From Swiping to Casual Sex and/or Committed Relationships: Exploring the Experiences of Tinder Users

From Swiping to Casual Sex and/or Committed Relationships: Exploring the Experiences of Tinder Users. Elisabeth Timmermans, Cédric Courtois. The Information Society 34(2), March 2018, DOI 10.1080/01972243.2017.1414093

Abstract: To better understand if and how the mechanics of the process Tinder imposes on its users (i.e., swiping, matching, and starting conversations) influences the resulting sexual or romantic interactions, we collected data from 1038 Belgian Tinder users. Our findings show that a user’s swiping quantity does not guarantee a higher number of Tinder matches, women have generally more matches than men and men usually have to start a conversation on Tinder. Moreover, while having conversations was positively associated with reporting having had offline Tinder encounters, less than half of our sample reported having had an offline meeting with another Tinder user. Whereas more than one third of those offline encounters lead to casual sex, more than a quarter of those offline encounters result in the formation of a committed relationship. Such findings indicate that Tinder is not “just a hookup app”, as often assumed in public discourse. We argue it is plausible that sexual encounters will eventually lead to committed relationships in a society where initiation of relationship formation with dating has been replaced by hooking up.