been having casual hook ups for hundreds or thousands of years, and mostly falling in love through work or long term social relationships. You don't have to look very far in time or geography to see societies that don't work anything like that. Arranged marriages, gender segregated schooling, lack of women in the workplace until relatively recently. And FWIW, within my social circles, Tinder is frequently used to find serious (as opposed to casual) dates. I have just moved in with my girlfriend who I met on Tinder.
  - forgetsusername 11y ago
    >But his generalization is apt. It's baseless and directly contradicts the data in the article, with no evidence outside of a personal experience with Tinder.
    - gareim 11y ago
      Which data in the article did it contradict?
    - dnr 11y ago
      It's even worse: as he himself said in his second paragraph, he has no personal experience with Tinder at all, it's all from "from speaking to people who use Tinder"! This is the most aggravating thing, even beyond the content of his comment and the way that it implicitly insults people who are trying to use Tinder for more than hookups: people see an app/phenomenon like Tinder and make a quick simplistic judgement based on what they want to see and their moral biases, and then make sweeping pronouncements like that.
TeeWEE 11y ago
This might be true for you, but its not true generally. I"ve known a few couples who met via online dating. And I myself had a long term relationship also trough tinder. People are using it for numerous purposes. And there are also other apps. All in all, online dating is also for serious matters.
cataphract 11y ago
But even if that was true, hook-ups are actually also a strategy for long-term relationships. At least, when asked, a very large majority of women and even most of the men say they wanted some kind of relationship from the hook-up.
n72 11y ago
'Tinder is not an app people seem to use to find "the one".' I think this is both true and not true. A suspicion I have (and I'm sure there's got to be research on this) is that a lot of people interested in casual dating/hooking up on Tinder and/or in bars are unconsciously looking for a long term mate. In some ways this is a very effective strategy, since you're cycling through a large number of potential mates to find one who meets some kind of acceptability threshold. I read somewhere (sorry can't find the reference), that extroverted, high frequency daters ended up in happier long term relationships simply because they had more selection, which on the face of it seems to make sense.
- MasterScrat 11y ago
  This is always what I tell my friends who have this "focus on work now, find someone and get married later" vision. You definitely can find someone in your late 20s if you have little relationship experience. But you won't be able to make an informed choice and will miss a lot of red flags.
  - ap22213 11y ago
    On the other hand, there's a better chance that you'll get to know the real person after 30. There's less influence from friends and family. The person's identity has usually smoothed out. And, they generally know themselves better - their motivations and goals, their likes and dislikes and principles. They're usually more confident in themselves and open about it. There's a better chance to 'get what you see'. I recommend to all of my friends to not look for a marriage partner until after 30.
    - emodendroket 11y ago
      Well, on the other hand, by that age you've probably both got pretty established patterns that are harder to break as part of your marriage. I don't think there's necessarily a "right" age to do it.
      - rayiner 11y ago
forgetsusername 11y ago
>But falling in love at work or based on a long social relationship is not suddenly going to stop happening because of Tinder. Well, I'm looking at the chart included in the article that shows all of those means of meeting someone in free-fall, while meeting people online rises exponentially. That data comes from the linked study: http://asr.sagepub.com/content/77/4/523 http://asr.sagepub.com/content/77/4/523 So, where is your data that this drastic shift isn't actually happening?
baldfat 11y ago
> Tinder is not an app people seem to use to find "the one". There is one flaw. Usally it just happens that you find the one. A person doesn't go "Oh I am getting married now let me find that person I want to marry." My Mom: "Careful who you date since you could end up falling in love with them. AKA Don't date people you wouldn't want to marry"
- emodendroket 11y ago
  Yeah, I feel like this is one of those things where if you set out to do it you will not be successful.
liveoneggs 11y ago
> and you are less likely to drop inhibitions because you are hopefully not constantly drunk whilst using it. only about 85% of the time?
Unklejoe 11y ago
