Posted January 28, Reviewed by Tyler Woods. Online dating has been around since the s, but with the introduction of mobile dating apps, like Tinder, online dating became faster-paced and more popular than ever. Tinder currently has over 60 million users and a survey of a representative sample of US adults found that 30 percent had used a dating website or app at some point.
For those unfamiliar with dating apps like Tinder, here's how they work: Users create a brief profile and browse through profiles of other users by swiping through a series of profile photos. If they like what they see, they swipe right and if they don't, they swipe left. If both users swipe right on each other, it's a match, and the pair can initiate contact. These apps use GPS technology in order to determine which users are nearby.
For this reason, Tinder has a reputation as a hookup app, where people can quickly and easily find someone nearby who is up for an immediate casual hookup.
Despite their reputation as hookup apps, hooking up is not the main reason people use these apps. In fact, the most common reasons people use dating apps is that they're trendy and exciting, suggesting that many users treat these apps as a game or diversion, rather than a way to search for romantic or sexual partners.
Among those users who are looking to meet someone on these apps, the search for love is more common than the search for a casual sexual encounter. But who actually ends up meeting up with their matches more often: Those searching for love or those searching for casual sex? A new study by Meredith Harrison and colleagues explored how love motives and sex motives predicted college students' likelihood of actually meeting up with a dating app match. They surveyed students, of whom had used a dating up at some point.
