So there you are on your lunch break, just nibbling on your salad Chipotle burrito and casually scrolling through Tinder. You're just looking, we know! But then you spot the perfect guy (or girl): a profile picture with an adorable animal, a chiseled jawline and a perfectly self-deprecating bio. You swipe right, you match, and your journey to true love begins. Right? Wrong. It turns out there's almost a 40 percent chance that said perfect Tinder match isn't even single.
This depressing—yet not entirely shocking—news comes courtesy of a new study conducted by Global Web Index. Their research found that a whopping 42 percent of people who use the dating app are already in relationships. And of that demographic, 30 percent are straight-up married. That's right, married. It probably also won't surprise you that most of these taken folks are also men (sorry to all the men out there for stereotyping, but it's not like you're doing yourselves any favors with this one).
Tinder came to its own defense after the results of the study went viral, saying "The results of this tiny, 681-person study in the UK is a totally inaccurate depiction of Tinder's userbase — this firm is making guesses without having any access to real data on our millions of users worldwide. Here are the facts: The single largest age group on Tinder, making up more than half of our entire userbase, is 18-24, and 93% of them have never been married according to the UK's Office of National Statistics. Without revealing any data about our users, simple logic should reveal that it's essentially impossible for any of these claims to be accurate. Their methodology seems severely and fundamentally flawed."
Nevertheless, if you're one of the poor souls who has started chatting (or worse) with someone who's not even single, you'd probably be pretty peeved at the fact that even on dating apps it's impossible to find somebody available. But Tinder's CEO Sean Rad would dissuade you from those feelings, because he argues that it's not even a dating service in the first place—apparently it's a "social discovery platform!" We're not really sure what two might people discover on Tinder besides each other's genitals, but whatever you say, Sean.
This idea intrigued us, so we decided to do a little sociological research (read: Going on Twitter and texting our friends) on what the public's real expectation is of Tinder. And what we found may shock you, unless you are on Tinder yourself: No one takes Tinder seriously. Like, no one.
If you are single and using the app you're probably just doing it for a few giggles and maybe to practice your late-night sexting for when someone legitimate comes along. If you're not single and you're using the app, you're acting as a wingman to a single friend or participating in some kind of odd social experiment to see how many swipe-rights you can get.
Either way the lesson here seems to be: Proceed with caution on Tinder. Extreme caution.