Since many people disagree with you, I'm going to chime in and say that I agree with you 100% when it comes to Tinder being used for hookups, at least where I live. I am a 25 year old male in South Jersey (near Philadelphia), and Tinder is primarily used for hookups here. I think it varies a lot based on where you live though. I mean if you think about it, it's an online dating platform that provides nothing more than a few pictures and a sentence as a basis for decision making. It's designed to allow for fast selection of people based solely on appearance. This is backed up by the fact that there's no profile text displayed when you're swiping...all you see is a picture of the person. If you want to view their actual profile, you need to click their picture, which hardly anyone does. This is unlike other dating sites where you have to take a personality test, provide a detailed description of your interestest, etc... However, like someone else said, many people go there for hookups, but they are actually seeking a longer term relationship whether they like to admit it or not. Some are probably looking for hookups maybe with the possibility of a longer term relationship. Additionally, this is going to come off as sexist, but I feel that there's a large percentage of girls on there who aren't looking for anything at all other than attention. This is particularly true for attractive girls. Hell, who wouldn't love to have people constantly telling them they're beautiful? I've even talked to a few attractive girls who use Tinder "because it's funny". For guys, I will go out on a limb and say that 90% of guys on Tinder are looking for some action. EDIT: Just to add, keep in mind that age plays a huge role here. I am 25 years old, and many of my friends are in the 20-23 year old range. I have a feeling that the average age of the commenters here is slightly higher, which could explain why so many people don't agree with Tinder being used for hookups. There's a big difference between a 35 year old and a 21 year old when it comes to maturity in dating.
- seibelj 11y ago
  Engaged to woman met on Tinder, met her at 26, disagree
- Scea91 11y ago
  It provides a sentence and picture for decision making but only in the context "I would like to write to this person'. Conversation usually follows before you meet up with your match. I find this way more interesting than other dating apps. It is also much closer to real life dating. In real life you also don't know much before you approach the person for conversation. On Tinder getting a match is really just a first minor step.
emodendroket 11y ago
I don't think most of the couples who meet in college, in church, through family, and so on, were really "planning" to find spouses either and the article shows that the portion of spouses finding each other through online dating has skyrocketed since the 90s.
ryanmarsh 11y ago
I'm sorry but that's just incorrect. Women are investing a significant amount of energy trying to find LTR using Tinder. Source: I'm helping a startup in the Tinder ecosystem. Learned a lot about people's habits.
swozey 11y ago
This is such bullshit. Every time I hear an explanation of Tinder like this, it's from someone who isn't even using Tinder and only reads about it vicariously through the people who brag about Tinder dating. The rest of us, men and women, use Tinder as an extra dating pool to add to Bumble, Hinge, OKCupid. They all have pros and cons. Hinge was great until they gave me 24 hours to respond to woman; sometimes I'm busy. Bumble requires the woman to message me first which is very nice as it takes that awkward "don't blow the first communication" line out of my hands. Yes, there are people who use Tinder for hookups. People use OKCupid for hookups. Match for hookups. That has not even remotely been the desire of the women I've met on Tinder.
- infinite8s 11y ago
  People also use bars, clubs, bookstores, meetup events, weddings, and vacations for hookups.
- derptacious 11y ago
  Yes, not only is this bullshit, but this article's premise is too. It takes A LOT of personal experience in the world to draw a true pattern about relationships. Even the opening sentence cries 'perceptual bias': "When was the last time you met a couple where one person was attractive and the other was not?" I see this all of the time, but how often do you think the author sees it too and consciously or unconsciously brushes it off as, "they must not actually be together." This article is like intellectual white-nighting, though not directly offering to save any girls - it's implying that the author knows better than the women whom are caving in to the wrong stimuli via "online dating." This is also a denial of sex statistics. If this new environment is keeping you ugly men from getting laid more today than you could yesterday, then who are all the ugly women banging? Otherwise, the author needs to claim that attractive men are actually getting laid more, while unattractive men are getting laid less or not at all. I don't see any evidence that less attractive men together have worse access to women in general than they had before. If anything, physical attractiveness of masculinity has decreased in some female's selection criteria over a long period of time due to the fact that a man's ability to physically defend himself and his family has become less necessary. Furthermore, studies have shown that the use of birth control causes women to be attracted to different (more feminine) men than they would otherwise - a side effect not often discussed or listed on the contraceptive package inserts.
eanzenberg 11y ago
>I wanted to get laid (and I'm prepared to admit I was shallow enough to want to do this on occasion) Are you 'shallow' when you eat when hungry, drink when thirsty, sleep when tired?
jefhwite 11y ago
I know lots of people seeking and finding long term relationships on Tinder. I don't think hooking up is everyone's use case.

