Tinder Leads the Pack?

We know what you’re thinking. It’s a hook-up site. Only appropriate for the younger crowd. Nothing could be further from the truth.

How do we know?

Well, Tinder is where we met.

And we’re 60 (Anne) and 58 (Amit). We weren’t looking for hookups. We wanted something meaningful. We also knew that Tinder had a bigger pool of potential candidates than any other dating site. And that’s why we both landed there.

As a recent article in Forbes noted, Seniors Are Using Dating Apps And Tinder Leads The Pack. It cited a study that found about:

One-third of seniors who have dated within the last five years have turned to dating apps for help. They reported that the top dating app was Tinder, with 35 percent of respondents saying that they were dating someone they met on the platform, followed by Match.com (28 percent saying they used it), Hinge (25 percent), Plenty of Fish (25 percent) and Bumble (24 percent).

The article notes that while the Baby Boomer Generation gets older, many are becoming single again. "The reduced fear of technology and fear of meeting someone over the Internet has resulted in 29 percent of seniors having been on a date with someone they met online through a dating website,” says technology industry entrepreneur Lon Sakfo, author of The Social Media Bible, in the Forbes’ article. “Dating sites are now catering to this older population and making it easier to join the platform and join a mate."

In an article in The Atlantic, Ashley Fetters writes that while dating sites have changed how we court potential partners, “what people are looking for is largely the same as it ever was: companionship and/or sexual satisfaction. Meanwhile, the underlying challenges—the loneliness, the boredom, the roller coaster of hope and disappointment—of being single and looking, haven’t gone away.”
 
The article notes that dating sites facilitate interactions between people who might never have crossed paths otherwise. So true. We met on Tinder and while we crossed paths several times over the years without knowing it (for a decade we lived just a few blocks from each other's house in Mississauga and Amit owned a rental in Hamilton a few blocks from where I now live), we never would have met if it weren’t for Tinder.
 
So yes, Tinder has been a delightful surprise.