Modern Romance (13 page)

For a while Tinder was treated as the solution to a long-standing dilemma facing the online dating industry: How do we make a straight version of Grindr?

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Grindr was a revolutionary app that took the male gay community by storm after its release in 2009, attracting more than one million daily users within a few years.
A precursor to Tinder, it was the first major dating site that was primarily a mobile app that used GPS and a basic profile with a photo to match people.

Years before I heard of Tinder, I once sat with a gay friend in a sushi restaurant and was floored when he turned on his Grindr app and showed me a profile of a handsome guy. “It says he’s fifteen feet away. Oh, shit. Look, he’s right over there,” he said, pointing to a guy sitting at the sushi bar.

It was mind-blowing, but companies struggled to replicate it for the straight world. The conventional wisdom was that straight women would never use a Grindr-type app, for reasons ranging from safety concerns to lack of such strong interest in casual sex with strangers. The Grindr team attempted it with an app called Blendr, but it didn’t catch on.

But Tinder added a key feature that Grindr—and Blendr, for that matter—didn’t have: the mutual-interest requirement. This is the term I just made up to describe how, on Tinder, you can’t engage with another user unless you both have swiped right, indicating interest in each other.

After our previous discussions of online dating, the appeal seems obvious. Take Arpan. No longer does he have to worry about writing a long message only to get dismissed based on his looks. The only people he can message are people who have already indicated interest in him. On the reverse side, for women, a dude can’t bother you unless you have swiped right on him. Women were no longer getting harassed by an infinite user base of bozos; they were engaging only with people they chose to engage. This change alone was enough of an improvement that, in October 2013,
New York
magazine proclaimed that Tinder had solved online dating for women.
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Also, the stress of weeding through profiles, à la our friend Derek, is gone too. You are just swiping on faces. It’s like a game. This aspect of Tinder’s user experience is huge.

Even the fact that signing up is so easy is a game changer. I remember signing up for a dummy OkCupid account, just to see what the site was like. It took forever. There were so many questions that I eventually just had an assistant answer them. It felt like a chore. Meanwhile, when researching Tinder, I was in the back of a cab and I quickly signed in through a Facebook account. Within seconds, I was swiping and enjoying the app with a friend. After each photo, my friend and I debated our thoughts on a particular person or checked to see if they had more pictures. Sometimes a user would come up with mutual friends, and that would spark a dialogue.

There was no denying it. There was something weirdly entertaining and gamelike about Tinder. When the app first started popping up, people in all our focus groups described signing up for amusement or as a joke and swiping profiles with friends in a group setting. They said using the app was actually fun and social, which was simply unheard of in all our conversations about other online dating sites.

At the same time, though, people’s attitude toward Tinder was strange. When we first started asking people about it in late 2013, they wouldn’t say they were on it looking for dates or even sex. They would say that they had signed up on a lark. They treated it like a party game. Anyone who was a serious user was basically using it as a hookup app for sex.

Here are a few exemplary quotes from a focus group we held in December 2013:

Hi, I’m Rena. I’m twenty-three and I signed up for Tinder, like, three months ago, just because I was drunk and with a friend.

Hi, I’m Jane. I’m twenty-four and I have a similar experience with Tinder where I was, like, at a party with friends and they were like, “This is the funnest game ever. Let’s play this.” And I downloaded it. And then, like, started seeing way too many people I knew. So I deleted it.

Those who did acknowledge that they’d actually used Tinder felt a little self-conscious about it. “I’m not gonna marry a guy from Tinder,” one woman said. “Yeah, Tinder’s very, like, hookup,” added another.

What, we asked, would you do if you met someone you actually liked on Tinder? One woman said she’d be embarrassed to tell people she’d met someone on Tinder, whereas another site, like JDate, would have been fine.

But by late 2014 people’s attitudes about Tinder were dramatically different, especially in the big cities where it first got popular. People we spoke with in New York and Los Angeles were using Tinder as
the
go-to dating app. It wasn’t just a sex app. It wasn’t a game. People were using it to meet people for relationships and dating because it was quick, fun, and easy. The change in perception was startling.

In October 2014 we asked people on our subreddit to tell us about their experiences with Tinder and other swipe apps. Sure, we got some stories about people using the site for drunken hookups, but we also got a lot like these:

I live in Atlanta, and when Dragon*Con came through I figured it would be the perfect opportunity for some hilarious stories. I started using it with my best friend and we’d send each other screenshots of our weird and scary messages and profiles we’d seen. Then I started matching with some legitimately cool dudes who I had shared interests with and had nice conversations with and I started taking it a lot more seriously . . .

I’m actually currently dating a guy I met off Tinder, we’ve been exclusive for about a month now? It’s going well, I like him a lot and we’re very happy. I deleted it after we agreed to be exclusive.

Based on the responses we got, it seems like many people who start on Tinder for laughs wind up finding something more meaningful than they expected. One man wrote:

The first time I had seriously used Tinder I ended up meeting [someone] who’s now my girlfriend. I wasn’t particularly looking for a serious commitment or anything, but I was just kind of going with it. It’s weird because I always thought that I’ve done tinder wrong because it didn’t end up in just a hookup and now I’m actually dating this girl. I haven’t used the app since we started dating in the beginning of the summer.