saturdaysaint 11y ago

If you haven't been in the dating pool for a long time, this is sort of like someone in Duluth making sweeping statements about Silicon Valley culture. Sex is undeniably part of Tinder's allure, but consider that the lascivious media stories and coworker jokes make it a lot less likely that couples that met through Tinder are going to volunteer the information. You're going to be misled by quite a bit of sampling bias if you just go by what you've heard. As someone engaged to someone I met on Tinder, and I met a lot of attractive, relationship-minded women, Tinder is just far and away the most efficient way to meet attractive women. Even if you're looking for a relationship, the idea of placing any weight in elaborately written profile statements (which often tell you far less than 10 seconds in front of a person) and sending messages to random women on OK Cupid seems like a waste of time. Tinder takes all of the most awkward "breaking the ice" parts of looking for a hook-up OR a partner and turns them into a fun little swipe game. I'll also add that most women I met on Tinder weren't above a hook-up but not-so-subtly had a relationship on the agenda, and that this affects guys behavior. If you sleep with an attractive, compatible woman a few times, it's not unheard of to start to form a friendship, at which point most (not all) guys in our society start to blanche at the idea of her doing the same with other partners. There's also the fact that for many of us, hook-up sex isn't even the best sex. So there's a natural draw to exclusivity.

touristtam 11y ago
All these is nice, but quite anecdotal.
talsraviv 11y ago
This coheres with my dating experiences as well. The medium may have changed, but we're all still people, with mostly the same spectrum of motivations we've always had. My issue with dating apps is that they're too efficient. Our attractiveness fluctuates dramatically based on context. If we're doing something we love, doing something interesting, or exhibiting a particular behavior or trait, we can be far more attractive than any five curated photos will show. And vice versa. Dating apps remove all contextual variety and flatten us out. And in that case, "efficiency" is actually inefficient.
marpstar 11y ago
wasn't Tinder originally named 'Bangs with Friends'?
- agopaul 11y ago
  Nope, you're talking about DOWN https://downapp.com https://downapp.com
ebrowndowntown 11y ago
As a 30-something year old woman on Tinder I agree. Among my female friends, everyone is sorting through Tinder for relationship-signaling behavior. What does this mean? Clear pictures (hopefully one in a tie), a witty tagline with correct spelling and grammar, maybe a dog or picture of you doing something you are good at (i.e. surfing, dancing). Men might try to use Tinder for hook-ups, but the higher quality female users sort out male users who project this image. I would 100% rather swipe right on a bald guy with a picture of him dancing with his niece at a wedding than with a muscular 25-year old taking a shirtless selfie in a dirty bathroom mirror. I think that's what the original article gets wrong. Men who can signal their potential as a good mate on Tinder get matched with higher quality women, even those who are more attractive than them.

alistproducer2 11y ago

This is not true of people older than 26 on the app (at least here in the Atlanta area). The profiles of that segment overwhelmingly signaled they were only looking for relationships.

FilterSweep 11y ago
Being from the same area, do note that that message in the profile is often used as a deterrent from creepy one-liners and overly aggressive first messages.

Grishnakh 11y ago

>From speaking to people who use Tinder ... Tinder is for hook-ups, one night stands, short relationships or maybe finding "friends with benefits" type relationships. My experience is that this is a giant load of crap, sorry. Every woman I see on there explicitly says "no hookups", all the ones I've met are not looking for hookups, they're looking for serious dates. I'm guessing you're under 25 years old. In that age range, Tinder is indeed for hookups. For people in their mid-30s and up, Tinder is absolutely not, except for the very occasional swinger couple I see there.

