These days, the only thing more popular than tinder itself is complaining about tinder. Women complain that they can't find good guys on there, only fuckbois and deadbeats, and men sign up, get one match in 6 months and wonder "where are all da ho's at?!" It seems neither sex is happy with online dating.

And yet, the Match Group (Tinder's parent), is on track to exceed $2 Billion in revenue this year. Clearly, they're doing something right. And men and women, despite all their bellyaching, are ponying up big cash to use the app. What gives?

They key is to understand *why* OLD sucks: they suck at doing what they say they're going to do for you, and excel at doing what you really want them to do. Hence, you complain in public, while still swiping like an addicted monkey in private.

Here is what OLD *says* they're going to do: they're going to help you meet The One: your soulmate, your spouse, your partner-in-crime, ride-or-die, yadda yadda yadda. Here's what they really do: they preserve and feed your fantasy of who that soulmate actually is, tantalize you with the possibility that that soulmate is just barely, almost, oh-so-close to being yours, and hide any sort of hard truths about relationships and people that gets in the way of your delusions. And then, you pay them for helping keep your delusions alive, while publicly complaining that they're not helping you make those delusions become reality.

BTW, this is not a secret that only Tinder knows. It's called marketing 101. A beer commercial is ostensibly about selling you a nice tasting beverage that you enjoy drinking. Yet the commercials have bikini clad women surrounding the beer drinkers while they lounge around on a beach. A pickup truck is ostensibly a practical vehicle used by people who need to haul stuff around all day. Yet their commercials are all about exploring the great outdoors and tearing up trails in forests and mountains. And most of them are bought by people who'll never haul more than a "Just Married" sign and will never drive on anything more off-road than a highway with a few potholes on it.

So how does this marketing delusion work in online dating? To explore that, we have to first analyze how people found relationships before online dating. At that time, you relied pretty exclusively on your social network, e.g. friends, family, co-workers, church, and other social networks you were in. Unlike Tinder, these social networks really *do* want to see you happy and in a stable relationship (generally speaking; and yes, they may be bad at it, but most of the time, their heart is in the right place). This is for several reasons:

1. They care about you and genuinely want to see you happy
2. Since you're a member of their social network, it actually helps everyone else if you're stable and happy, and not miserable and always needing support from the social network rather than contributing back
3. Conversely, if someone sets you up with a horrible person (or even a very mismatched person), they will face repercussions from you and everyone else when the relationship inevitably blows up. You can't sue Tinder for a date gone wrong. But you can certainly disown your friends if they set you up with a serial killer. IOW, the social network can bite back if you willfully mess things up.

Additionally, your social networks know a lot about you and (usually) a lot about the people they're matching you with. Which means they can often see through your own BS (in the way that good friends and close family usually can), and find good matches for you that you would never have considered yourself.

This system has worked for thousands if not millions of years. And most notably, OLD has none of the advantages listed above. Yet OLD has been incredibly successful and pretty much completely replaced the IRL social networks of the past. We even pay them to do what our social networks used to do for free. Why is that?

Because the mortal weakness of your IRL social networks is this: since they're not in the marketing business, they tell you hard truths you don't want to hear. I'll give you an example. When I was in my early thirties (pre-tinder), one of of my co-workers, also in her early thirties, was telling me about a date her friends had set her up with. Apparently it was a mid-forties man, balding, divorced, with a kid. She was in shock the next day. Not so much about the guy, who was nice enough. But that her friends thought that was her appropriate match. In her mind, she was still the mid-twenties hot young thing who would get cat-called in the bars. More than the guy himself, just the idea that now she was only fit for older, frumpy, divorced dads, and that furthermore *that was what her friends thought*, was too much for her to bear. But her social networks were doing the right thing. They didn't want to see her end up single and alone in 10 years. And regardless of whether that guy was the absolute best she could do, they saw her relationship value far more clearly than she did. They were a lot closer in their estimates of her value than she was.