Clearly, Tinder is working for people. Just two years after it was released, Tinder reported that it was processing two billion swipes and generating twelve million matches a day. And not just on college campuses. Today the average user is twenty-seven, and it’s quickly becoming popular throughout the world.
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Near the end of 2014, Tinder claimed that the average user logged on eleven times per day and spent approximately seven minutes on each session, meaning they are there for more than 1.25 hours each day. That’s an amazing amount of time to do anything, let alone move your fingers around a tiny screen.

There are also imitators. OkCupid developed a swipe-type app for its users. There is a popular start-up called Hinge that matches people Tinder style, but users have to have mutual friends on Facebook. Other new apps are surely on the way.

 • • • 

Swipe apps like Tinder definitely seem to be where online dating is headed.
Weirdly, these apps have also come to signify a strange sense of wonder about what it means to be single today. In our interviews, people in relationships in their thirties or forties lamented the fact that they weren’t able to experience the single life in the “age of Tinder.” The app symbolizes the opportunity to meet/date/hook up with beautiful people whenever you want.

Is that the reality? In a sense, yes. The app is almost magical in the way you are so quickly exposed to exciting and beautiful possibilities for your romantic life. To think, just twenty years ago we were buying ads in a fucking newspaper!

One gentleman we interviewed told us that he literally could not get off the app, so overwhelmed was he by the enormous number of single women who were suddenly accessible. “I was literally addicted to it,” he recounted. “I had to delete it.” Another woman recalled being so hooked on Tinder that she was on her way to a date and swiping to see if there was another more attractive guy out there to meet up with in case her existing date was a bust.

But, like any dating trend, swipe apps have their pitfalls. The user base isn’t exclusively attractive singles looking to have a good time; there is plenty of riffraff as well. Despite the mutual interest factor, you can find plenty of Tinder conversations on Straight White Boys Texting filled with matches who are spouting filth. Countless guys have also been lured to engage with women who were bad news or, worse yet, bots and/or prostitutes.

 • • • 

The biggest criticism of swipe apps is that, with their reliance on purely physical attraction, Tinder and the like represent increasing superficiality among online daters.
(“Tinder: The Shallowest Dating App Ever?” asks the
Guardian
.
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)

But I think that’s too cynical. Walking into a bar or party, a lot of times all you have to go by is people’s faces, and that’s what you use to decide if you are going to gather up the courage to talk to them. Isn’t the swipe app just a HUGE party full of faces that we can swipe right to go talk to?

In the case of the girl I’m currently dating, I initially saw her face somewhere and approached her. I didn’t have an in-depth profile to peruse or a fancy algorithm. I just had her face, and we started talking and it worked out. Is that experience so different from swiping on Tinder?

“I think Tinder is a great thing,” says Helen Fisher, the anthropologist who studies dating. “All Tinder is doing is giving you someone to look at that’s in the neighborhood. Then you let the human brain with his brilliant little algorithm tick, tick, tick off what you’re looking for.”

In this sense, Tinder actually isn’t so different from what our grandparents did, nor is the way my friend used online dating to find someone Jewish who lived nearby. In a world of infinite possibilities, we’ve cut down our options to people we’re attracted to in our neighborhood.

USING TECHNOLOGY TO GAIN ROMANTIC FREEDOM

For those who don’t live in a world of infinite options, digital technology provides another benefit, and I hadn’t thought about it until we interviewed people in one of the world’s most unique dating cultures: Qatar.

The benefit is privacy. The secret worlds of the phone and the Internet provide single people a degree of freedom and choice in less open societies.

Needless to say, the singles scene in Qatar is not quite like what we observed anywhere else in the world. Those from religious and traditional families are literally prohibited from casual dating. Flirting in public places gets a young person in serious trouble, and it’s especially dangerous for young women, who are expected to be chaste until marriage and risk bringing terrible shame to themselves and their parents if they are caught courting a man.

One online guide warns: “No public displays of affection: Kissing, hugging, and some places even holding hands . . . The result is jail time.”
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That’s a pretty grim prison story.

“Hey, man, what are you in for?”

“Doing five years for holding hands in the park.”

“You?”

“Doing life . . . for smooches.”

 • • • 

Since casual dating is prohibited, families—mainly the mothers—do the matchmaking in Qatar.
Marriages are arranged, and for the women we interviewed, the incentives to tie the knot are oddly reminiscent of those expressed by the older American women we interviewed in the senior centers.

A twenty-seven-year-old named Amirah told us, “The main thing you need to understand about marriage here is that the parties to the contract are rarely the man and woman entering it. It’s the families; it’s the group.

“There’s, like, a mating season,” Amirah said, “and it’s the mothers who do the initial screening. The mothers of boys go from one house to the other. They’re looking for women who are suitable based on family background and education. They’re looking for
naseeb
, their family’s destiny for marriage.

“The other thing to know about marriage,” Amirah continued, “is that it’s attractive to young girls because they want to move out and get their freedom.” Her friend Leila, a twenty-six-year-old lawyer who was also on the video chat, nodded in agreement. “When I first came back to Doha after I graduated from university, I went to visit [Amirah’s] house,” she began. “My mother called me and said, ‘It’s going to be nine
P.M
.; you should come home.’ They’d always call me when I was out to find out where I was and ask when I was coming home. If I went shopping, they’d say, ‘Stop. We have a maid who can do that!’ If I was with a friend, they’d say, ‘Come home!’ They just didn’t want me out.”

After college, Leila couldn’t tolerate this level of parental supervision. “I didn’t want to be at home with my family all the time,” she told us. “I wanted to have my freedom back. But women from traditional families can’t live alone in Qatar. The only way you can leave your family’s home is to get married or die.”