Gone are the days of meeting a cute boy in Bio lab, or sparking a drunken hookup in a sweaty fraternity basement. Trade your mini skirt for your sweatpants, and instead of swishing your hips to Rhianna, blast Taylor Swift in your living room and start swiping your finger: Left, right, left, left, right, match, chat.
Sound familiar? In recent months, Tinder has become one of Apple’s top apps, and this trend has become more popular on our campus than Skibo at 1 AM. Tinder is a dating app that users access through Facebook accounts, and they are matched up with potential suitors in their decided age and location range. Imagine eharmony meeting your social media profile meeting your GPS. Logging in through Facebook makes it seemingly safe, and the ability to blindly match and reject makes it credible.
While this all sounds great and theory, what is the real deal with Tinder? Does it reach the hype? I asked a variety of girls on our campus about their Tinder times, and here are their stories, recorded anonymously.
Isabelle’s story: Just for hook ups?
When I caught Isabelle, she was on her way to meet up with her Tinder boy, a student at a neighboring university. Isabelle matched with this guy when she first started using Tinder. They started chatting on the app, then soon switched to texting when he asked her to hang out. He offered to pick her up at her house, but Isabelle was hesitant. “I was, like, oh my god, I’m gonna get raped.” But after talking to a couple of friends about it, she decided that if she gave them his address, and gave him the once over when he picked her up, they would be good to go. And they were. They’ve hung out a handful of times in the past couple of weeks, casually hooking up without strings attached.
Looking at it in hindsight, is Tinder safe? Probably not. There were a lot of creeps she matched with, such as the guy who messaged her: Hmm okay. “So What would it take for me to get you to come over, get a tour of my place, get sweet talked as we awe over my beautiful view, and then cuddle all night long? P.S. I have a pool. Haha” and the one who dropped hello for “We should hook up.” Clearly, Isabelle did not pursue anything with those guys.
Meeting up with an online stranger never guarantees safety, but she took the risk and she got lucky. The relationship is playing out exactly how she wanted it to, and she doesn’t want anything more from him or Tinder itself.
Tinder, Isabelle advises, is not for finding a serious relationship. People who get emotionally attached, don’t Tinder. People looking to settle down, don’t Tinder. “If you’re on Tinder, you’re on Tinder for a reason.” The app is for hooking up, nothing more. The difference between casually hooking up with a CMU guy and a Tinder guy is the aftermath: “At CMU, if you hook up with someone, everyone knows.” Even if it was a one-time thing, word gets out. If you meet a guy on Tinder who goes to Pitt or Dusquesne, or is perhaps just local, who is going to find out about it? Who is going to care?
Lizzy and Allison’s stories: It’s all what you make of it
Lizzy had been talking to a guy she met on Tinder for almost two weeks before he suggested they meet. He came to her house and they hung out for a little while and they hooked up. At first, she was apprehensive about meeting a stranger: “It’s actually kinda sketchy if you really think about it.”
Regardless of his Facebook-based Tinder profile, she had no background on him. He easily could have been an old man, or a total creep. Had they met in a public place, she may have been less nervous, but still not completely at ease. Maybe she would have had a few seconds’ advantage to see if his photo matched, but there’s still no foolproof way of verifying if everything he told her about himself was true.
Allison, however, has had very similar Tinder experiences, but without the doubt. She, too, was talking to a guy for a while before they decided to meet up at her place. “I didn’t have any doubts because we were friends on Facebook and Twitter,” she said. It’s like when cashiers ask to see your license after you hand them your credit card: the more verifications of identification, the safer it seems.
Although they had differing emotions going into it, both Lizzy and Allison had great Tinder face-to-face interactions, and they both still talk to their Tinder men.
At the end of the day, they agree that Tinder can be used as a variety of platforms: “Tinder is a dating app, but it’s also just for fun and a way of trolling people,” Lizzy says.
“I think the purpose is different for everyone,” Allison says. “Some guys want to get laid, and some people just want to meet people.”
Tinder is multidimensional, they decided. It just depends on what you want out of your swiping.
Natalie’s story: Something more?
Natalie, for example, is having an indie-movie romance with a guy she met on Tinder. When she first started to use Tinder, she saw it has a huge ego boost. It’s flattering to have people think you’re attractive, and it’s empowering to have the ability to dismiss someone with just the swipe of your finger. It’s fun to see who you match with and who you get along with.
She may not have expected to actually meet with one of her Tinder matches, but after talking to one boy for about a week this summer, they agreed to meet for coffee. Initially, Natalie was concerned. What if he had been using a fake picture and profile? What if he was a woman? What if he was 40? 70? What he was secretly her ex boyfriend trying to get back at her? Did she have Nev and Max from Catfish on speed dial?
However, once they met up, Natalie’s worries subsided. “He was sweet and polite, but was also being pretty outwardly flirty,” Natalie said. She gave him a tour of CMU, introduced him to a couple of her friends who gave their stamps of approval. Their date continued, and he stepped up his game: they drove around downtown in his convertible with the top down: “It was so cool to look at all the buildings and feel like you’re flying through with nothing between you and the buildings.” He took her across the Yarn Drive and drove slowly enough so that she could stand in the car as they drove past. She slept at his apartment that night, and they hung out again the next night.
They have been texting regularly since that weekend, and even though he moved across the state a couple weeks later for work, he is making plans to visit in the next few weeks, and wants her to visit him, Natalie can’t deny they are in a weird place. “It’s kinda weird to invest that much [time and effort] into someone you had one, maybe two, dates with.” But if the feelings are there, then they are there, and why fight them?
Tinder: An assortment of sparks
These are just a few of CMU’s Tinder tales. The app is what you make of it, and you can make your matches into anything, whether it’s just a chat buddy, a hook up, or someone you could truly be happy with. The most important thing to remember is to trust your intuition, and keep the side effects in mind: app addiction, zombie swiping and early stages of carpal tunnel. But in the meantime, just keep swiping left, right, right, right, left, right…
Photo credit:
http://www.vancitybuzz.com/wp-…