Why Your Non-Single Friends Are Ruining Tinder

A confidence boost for them, real life for the rest of us.


"So I was on Tinder last night, and I swear, I saw Ellen's boyfriend on there. I was in a rhythm and swiped too fast, so I didn't get a full look, but I know it's him," my friend Rebecca told me over the phone, a few weeks ago. "Do you think I should tell Ellen? It's so sketchy!"  Awkward pause. "But Rebecca," I started slowly, "you're on Tinder and you're engaged!"

"True," she conceded, "but, I mean, that's totally different."  Is it?

Rebecca isn't my only friend who's in both a relationship and active on a swipe-and-match app. During dinner one night, another friend, Ashley, told me that she's on Tinder "for work:" "Someone was saying what a nice user interaction the app had—being able to just be like, 'nope, yep, nope.' So, intrigued by that conversation, I downloaded the app," she explained. But she was also, you know, curious, to see what it was all about, which is how my whistle-blowing friend, Rebecca started Tindering in the first place. "I was having drinks with a few girlfriends, and it was around 10:30 P.M. on a Saturday night, and we were talking about Tinder. I was like 'Do you think it's as much of a booty-call thing as you hear?'—because I'd heard it was like let's meet up for a drink, finish half of it, and then go have sex. So I volunteered to join because, whatever, I had nothing to lose, so why not?"

Related: 6 True Stories of Women, Dating, and Tinder

And she did. What she got was 10 to 12 nearly instant matches, but zero booty-call-type sleaze. The experiment didn't end there, however. She—with the help of her single and swipe-adjacent-happy friends—answered some of the messages, and was surprised by the responses. "For most of them, the topic of meeting up didn't even come up. It was just conversation, conversation, and I was like, 'So when are they going to ask me to come to their apartment to hook up?'" she said. "I was surprised that the conversations kept going as long as they did, and how much the guys shared about themselves openly. I don't know. They seemed kind of legit."

Veronica also signed up for Hinge out of curiosity—and a little FOMO. "I was out at happy hour with all my girlfriends, and they were showing me who they were matched with on Hinge, and I wasn't participating. So I joined it right then and there, and we all looked through who I was matched with for the day." She didn't immediately delete the app, but unlike Rebecca, she didn't go down the messaging rabbit hole. "I was on it for about two weeks, and then I got matched with a good buddy from college and I was like 'This isn't right. Ah, this is sketchy,' and I deleted it right away."

Related: The 12 Guys You Meet On Tinder

But none of them are afraid of actually getting "caught," because, unlike Ellen's boyfriend, Rebecca, Veronica, and Ashley's significant others all knew their girlfriends were on Tinder. "I don't think he loves it, but I'm not hiding this from him," Ashley says of her boyfriend's reaction. "Tommy doesn't care—he wanted to know what it was, so he played around with my Tinder too," says Rebecca. None of these couples considers being on the dating app cheating, but where they draw that line varies. While Ashley states her intentions in her profile—"My tagline is 'research project,' because really, that's why I downloaded it"—Veronica just doesn't answer her messages. ("Hell no," was her response when I asked.) And Rebecca says anything face-to-face is what would take things too far. "I don't think there's anything wrong with harmless flirting. The line is meeting," she says. "At a certain point you can flirt, flirt, flirt, but you have to meet. It's going to lead to that, and if it's not, it's kind of just a waste of time."

Hence the reason why both Veronica and Rebecca ultimately decided to break up with their respective apps: boredom. In addition to being creeped out by seeing her college friends on there, Veronica says, it just got old: "At a certain point, it just gets boring getting all of these matches and not being able to do anything with them."

But being bored by viable options is a luxury actual single people don't really have. For someone in a relationship, logging onto one of these apps is fun, exciting, and emotionally, risk-free. There's never the night when you go through your daily Hinge batch without a single promising prospect or go a week without getting a Tinder match. Being on social dating sites when you're in a relationship is like the best of both worlds: the exciting, butterfly feeling of being "liked" without having any real stake in it. Because, besides satisfying one's curiosity, having that instant ego-booster at your fingertips is a big part of the appeal, and at the end of the day, there isn't the worry of rejection when you have a significant other plopped on the couch next to you.

"I'm not going to lie, it's a confidence booster when you have a match. It's like yeah! Okay!" Ashley says. "It's sort of like a I had a couple glasses of wine at dinner, come home, veg out, unwind after a long week thing. [Tinder] is hilarious. It kind of reminds me of hot or not. It's an entertaining thing, I could do this forever, in the same way you can endlessly look through Instagram."

Related: The Newest Tinder Trend: Marriage

While I was surprised to learn about my non-single friends' swiping habits, the trend doesn't come as a shock to the folks at Tinder. "There are many use cases for Tinder, not just dating, which is why we think of ourselves as more of a social platform than a dating app," says Rosette Pambakian, the VP of communications and brand partnerships at the company. "We're hearing of more and more married people downloading and using Tinder for themselves or "hijacking" their friend's phones just to swipe for them." And while she concedes that some of it is FOMO-related, there's other cases for it too—including seeking Yelp-like travel recs, making friends, and even finding a job. "Many married couples are on Tinder just because they feel like they're missing out on all of the fun their single friends are having using Tinder, while other married couples are on it for networking or using it while traveling together. You'll be surprised how many successful business ventures we've heard of from people who met on Tinder!"

But for those of us using the app for good, old fashioned, new-age matchmaking, those pleasure-seeking non-committers who are in commitments are gumming up Tinder for the rest of us. When I told a coworker I'd joined Tinder, but didn't actually respond to messages, she told me I was "the worst kind of person on Tinder." And it's true: For the most part, all of those intro messages—however weird—take confidence to send. And as much as recipients get an ego-boost (self-five, I'm hot!), the senders who get nothing in response take a hit. "No, I don't feel guilty. Is that terrible?" Veronica responded when I asked her if she ever, you know, felt bad leaving her Hinge matches in the lurch.

Well, it is, kind of. While you go home to your boyfriend, feeling good about your six new matches, the rest of us are still waiting for Mark M. from Brooklyn, NY, to tell us how his weekend was.

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