peterwwillis 11y ago
Seconded. Almost every profile I see on Tinder, if there is a profile, explicitly says "not looking for a hookup". (Which is ridiculous to me - how do people expect meaningful connection from just looking at pictures?)
- Jtsummers 11y ago
  hookup = sex with no strings in this context, so it's not ridiculous. They want to talk, and they want a date (or that's what they're asserting). Sex may happen, but that's not the initial intention, that's a part of the eventual goal (steady relationship).
- Grishnakh 11y ago
  There's nothing ridiculous about it; it's no different than any other dating site, except it doesn't have as much room for your bio. People naturally develop romantic interest in each other based on looks first. Tinder, like any other dating site, is just giving you a venue to meet people who available for dating. What better method for meeting people do you propose? Go look at the article: online dating is now the #3 (IIRC) most popular method, just behind bars and through friends. Meeting through friends is falling fast, and all the other methods have gone down the tubes: church, school, through family, etc. In a society where people are more mobile (i.e. they move around the country with job changes, they don't live in the same place they grew up or went to college), are less religious, online dating makes the most sense for anyone who isn't a big drinker.

xentronium 11y ago

I don't see why the trend described in the article shouldn't apply to other forms of online dating/matchmaking as well. "But I have a wonderful personality" will know no one ever, as long as your mug is ugly. Consider this: at least in the bar you have your chance to make a good impression. In online dating you're one click away from being ignored forever.

golergka 11y ago
> "But I have a wonderful personality" will know no one ever, as long as your mug is ugly. Hm. So, how come average and below-average looking people with good personalities have stable and happy long-term relationships after thirty, when gorgeous and sexy party animals and drama queens (of any gender and sexual orientation) keep marrying, divorcing, and end up being mostly single after 40?
- neverminder 11y ago
  What does attractiveness have to do with stability of relationship? If anything, attractive people will always have more attention/choices/distractions that is a negative factor in relationship and the opposite will be beneficial for the not attractive ones.
  - golergka 11y ago
    > What does attractiveness have to do with stability of relationship? That's exactly my point, so I'm surprised that you phrase your comment as if you're arguing with me.
    - neverminder 11y ago
      I may have misunderstood you, since now I realized your comment is a single very long question.
    - coldtea 11y ago
      Your point is not arguing with the article however. The article is not about how hot people find eternal stable relationships, but how they have more chances to get into relationships. That you noticed them often break an older relationship and get into a new one corroborates the article, doesn't negate it. And if we take away the stigma of divorce, which is supposed to mean some kind of personal failure, that's good for them. It could also entail "ugly" people also wanting to divorce/play around more, but as they fear not having the same chances, they play it safe (and miserably). So, yeah, it might not be that a less attractive person will "know no one ever" (absolute), but it will probably be that they'll have limited chances to get to know other people, and when they do, they'll tend to stick with them.

cageface 11y ago

This seems to be less true outside the US. I've seen Tinder pick up a lot in Vietnam in the last two years but people use it to find more traditional dates or just to network or make new friends. It's not a hookup app here.

Scea91 11y ago
Yes, it is the same in Prague. I've met my current girlfriend of one year in Prague and I don't believe that I am an exception. Many of the girls were looking for a long term partner. Maybe it's just about selection. If you are looking for a hookup you will surely find it there, but it is no problem to find long term partner instead.
- vincentkriek 11y ago
  Agreed, in the Netherlands dating apps are having serious troubles because Tinder is free, easy and quick. Dating apps now try to sell there "privacy aware" attributes because you don't need facebook with them (which you do need with Tinder). Personally I have no experiences with it, but in my circle I see tinder being used as a dating app.
  - Mark222 11y ago
    Out of curiosity, what are those other apps?
- MasterScrat 11y ago
  Same here in Switzerland. So far I have met 3 couples who are together for over 6 months who met on Tinder.
  - TaylorGood 11y ago
    All would be great if my Tinder app in California would load Switzerland profiles..
majani 11y ago

dnr 11y ago

Please don't generalize outside of areas that you have experience with. In the gay community (male at least), tinder is more relationship-oriented than your description (because there are already many other apps for hooking up).

