That fall, his relationship of two and a half years finally ended, and Eli found himself single again. He was 27 years old, losing the vestigial greenness of his youth. He wanted to have sex with some women, and he wanted some stories to tell. He updated his dating profiles. He compiled his photos. He experimented with taglines. He downloaded all the apps. He knew the downsides—the perfidy of the deceptive head shot, the seductress with the intellect of a fence post—but he played anyway. He joined every free dating service demographically available to him.
Around the same time, somewhere across town, a woman named Katherine1 shut down her OkCupid account. She had approached Internet dating assertively, had checked the box that read “Short-term dating” and the one that read “Casual sex.” Then a casual encounter had turned menacing, and Katherine decided she no longer wanted to pursue sex with total strangers. But she had a problem: She liked the adventure, she had the usual human need for other humans, and she needed the convenience of meeting people online. Katherine was 37, newly single, with family obligations and a full-time job. Most of her friends were married. She needed something new.
When Katherine and Eli downloaded Tinder in October 2013, they joined millions of Americans interested in trying the fastest-growing mobile dating service in the country. Tinder does not give out statistics about the number of its users, but the app has grown from being the plaything of a few hundred Los Angeles party kids to a multinational phenomenon in less than a year. Unlike the robot yentas of yore (Match.com, OkCupid, eHarmony), which out-competed one another with claims of compatibility algorithms and secret love formulas, the only promise Tinder makes is to show you the other users in your immediate vicinity. Depending on your feelings for these people, you swipe them to the left (meaning “no thanks”) or to the right (“yes, please”). Two people who swipe each other to the right will “match.” Your matches accrue in a folder, and often that's the end of the story. Other times you start texting. The swiping phase is as lulling in its eye-glazing repetition as a casino slot machine, the chatting phase ideal for idle, noncommittal flirting. In terms of popularity, Tinder is a massive and undeniable success. Whether it works depends on your idea of “working.”
For Katherine, still wary from her bad encounter, Tinder offered another advantage. It uses your pre-existing Facebook network and shows which friends, if any, you have in common with the person in the photo. On October 16, Eli appeared on her phone. He was cute. He could tell a joke. (His tagline made her laugh.) They had one friend in common, and they both liked Louis C.K. (“Who doesn't like Louis C.K.?” Eli says later. “Oh, you also like the most popular comedian in America?”) She swiped him to the right. Eli, who says he would hook up with anybody who isn't morbidly obese or in the middle of a self-destructive drug relapse, swipes everyone to the right. A match!
He messaged first. “Sixty-nine miles away??” he asked.
“I'm at a wedding in New Jersey,” she replied.
So, Eli said to himself, she's lonely at a wedding in New Jersey.
Eli: “So why you on Tinder?”
Katherine: “To date. You?”
Eli said it was an “esteem” thing. It had taught him that “women find me more attractive than I think.” Unfortunately for Katherine, he told her he didn't have a lot of time to date. He worked two jobs. They wanted different things. It therefore read as mock bravado when Eli wrote, “But you ever just want to fuck please please holler at me cool???” He added his number.
Katherine waited an hour to respond. Then: “Ha.” And then, one minute later, “I will.” And: “I kinda do.”
Eli: “Please please do. ;)”
Katherine liked that he was younger. He was funny. He did not, like one guy, start the conversation with “Don't you want to touch my abs?” He said “please.” Eli liked that Katherine was older. Katherine wrote: “You can't be psycho or I will tell [name of mutual friend].” He sympathized with that, too.
The parameters were clear. They arranged to meet.
···
I first signed up for Tinder in May but found it skewed too young. (I'm 32.) When I looked again in mid-October, everything had changed. I swiped through people I knew from college, people I might've recognized from the train. I saw it had gone global when a friend in England posted a Tinder-inspired poem on her Facebook page (“and here are we, He and Me, our flat-screen selves rendered 3D”). I started to check it regularly. The more I used it, the more I considered how much it would have helped me at other times in my life—to make friends in grad school, to meet people after moving to a new city. It seemed possible that one need never be isolated again.
