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Tinder is one of the millions of apps available for download on your Smartphone. —> Download Here. It is known as a dating app. Users input a photo of themselves when they sign up. Then use the app to view other user’s pics and swipe left or right for interest. You have the option to contact any person you find attractive, as long as the feeling is mutual. It uses Facebook and Spotify profiles to help decide the pics they will show you. Since its launch in 2012, it has been both touted and berated for its addictive services. Some critics have called it the death of dating after it became known for its superior aid in casual sex hookups. As years went on, however, more swipe type dating apps popped up and Tinder widened its services to keep current in the market. In a recent study of 3,800 millennials, of those that use Tinder, almost 30% use it for reasons other than hookups. Almost half said they use it simply as a way to pass the time that makes them feel good.

People Use Tinder to Look for Weird Hobby Pals

If we have all learned one thing about Tinder since its existence, it is that it is not the place to find a lasting relationship. Sites like Match.com and OKCupid are much more useful for that goal. People have gone on to notice the other things available to them on Tinder with the emerging social interactive additions to the app. Freaks and geeks and people who enjoy weird hobbies have learned to seek each other out on this app. Taxidermists, collectors of memorabilia and horror movie fans meet and congregate with Tinder. A hookup may or may not ensue but that is not the issue. People use Tinder to find others with unusual hobbies.

People Use Tinder to Assuage Their Boredom

Waiting for the bus? Sitting in the doctor’s office? Shuffling through the mall with your sister? Sitting through a boring work meeting? On your way to work on the subway train? We all have those minutes of the day when our minds wander and we wait for the next important thing in our day to happen. Look around you. Everyone is on their phone and at least half of them are on Tinder. People use Tinder to pass the time or when bored. It occupies your mind for a few minutes and them time pass a little faster. There is usually no intention to hookup. It is more like a game of Candy Crush. Just a harmless distraction.

People Use Tinder as a Way to Boost their Ego

The very basis of Tinder is people judging each other’s appearance. The one thing we are all a bit nervous about. Everyone wants to be attractive to other people. Putting your picture on Tinder is opening yourself up to the world. You upload your best shot and hope for the best. While you are swiping away, your photo is also being swiped. It makes you feel good when you find you have swiped your approval and the same person you find attractive has approved of you also. It brings a smile to your face and a tiny spark of joy warms your solar plexus for a fleeting moment. When you log off and get back to the world you feel a little happier and more confident. Somebody thinks you’re hot. Maybe you’ll hookup, maybe you won’t. The point is, you could if you wanted to and that is often enough.

Tinder has opened it’s services to a more social media type app like Facebook and Twitter, opening the doors for people to find many more uses for the app. Some of them can be pretty strange. Users have found more ways to connect beside just the sexual aspect of the app. How will this affect the hookup generation? Many studies show that millennials are waiting later to have sex and even later to find serious relationships and commitment. The super-availability of the hookup seems to have taken the taboo and excitement out of the act. People are more serious about each other beyond sex in this new millennium. We’ll have to wait to see how that turns out.