jamesrom 11y ago
But his generalization is apt. It's a generalization. It does not apply to your specific circumstance. Nor mine, actually. And further to the point, his observation does not change if you find and replace 'tinder' with whatever app you DO use for hooking up.
- adam-a 11y ago
  I don't think his generalisation his accurate, and lots of others agree. Not only the idea that Tinder is majority used for hook-ups, but the idea that people have been having casual hook ups for hundreds or thousands of years, and mostly falling in love through work or long term social relationships. You don't have to look very far in time or geography to see societies that don't work anything like that. Arranged marriages, gender segregated schooling, lack of women in the workplace until relatively recently. And FWIW, within my social circles, Tinder is frequently used to find serious (as opposed to casual) dates. I have just moved in with my girlfriend who I met on Tinder.
- forgetsusername 11y ago
  >But his generalization is apt. It's baseless and directly contradicts the data in the article, with no evidence outside of a personal experience with Tinder.
  - gareim 11y ago
    Which data in the article did it contradict?
  - dnr 11y ago
    It's even worse: as he himself said in his second paragraph, he has no personal experience with Tinder at all, it's all from "from speaking to people who use Tinder"! This is the most aggravating thing, even beyond the content of his comment and the way that it implicitly insults people who are trying to use Tinder for more than hookups: people see an app/phenomenon like Tinder and make a quick simplistic judgement based on what they want to see and their moral biases, and then make sweeping pronouncements like that.

TeeWEE 11y ago

This might be true for you, but its not true generally. I"ve known a few couples who met via online dating. And I myself had a long term relationship also trough tinder. People are using it for numerous purposes. And there are also other apps. All in all, online dating is also for serious matters.

cataphract 11y ago

But even if that was true, hook-ups are actually also a strategy for long-term relationships. At least, when asked, a very large majority of women and even most of the men say they wanted some kind of relationship from the hook-up.

n72 11y ago

'Tinder is not an app people seem to use to find "the one".' I think this is both true and not true. A suspicion I have (and I'm sure there's got to be research on this) is that a lot of people interested in casual dating/hooking up on Tinder and/or in bars are unconsciously looking for a long term mate. In some ways this is a very effective strategy, since you're cycling through a large number of potential mates to find one who meets some kind of acceptability threshold. I read somewhere (sorry can't find the reference), that extroverted, high frequency daters ended up in happier long term relationships simply because they had more selection, which on the face of it seems to make sense.

MasterScrat 11y ago
This is always what I tell my friends who have this "focus on work now, find someone and get married later" vision. You definitely can find someone in your late 20s if you have little relationship experience. But you won't be able to make an informed choice and will miss a lot of red flags.
- ap22213 11y ago
  On the other hand, there's a better chance that you'll get to know the real person after 30. There's less influence from friends and family. The person's identity has usually smoothed out. And, they generally know themselves better - their motivations and goals, their likes and dislikes and principles. They're usually more confident in themselves and open about it. There's a better chance to 'get what you see'. I recommend to all of my friends to not look for a marriage partner until after 30.
  - emodendroket 11y ago
    Well, on the other hand, by that age you've probably both got pretty established patterns that are harder to break as part of your marriage. I don't think there's necessarily a "right" age to do it.
    - rayiner 11y ago

forgetsusername 11y ago

>But falling in love at work or based on a long social relationship is not suddenly going to stop happening because of Tinder. Well, I'm looking at the chart included in the article that shows all of those means of meeting someone in free-fall, while meeting people online rises exponentially. That data comes from the linked study: http://asr.sagepub.com/content/77/4/523 http://asr.sagepub.com/content/77/4/523 So, where is your data that this drastic shift isn't actually happening?

baldfat 11y ago

> Tinder is not an app people seem to use to find "the one". There is one flaw. Usally it just happens that you find the one. A person doesn't go "Oh I am getting married now let me find that person I want to marry." My Mom: "Careful who you date since you could end up falling in love with them. AKA Don't date people you wouldn't want to marry"

emodendroket 11y ago
Yeah, I feel like this is one of those things where if you set out to do it you will not be successful.

liveoneggs 11y ago

> and you are less likely to drop inhibitions because you are hopefully not constantly drunk whilst using it. only about 85% of the time?

