Swipe Right For A Valentine

Swipe

Right

For A

Valentine…

by Jakub Dulak

February 9, 2018

Valentine’s Day is fast approaching, and with that the pressure to find that special someone is the highest it’ll be all year.   Who wants to spend the most romantic day of the year riding solo?   With only about two weeks to go, guys and girls alike are bound to start scrambling, and many of them will be turning to those trusty dating apps. But you have to wonder…are those apps really all they’re cracked up to be?

Bumble, Coffee Meets Bagel, OK Cupid, and the most notorious of them all, Tinder, have reached peak popularity, with an estimated 50 million individuals using some sort of application a month.   Needless to say, the apps are popular, and convenient.  You can browse all the singles in your area from the comfort of your couch…and with 12 million matches a day, the app is clearly working!   But then…why are the people on Tinder still on Tinder?  It’s not often you see profiles vanish. Can these apps actually lead you to finding Mr. or Mrs. Right, or are they doomed to lead to a conversation that is doomed to fizzle out?

In a recent study conducted by Bustle.com, Tinder users were polled on the longevity of their relationships forged from the app.  Of the study group, 23.7% said they only ever went out on one or two dates with their match, and about 21% stated the relationships lasted less than 6 months. In fact, only 14.7% of the relationships lasted more than a year. 13.6% of the relationships led to either engagement or marriage, so there is proof that dating apps can lead to your happily ever after…but that’s not exactly all that reassuring considering it was the second-to-smallest ratio of the entire study.

It really comes down to is this.   if you want a quick, meaningless date to fill that Valentine void, yeah, jump on Tinder and start swiping (don’t bother with Bumble when you’re in a rush, by my own statistics you’re 20 times more likely to get a match on Tinder…try not to read into that too much!)  Be prepared, while there are about one billion swipes on Tinder a day…there’s only about 12 million matches. Who knows? You might be one of the lucky ones! Just…don’t get your hopes up that your Valentine’s date is going to be much more than exactly that…a Valentine’s date.   Don’t worry… you’ll fall into the endless loop of swiping and going on one or two off dates just like the rest of us. It’s hard to resist the temptation of dating apps, I get it. I signed up three years ago and haven’t looked back since!   Maybe, you’re better off ignoring Valentine’s Day this year and going out to a bar instead, meeting people and striking up conversations.    It certainly makes for a better first impression that a corny one liner that you text and pray you get a response, and just might lead to a more organic relationship blossoming in your future.