In December, I flew out to Los Angeles, where Tinder is based, to visit the company's offices and meet two of its founders, Sean Rad and Justin Mateen, both 27. (The third is Jonathan Badeen, the engineer who built the app.) Rad is the chief executive officer; Mateen is chief marketing officer. They are also best friends, share a resemblance to David Schwimmer, and have been known to show up for work in the same outfit. I was staying only a mile from Tinder's offices in West Hollywood, and within forty-eight hours both founders showed up on my Tinder feed. Other memorable appearances on my feed in Los Angeles included a guy holding a koala bear, a guy and his Yorkshire terrier, in matching sweaters, and a pipe-smoking dandy with a Rasputin beard, horn-rimmed glasses, and a gold ring the exact shape and size of a cicada.
Rad and Mateen are local boys. They both grew up in Beverly Hills, although they attended different private schools. They first encountered each other at 14, when Sean made a play for Justin's girlfriend. (“We met because we both liked the same girl—but the girl was my girlfriend,” says Justin.) They reconnected at USC, and then both started independent companies. Justin's was a “social network for celebrities.” Sean's was Adly, a platform that allows companies to advertise via celebrities' social networks. He sold the majority of his stake in 2012. “I didn't want to be in the ad business,” he says. He also didn't want to make things for computers. “Computers are going extinct,” he says. “Computers are just work devices.” For people his age, the primary way to interface with the technical world was through a mobile device.
Rad and Mateen have shared business ideas with each other for years, and every idea begins with a problem. The key to solving the problem that interested Tinder: “I noticed that no matter who you are, you feel more comfortable approaching somebody if you know they want you to approach them,” says Sean. They had both experienced the frustration of sending smoke signals through social media. “There are people that want to get to know you who don't know you, so they're resorting to Facebook,” explains Justin. When those advances or friendings or followings are unwanted, they say, the overtures can seem a little “creepy.” (Consider, for example, the long-standing mystery of the Facebook “poke.”) Sean was interested in the idea of the “double opt-in”—some establishment of mutual interest that precedes interaction.
And so Tinder entered a fossilizing industry. Most of the big players (including Match.com, Plenty of Fish, OkCupid, eHarmony, Manhunt, JDate, and Christian Mingle) established themselves before billions of humans carried miniature satellite-connected data processors in their pockets, before most people felt comfortable using their real names to seek companionship online, and before a billion people joined Facebook—before Facebook even existed. Tinder's major advantages come from exploiting each of these recent developments. The company also managed to accrue, in less than a year of existence, the only truly important asset of any dating site: millions and millions of users.
Around the same time, somewhere across town, a woman named Katherine1 shut down her OkCupid account. She had approached Internet dating assertively, had checked the box that read “Short-term dating” and the one that read “Casual sex.” Then a casual encounter had turned menacing, and Katherine decided she no longer wanted to pursue sex with total strangers. But she had a problem: She liked the adventure, she had the usual human need for other humans, and she needed the convenience of meeting people online. Katherine was 37, newly single, with family obligations and a full-time job. Most of her friends were married. She needed something new.
When Katherine and Eli downloaded Tinder in October 2013, they joined millions of Americans interested in trying the fastest-growing mobile dating service in the country. Tinder does not give out statistics about the number of its users, but the app has grown from being the plaything of a few hundred Los Angeles party kids to a multinational phenomenon in less than a year. Unlike the robot yentas of yore (Match.com, OkCupid, eHarmony), which out-competed one another with claims of compatibility algorithms and secret love formulas, the only promise Tinder makes is to show you the other users in your immediate vicinity. Depending on your feelings for these people, you swipe them to the left (meaning “no thanks”) or to the right (“yes, please”). Two people who swipe each other to the right will “match.” Your matches accrue in a folder, and often that's the end of the story. Other times you start texting. The swiping phase is as lulling in its eye-glazing repetition as a casino slot machine, the chatting phase ideal for idle, noncommittal flirting. In terms of popularity, Tinder is a massive and undeniable success. Whether it works depends on your idea of “working.”For Katherine, still wary from her bad encounter, Tinder offered another advantage. It uses your pre-existing Facebook network and shows which friends, if any, you have in common with the person in the photo. On October 16, Eli appeared on her phone. He was cute. He could tell a joke. (His tagline made her laugh.) They had one friend in common, and they both liked Louis C.K. (“Who doesn't like Louis C.K.?” Eli says later. “Oh, you also like the most popular comedian in America?”) She swiped him to the right. Eli, who says he would hook up with anybody who isn't morbidly obese or in the middle of a self-destructive drug relapse, swipes everyone to the right. A match!
