Writers debate whether you can find true love on Tinder — as dating app celebrates its fifth birthday with 10million daily active users and 10billion matches since launch
Since the app launched by a group of Californian students in 2012, Tinder has made 10billion matches, but not everyone seems to believe you can find love online
IT’S time to give birthday boy Tinder the humps as the dating app turns five this week.
Since a group of Californian students hatched the simple swiping formula, it has gone on to make TEN BILLION matches.
Here, The Sun’s relationship expert Tinderella explains why she thinks Tinder has changed dating for the worse.
Tinder killed romance
ROMANCE was given its final, fatal kick in the knackers five years this week – and it’s all thanks to Tinder.
Meant to make dating easier, the app has instead made dating obsolete, as strangers grind groins before they swap surnames then hit delete before the front door has even slammed on their latest conquest.
Welcome to the Tesco Metro of love — a soulless convenience store of potential mates where effort goes out the window and it’s quantity not quality that wins the day.
Of course, on paper Tinder was a brilliant idea. Instead of slurping Chardonnay and side-eyeing hotties in a bar, solely reliant on the talent in that night, Tinder freed singles to pull from the comfort of the couch.
For an initial outlay of zero pounds (take that, eHarmony), the app hooked you up with a huge pool of new, allegedly available people.
Suddenly friends of friends weren’t your only option and you no longer had to grill work pals to find out if their fittest mates were single once again.
It was simple, quick and delightfully shallow — a breath of fresh air after the essay writing and cheek-swab intricacy of signing up to sites like My Single Friend.
You looked at a photo and had a gut yes-or-no reaction that you acted on with a left or right swipe. No dithering over music tastes or shared holiday goals. It was simply Hot or Not.
And if you got a match, you could line up a date with minimum fuss, neatly sidestepping the potential face-to-face cringe of rejection in real life.
Even more reassuringly, the app initially rifled through Facebook to match you with people who knew your friends or their mates. So not really strangers, eh?
And it worked, as Tinder now claims to have more than 10 BILLION notches on its bedpost.
But perhaps it worked a bit too well. Suddenly Britain’s lovelorn were hooking up like bunnies on the last boozy Friday before Christmas.
Subtlety became a dirty word and flirting a lost art as men and women spelled out their sexual needs like a shopping list — then met up almost instantly to fulfil them.
Why exchange endless flirty emails when you can simply get jiggy and still be home in time for Doctor Foster on catch-up?
You’d tap in for a swipe session in a boring lunchbreak and almost instantly see photos of Dave, 32, without his pants on.
And just like that, the pigtail-pulling thrill of the chase was gone. You expected — and got — sex in a heartbeat.
And so relationships became disposable too. Because if this rendezvous doesn’t meet your expectations, you know the next is just a right swipe away.
So we don’t settle, we don’t try to work at it, we don’t learn to compromise and all the other skills that make successful relationships work. We just ditch and move on.
Of course, there are exceptions to the rule, like the rare couples who cut through the bulls**t to find a compatible mate for life through Tinder. I think they were the honest ones. People who spelled out how serious they were about a committed relationship without a moment’s fear they’d sound gauche. To them the spoils, not the STDs.
But for the lion’s share of Tinder users, we’re a bit lost, looking for meaningful relationships amid a sea of weirdos and egomaniacs. Because actually your mates’ vetting process is sorely lacking from Tinder’s very modern list of maybes.
If you’re just up for sex (and there’s nowt wrong with that), jump on it.
But if you’re in search of appy ever after? Swipe left.
Another view of the matchmaking app? Here user Sally-Anne Flight tells KARA DOLMAN how Tinder led to motherhood and wedding bells.
Worked for me...I found true love
DESPITE starting as a place to find a no-strings hook-up, Tinder is fast becoming the online portal where people find true romance.
Sally-Anne Flight, from Bromley, Kent, agrees – because she met the love of her life on the app. The 36-year-old, who works in fashion, said:
"If you had told me in May 2014 that I would meet the man of my dreams on Tinder I would have laughed in your face.
But here I am just over three years later, having bought a home, married and just had a baby with a man I met on the app.
I had only been on Tinder a little while and had a few useless dates – but then one day I was matched with a really handsome man called Andy Flight.
He was 38, worked in social media and sounded perfect. We also had my best friend in common. I rang her straight away to ask if he was too good to be true and we started chatting on the app on a Friday.
We had our first date the following Monday and it was literally love at first sight. Lunch turned into dinner, which turned into drinks and when I got home, alone, at 1am that morning, I shouted out loud: “I’ve just met the man I’m going to marry.”
Within eight months we had bought a flat together and by September 2016 we were married.I then fell pregnant with our son, now seven weeks old, straight after the wedding
Even if we had met in real life people would describe it as a whirlwind romance but we knew straight away this was right.
We’re living proof that Tinder is the perfect, modern way to find love."
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Idea caught fire on campus and spread
ACCORDING to Tinder founder Sean Rad, the app is a runaway success because “no matter who you are, you feel more comfortable approaching somebody if you know they want you to approach them”.
By swiping right on screen, the app enables you to “like” someone anonymously – or you can pass on them by swiping left.
If two users like each other, they can then chat from within the app.
Rad originally worked on his idea with developer Joe Munoz, later collaborating with the company’s co-founders Chris Gulczynski, Jonathan Badeen and Whitney Wolfe – who later quit to found rival dating app Bumble amid accusations of sexual harassment at Tinder.
Rad’s best pal Justin Mateen was hired to market the product and the team built the first version in just 23 days. They launched the app in 2012 by sending it to people they knew and visiting college campuses to spread the word among students.
Rad, whose net worth is estimated at £757million, recalled: “We texted Tinder to literally 500 people. Immediately, 80 per cent of the people we texted signed up. The next day we grew 50 per cent. People who knew of each other but never exposed any interest were now getting connected. So we immediately knew this could have a huge impact on society.
“We would go to colleges and talk about Tinder. We were stopping people on the street and we’d go into coffee shops and talk to each other like, ‘Oh, have you heard of that app Tinder? It’s such a cool app!’ At the start of the month we had 20,000 users and at the end 500,000.”
Originally called Matchbox, the app’s name is meant to imply it can start a romantic fire – though US health chiefs blame it for a rise in STDs.
It’s free to install and can be used without spending a penny. But it offers a range of in-app purchases which have made it the top-grossing download on the Apple Store.