Shana Claudio left the bar on the Upper East Side of Manhattan for her third Tinder date of the day. She had already met a finance type for brunch that Sunday in October 2013 through the dating app (he was a bit superficial), and she found the second guy, whom she met for a drink, forgettable.
By now it was early evening, and Ms. Claudio, who now works in corporate communications, was scheduled to go on a date at a nearby bar with a guy named Ken. He turned out to be Ken Andrews, a 33-year-old surgeon in his fourth year of medical residency at N.Y.U., who thought Ms. Claudio was a “total knockout.”
After three hours of conversation, Mr. Andrews walked her home, giving her a quick kiss at her apartment doorstep. “No way was he coming upstairs and he didn’t try — that’s not why I was on Tinder,” said Ms. Claudio, now 33. They went out again, and they were engaged 10 months later. She is now Mrs. Andrews.
Yes, they swiped right and met the one — with hardly a cheap rendezvous in sight, even though Tinder, the ubiquitous mobile-dating app, has been written off by some observers as nothing more than a vehicle to promote quick and easy hookups.
In a 2015 article in Vanity Fair, Nancy Jo Sales argued that Tinder is responsible for a “dating apocalypse,” with several 20-something New York men admitting they use it to prowl for women to sleep with. They call their conquests “Tinderellas” and pride themselves on getting women into bed after a few texts.
The article set off a firestorm on the Twittersphere, with Tinder going on the defense — at one point tweeting out 30 responses in just a few minutes. Tinder acknowledged that some users just want to hook up, but said that a vast majority were looking for meaningful connections
Janie Egan, a 21-year-old living in Salt Lake City, met her husband, Chris George, on Tinder as a freshman at the University of Utah. Her parents had forbidden her to use the dating app, but she thought it was fun; Mr. George, 29, was the second guy she met on the app.
Still, the app has become so popular that couples are shedding some of the shame associated with meeting on it. Many are proudly incorporating Tinder into their engagement or wedding ceremonies. A spokesman for Tinder said that the company has received wedding invitations via email and regular mail, and that Sean Rad, the chief executive, and other members of the Tinder team are often asked if they would like to attend.
One couple were engaged using Tinder messages. Rachael Honowitz, 35, lived in Manhattan for 12 years, working as an event planner for People magazine, before deciding to move to Los Angeles in 2014. She moved with the hope that men on the West Coast weren’t as noncommittal as the ones she met in New York.
She met her husband, Jason Cosgrove, a digital media executive who was growing tired of the online dating scene, on Tinder six weeks later.
“I was probably chatting with 10 guys at the time,” said Ms. Honowitz, who now runs a company that prepares gift bags for award shows and celebrities. “I was even talking to one of his best friends, which was a bit awkward later.”
Mr. Cosgrove and Ms. Honowitz went out for sushi for their first date. They clicked. “You just know if it’s going to work after one date,” she said. “And it did.”
Mr. Cosgrove, 38, decided to propose using Tinder messages while sitting with Ms. Honowitz on a bench in Central Park during a trip to New York. When he ran into technical difficulties on Tinder (they couldn’t get their profiles to “match” in a different city), he sent his “Tinder message” via text, excerpted here: “Here we are. Back in the place where it all began — a little app inside your phone. But things have changed a bit since we first met here … I suppose after saying some sweet stuff to a girl on Tinder, it would be time to ask her out. … But I’ve got another question instead.”
Ms. Honowitz put the phone down; Mr. Cosgrove got down on one knee and proposed.
“I was embarrassed by how we met at first and didn’t tell people, but now I see it as my civic duty to let people know,” said Ms. Honowitz, who agreed to let Tinder post their love story on the “success stories” part of their website. “There’s no shame in meeting on Tinder. I’m a smart, educated girl from a great family. Jason is, too.”
In 2015, Eric Schleicher posted a wedding photo of himself and his new wife, Caitlin, on Instagram with an attention-grabbing “Straight Outta Tinder” graphic stamped on the front. “We #SwipedRight!,” Mr. Schleicher, the marketing manager for events at the BOK Center arena in Tulsa, Okla., captioned the photo.
He’s one of hundreds who have posted to the hashtag. “People are always surprised when I tell them how we met,” he said. “I thought this was a fun way of sharing it.”
Mr. Schleicher joined Tinder in the fall of 2013, shortly after moving to Dallas. He wasn’t looking for a hookup (he says that’s not his thing). He just wanted to get to know people.
He met Ms. Schleicher at 11 p.m. at a bar called Three Sheets for their first date; it was her idea. “Looking back, the late time could have given him the wrong impression,” said Ms. Schleicher, a labor and delivery nurse, “But he wasn’t in a rush that night, about anything. We just talked for hours.”
“I think Tinder is what you make of it,” said Mr. Schleicher, 25. Sure, there are people looking for casual sex, he said, but then there are people who really want to meet someone. “You just have to sift through,” he said.
He’d go out of his way to seem normal when he approached women on the app, knowing that many of them were hurled insulting pickup lines like, “Do you have any bikini shots?” His opening line was always plain vanilla: Hey, how are you?
Mr. Cosgrove thinks of Tinder as an icebreaker, since it can ease the stress of approaching a woman. “If I saw my wife in a bar, I would have been too intimidated to approach her,” he said. Knowing that she had already swiped right reassured him that she found him attractive, which he said gave him more confidence on their first date.
Aimee Denaro, a real estate broker who lives in the East Village, never thought she’d meet a husband on Tinder in 2013. “I had tried Match.com and eHarmony, but I never found any normal guys there,” she said.
Ms. Denaro signed up for a Tinder account at the same time as her best friend, and they’d both scroll through the guys, like it was a game. They were encouraged. “On Tinder, I felt like I’d found a larger pool of guys, guys I would have been friends with,” she said. (There were definitely creepers, too, like the guy who asked if she liked massages, or the one who asked her to describe her feet.)
When she met Rob Becker, she had an instant crush, but she didn’t take him seriously at first. “I had written him off, thinking ‘Come on, I’m not really going to meet my husband on Tinder,’” she said. But he was exactly her type, and they were engaged a year later. He gave her a T-shirt that night: “Yeah, we met on Tinder,” it read.
And Ms. Denaro’s best friend? She was engaged a month later to one of her Tinder beaus as well. Says Ms. Denaro: “We were in each other’s bridal parties.”
By BROOKE LEA FOSTER
Source New York Times
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