Tinder: How to Turn Your Dating Life into a Dumpster Fire

I view myself as a very average or slightly above average guy in terms of looks, height, financial stability, social connection and fitness level. All the things that people swiping care about most (even if some are terrible metrics to filter by).

Here’s my combined resume from having a Tinder, Bumble, OKCupid and Hinge profile for 5+ years.

Maybe 50 matches. Less than 10 conversations. 0 dates. 1 catfish. 1 girl who was so mentally ill that she needed me to block her on everything so that she couldn’t reach me.

You can take make anecdotal experience as proof, or you can check out exactly how bad dating apps are for your mental health and dating life.

Here’s a fun one to start with:

66% of dating app users aren’t even single.

A study of 1400 people published in July of 2023 found that 65.3% of users were married or in a relationship. Beyond that only 50% of people were using the app to meet someone in person.

Your success rate is 0.0033% at best.

The chart above shows a year of swiping from a 23 year old girl and over 30000 swipes. It resulted in 1 long term partner. That’s a success rate of 0.0033%. Factor in that men swipe yes on 53% of women and women swipe yes on only 5% of men. This means we need to divide by a factor of 10 to get your success rate.

Additionally, let’s say for fun you spend 10 seconds per profile. 30,000 swipes would cost you 3.5 days of your year.

Tinder’s business model is built on keeping you single.

Everyone seems to forget that a dating app can only make money if you keep using it (and paying for premium subscriptions or boosts). You’re sold the promise of love when in reality it is a direct conflict of interest for you to find a long term partner because of a dating app.

Their data scientists have determined exactly how long between matches you’re willing to wait without deleting the app. And, on average, how many matches it takes for you to find a girlfriend.

With that information they can continue to drip out enough matches to keep you on the app, but not enough to find a long term partner.

70% of dating app users feel depressed after using them.

Okay this one is just plain sad.

The Daily Mail reported in February… a whole bunch of depressing stats.

Among other things:

• 44% of users don’t feel good enough for the people they match with

• 27% of women use dating apps only as an ego boost

• 44% of users want a casual hook-up

• 39% of users feel unwanted

As it turns out my feeling of being average correlates to the average experience of a dating app user.

I would bet $1,000,000 that for a man of average attractiveness, you’d have a better success rate standing on a street corner and asking every girl your age that walks by out on a date.

It’s time to delete some accounts.