I ASKED 100 GUYS ON TINDER WHY THEY USE IT

This was originally written as a final paper for an English class I took my freshman year of college. I have tweaked it quite a bit in order for it read less as a boring essay and more as a humorous article. Clearly it is problematic and has far too many variables to be considered as legitimate "data," but nonetheless was interesting to do. I have not used Tinder since the initial writing of the paper, so I cannot speak for the Tinder of 2017...I am going to go out on a limb and guess people still use it for hooking up.

It all started in the fall of 2014. I was a freshman in college and every girl in my dorm seemed to have an account on Tinder. Some girls used for hookups, others had high hopes their matches could blossom a potential relationship, and some girls were just trying to find someone on campus with weed. I was highly skeptical of the app, but never passed up the opportunity to take a friend's phone to play the swipe right game, spending the night trolling overly-eager college guys. What can I say, I'm a natural born instigator.

Eventually I gave in to my curiosity and downloaded the infamous dating/hookup app. How many matches can I rack up? What type of messages will I get? Do these guys realize how easy it is for me to hide my double chin in a picture? All burning questions waiting to be answered.

Well, a few creepy messages later (I'll restore your faith in men and have you know not all the messages were creepy) and four days worth of paranoia later, I decided that I was not cut out for the Tinder life. Anytime I saw a guy on campus, all I could think was "Jesus Christ. Has he seen me on Tinder?" I assumed that any guy who saw my profile probably thought I was down to hookup, solely based off the fact that I had a Tinder. And that bothered me. Not because I think safe, casual sex between two consenting adults is bad, but because that's not what I was there for. To be honest, I'm not really sure what I was there for.

When I was asked to write a final paper about a discourse group for my English class, it dawned on me that the people of Tinder had a lot to offer on the subject of sex. I wanted to broaden my limited view about the app and find out why people are swiping right. To find love? To find sex? To find someone with pot??

I had a vague idea as to how I was going to bring about the topic of “what do you use Tinder for?” without sounding like I was one of those people who stand in the middle of the mall asking passersby to take a survey. Over a period of a few hours, I developed a method that went something like this:

Me: "Hey"

Tinder Dude: (insert some type of response that could vary from a friendly hello to an ever-so-charming reference about their penis.)

Me: "Can I ask you a question?"

Tinder Dude: "Sure" (that was the response if they weren't a total asshat)

Me: "Be honest. What do you use Tinder for? Hookups, sexting, just talking?"

And then all hell broke loose.

After repeating the process until I had responses from 100 guys ages 18-21 (25 from each age group), I proceeded to bullshit a paper about millennials being portrayed as the "hookup generation" by those that came before us. Well I hate to break it to you Aunt Shirley (I don't actually have an Aunt Shirley), but college-aged people are having just as much casual sex as you and your friends did when you were our age. The only difference is instead of meeting someone and actually having to talk to them face-to-face before we could get in their bed, we can simply swipe right. Modern technology at its finest.

So, lets get down to what you came here for; the "research." As you can see from the pathetic Microsoft Excel graphs and charts I originally made for the essay, of the 100 guys I asked, 57 admitted to using the app for sex, 28 for conversation, 13 for sexting, and a whopping two for finding a relationship.