He messaged first. “Sixty-nine miles away??” he asked.
“I'm at a wedding in New Jersey,” she replied.
So, Eli said to himself, she's lonely at a wedding in New Jersey.
Eli: “So why you on Tinder?”
Katherine: “To date. You?”
Eli said it was an “esteem” thing. It had taught him that “women find me more attractive than I think.” Unfortunately for Katherine, he told her he didn't have a lot of time to date. He worked two jobs. They wanted different things. It therefore read as mock bravado when Eli wrote, “But you ever just want to fuck please please holler at me cool???” He added his number.
Katherine waited an hour to respond. Then: “Ha.” And then, one minute later, “I will.” And: “I kinda do.”
Eli: “Please please do. ;)”
Katherine liked that he was younger. He was funny. He did not, like one guy, start the conversation with “Don't you want to touch my abs?” He said “please.” Eli liked that Katherine was older. Katherine wrote: “You can't be psycho or I will tell [name of mutual friend].” He sympathized with that, too.
The parameters were clear. They arranged to meet.
···
I first signed up for Tinder in May but found it skewed too young. (I'm 32.) When I looked again in mid-October, everything had changed. I swiped through people I knew from college, people I might've recognized from the train. I saw it had gone global when a friend in England posted a Tinder-inspired poem on her Facebook page (“and here are we, He and Me, our flat-screen selves rendered 3D”). I started to check it regularly. The more I used it, the more I considered how much it would have helped me at other times in my life—to make friends in grad school, to meet people after moving to a new city. It seemed possible that one need never be isolated again.
In December, I flew out to Los Angeles, where Tinder is based, to visit the company's offices and meet two of its founders, Sean Rad and Justin Mateen, both 27. (The third is Jonathan Badeen, the engineer who built the app.) Rad is the chief executive officer; Mateen is chief marketing officer. They are also best friends, share a resemblance to David Schwimmer, and have been known to show up for work in the same outfit. I was staying only a mile from Tinder's offices in West Hollywood, and within forty-eight hours both founders showed up on my Tinder feed. Other memorable appearances on my feed in Los Angeles included a guy holding a koala bear, a guy and his Yorkshire terrier, in matching sweaters, and a pipe-smoking dandy with a Rasputin beard, horn-rimmed glasses, and a gold ring the exact shape and size of a cicada.
Rad and Mateen are local boys. They both grew up in Beverly Hills, although they attended different private schools. They first encountered each other at 14, when Sean made a play for Justin's girlfriend. (“We met because we both liked the same girl—but the girl was my girlfriend,” says Justin.) They reconnected at USC, and then both started independent companies. Justin's was a “social network for celebrities.” Sean's was Adly, a platform that allows companies to advertise via celebrities' social networks. He sold the majority of his stake in 2012. “I didn't want to be in the ad business,” he says. He also didn't want to make things for computers. “Computers are going extinct,” he says. “Computers are just work devices.” For people his age, the primary way to interface with the technical world was through a mobile device.
Rad and Mateen have shared business ideas with each other for years, and every idea begins with a problem. The key to solving the problem that interested Tinder: “I noticed that no matter who you are, you feel more comfortable approaching somebody if you know they want you to approach them,” says Sean. They had both experienced the frustration of sending smoke signals through social media. “There are people that want to get to know you who don't know you, so they're resorting to Facebook,” explains Justin. When those advances or friendings or followings are unwanted, they say, the overtures can seem a little “creepy.” (Consider, for example, the long-standing mystery of the Facebook “poke.”) Sean was interested in the idea of the “double opt-in”—some establishment of mutual interest that precedes interaction.
And so Tinder entered a fossilizing industry. Most of the big players (including Match.com, Plenty of Fish, OkCupid, eHarmony, Manhunt, JDate, and Christian Mingle) established themselves before billions of humans carried miniature satellite-connected data processors in their pockets, before most people felt comfortable using their real names to seek companionship online, and before a billion people joined Facebook—before Facebook even existed. Tinder's major advantages come from exploiting each of these recent developments. The company also managed to accrue, in less than a year of existence, the only truly important asset of any dating site: millions and millions of users.
by Emily Witt, GQ | Read more:
Image:uncredited