Unklejoe 11y ago

Since many people disagree with you, I'm going to chime in and say that I agree with you 100% when it comes to Tinder being used for hookups, at least where I live. I am a 25 year old male in South Jersey (near Philadelphia), and Tinder is primarily used for hookups here. I think it varies a lot based on where you live though. I mean if you think about it, it's an online dating platform that provides nothing more than a few pictures and a sentence as a basis for decision making. It's designed to allow for fast selection of people based solely on appearance. This is backed up by the fact that there's no profile text displayed when you're swiping...all you see is a picture of the person. If you want to view their actual profile, you need to click their picture, which hardly anyone does. This is unlike other dating sites where you have to take a personality test, provide a detailed description of your interestest, etc... However, like someone else said, many people go there for hookups, but they are actually seeking a longer term relationship whether they like to admit it or not. Some are probably looking for hookups maybe with the possibility of a longer term relationship. Additionally, this is going to come off as sexist, but I feel that there's a large percentage of girls on there who aren't looking for anything at all other than attention. This is particularly true for attractive girls. Hell, who wouldn't love to have people constantly telling them they're beautiful? I've even talked to a few attractive girls who use Tinder "because it's funny". For guys, I will go out on a limb and say that 90% of guys on Tinder are looking for some action. EDIT: Just to add, keep in mind that age plays a huge role here. I am 25 years old, and many of my friends are in the 20-23 year old range. I have a feeling that the average age of the commenters here is slightly higher, which could explain why so many people don't agree with Tinder being used for hookups. There's a big difference between a 35 year old and a 21 year old when it comes to maturity in dating.

seibelj 11y ago
Engaged to woman met on Tinder, met her at 26, disagree
Scea91 11y ago
It provides a sentence and picture for decision making but only in the context "I would like to write to this person'. Conversation usually follows before you meet up with your match. I find this way more interesting than other dating apps. It is also much closer to real life dating. In real life you also don't know much before you approach the person for conversation. On Tinder getting a match is really just a first minor step.

emodendroket 11y ago

I don't think most of the couples who meet in college, in church, through family, and so on, were really "planning" to find spouses either and the article shows that the portion of spouses finding each other through online dating has skyrocketed since the 90s.

ryanmarsh 11y ago

I'm sorry but that's just incorrect. Women are investing a significant amount of energy trying to find LTR using Tinder. Source: I'm helping a startup in the Tinder ecosystem. Learned a lot about people's habits.

swozey 11y ago

This is such bullshit. Every time I hear an explanation of Tinder like this, it's from someone who isn't even using Tinder and only reads about it vicariously through the people who brag about Tinder dating. The rest of us, men and women, use Tinder as an extra dating pool to add to Bumble, Hinge, OKCupid. They all have pros and cons. Hinge was great until they gave me 24 hours to respond to woman; sometimes I'm busy. Bumble requires the woman to message me first which is very nice as it takes that awkward "don't blow the first communication" line out of my hands. Yes, there are people who use Tinder for hookups. People use OKCupid for hookups. Match for hookups. That has not even remotely been the desire of the women I've met on Tinder.

infinite8s 11y ago
People also use bars, clubs, bookstores, meetup events, weddings, and vacations for hookups.
derptacious 11y ago
Yes, not only is this bullshit, but this article's premise is too. It takes A LOT of personal experience in the world to draw a true pattern about relationships. Even the opening sentence cries 'perceptual bias': "When was the last time you met a couple where one person was attractive and the other was not?" I see this all of the time, but how often do you think the author sees it too and consciously or unconsciously brushes it off as, "they must not actually be together." This article is like intellectual white-nighting, though not directly offering to save any girls - it's implying that the author knows better than the women whom are caving in to the wrong stimuli via "online dating." This is also a denial of sex statistics. If this new environment is keeping you ugly men from getting laid more today than you could yesterday, then who are all the ugly women banging? Otherwise, the author needs to claim that attractive men are actually getting laid more, while unattractive men are getting laid less or not at all. I don't see any evidence that less attractive men together have worse access to women in general than they had before. If anything, physical attractiveness of masculinity has decreased in some female's selection criteria over a long period of time due to the fact that a man's ability to physically defend himself and his family has become less necessary. Furthermore, studies have shown that the use of birth control causes women to be attracted to different (more feminine) men than they would otherwise - a side effect not often discussed or listed on the contraceptive package inserts.

eanzenberg 11y ago

>I wanted to get laid (and I'm prepared to admit I was shallow enough to want to do this on occasion) Are you 'shallow' when you eat when hungry, drink when thirsty, sleep when tired?

jefhwite 11y ago

I know lots of people seeking and finding long term relationships on Tinder. I don't think hooking up is everyone's use case.