Science Explains Why Tinder Is an Ineffective App for Hookups
Despite its reputation as a “hookup app,” Tinder isn’t a great tool for short-term connections
I sat in my room with a blank stare and a hole in my soul that was eating its way outward. A sense of loss and emptiness flowed through my veins like my blood had been replaced with a vacuous nothingness. I had become the abyss.
I was lonely — and I was alone.
I shouldn’t be too hard on myself.
I’d been traveling for years non-stop, with no end in sight. I was in a weird town with strange people and even weirder politics. The racism that exists implicitly elsewhere was made explicit in this city.
Kin similar to me felt so far away — like I’d have to cross a continent on foot in order to share in an ordinary conversation that didn’t make me feel like an outcast in exile.
So I did what any other sometimes-stupid young man would do, and I decided to dig out my Tinder app and see if I could meet some people in the nearby vicinity.
Filled to the brim with overconfidence and possibly too much testosterone, I carefully constructed my profile and swiped away with an unrelenting fervor.
And after a week, I realized that my attempts were utterly futile. I was too unconventional, too “progressive,” and too much of a free spirit to meet any similar souls in the small conservative city I was stuck in until I finished the job I’d traveled there to do.
What I didn’t see when I began was just how stacked against me the odds were. I could smell the differences between myself and the locals as I emerged in public and interacted as necessary for my job, but I thought that Tinder might show me a different crowd.
I was wrong.
Have you ever had this experience? I have more than once.
Tinder: the Hookup App?
I’ve also witnessed countless friends turn to Tinder in their moments of loneliness, to try to score a quick hookup with a fresh and exciting stranger, only to walk away from their endeavors feeling worthless and even more alone than when they started.
Being able to see them from the outside, oftentimes jobless, broke, and thus unable to even so much as go out on a date, I tried to caution them against it.
They never listened. They always failed.
Lonely people won’t listen to reason, as they seek to quench their solitude by swimming in the company of others.
Beyond these material reasons that Tinder for hookups is a bad idea, there are some factual ones that come to us from real research into people’s experiences and motives for using the app.
Using Tinder doesn’t require much time or effort because you can easily swipe through profiles of people who are near you. This is just about all Tinder has going for it.
It’s got sheer numbers, the number of people you can scan in a very short period of time, and location matching. But that’s where the benefits of Tinder as a hookup app begin to break down.