In contrast, Tinder will happily whisper lies in your ear all day as long as you pay it to do so. In fact, for them, it's a *failure* if you find your perfect partner and ride off into the sunset, because that means you'll soon delete their app. Let me repeat that: Tinder does not want you to get married. It doesn't even want you to find someone for a year. If all of their customers found a mate within a month of being on the app, and then not check the app again for a lifetime or even a year, they'd run out of customers and go out of business. And their profits are far more important to them than your happiness.

So what are these lies?

1.

(If you're a woman), your perfect match is a billionaire convict outlaw church-going surgeon who cries during weddings. Also has 6-pack abs and a footlong. (If you're a man), your perfect match is a Victoria's Secret Angel madonna in public, whore in bed, who does yoga 6 hours a day and gets wet just thinking about your mastery of obscure Star Wars trivia. Also has no problem blowing you in public.

Yeah, neither of these people exist. Your friends will tell you that. But Tinder never will. Not only will it never tell you that, it actively encourages everyone to lie and puff themselves up into those fantasy matches. A guy who insists on talking about his "amazing trip to Machu Pichu" 5 years after he went is considered a blowhard in real life. On Tinder, that's the picture he uses to make his life seem more exciting than it really is. Every person on Tinder is trying to convince you that they are that billionaire convict, or that yoga-addicted underwear model. Your IRL social network would weed out the phonies real quick. Tinder prefers to bump them up in your queue.

2.

That man / woman of your dreams is just a swipe away. Who knows? They could even be the very next swipe! So just... flick your finger... one more time... Even if the people above actually exist, very, very few people can even meet them in real life. That billionaire dude doesn't hang out at Applebee's. Just getting into the restaurants / hotels / vacation resorts he stays at in order to run into him requires knowledge, money, and enough time spent studying the subtle class markers of the ultra-rich that you can pass yourself off as one of them. Similarly, just meeting a Victoria's Secret model requires running in their social circles, which typically means you're either a rich person, in the fashion and entertainment industry, or at least live in NY / LA and are willing to blow huge amounts of money on bribing the bouncers and hosts to let you into the closed clubs they hang out in. If you're really, really lucky, you might score a date because you're neighbors with their grandmother back in Kansas and she somehow convinces her granddaughter to give the nice neighborhood boy a chance when she's back home for Christmas and bored out of her skull. And even that's not as easy as a quick swipe, is it?

Everyone knows that to make a million dollars, you need to study hard, get into a good career, work your ass off, have a little luck, etc. Just like how your friends will tell you that to get a good girl, you need to work hard, lift, be sociable, and overall become a desirable guy. Tinder is the equivalent of the casino slot machine, which tempts you that that million dollar prize is just a dollar and a quick pull away. Similarly, Tinder tells you that dream guy/girl is just a quick swipe away. At least casinos are legally required to list the actual probability you have of winning that prize. Tinder doesn't even do that.

3.

Even if your perfect match exists, and you end up meeting them, you will often find out, much to your disappointment, that they're not a great match for you. There's a great saying: "behind every beautiful woman, there's a guy tired of fucking her." That glossy exterior image is often radically different than the inside. Every guy who has dated at least a few incredibly hot women will tell you that many of them (though not all!) are not worth the hassle. It may not even be that the other person is a "bad" person. Even a good person from a radically different environment can be a bad match. For example, if you can't name at least 5 different forks and which foods to use them with, and you think being a foodie means using A1 steak sauce instead of ketchup, then you probably won't even enjoy that 3-star meal your billionaire boyfriend buys you in Paris, while he will look on in disgust at your local hometown's "world famous" hamburger you buy him.

Birds of a feather flock together. Your social network is comprised of people who are similar to you in many aspects of your life, which makes it very difficult to find people radically different in life experience / values / outlooks than yourself. Which is actually a *good* thing because people from radically different walks of life tend not to be compatible enough to build a life together. Again, say somehow through Tinder you score a date with your movie actress celebrity crush. What would you actually talk about? Do you know anything about the movie business? Could you relate to her insecurities and what she deals with going on auditions every day where random strangers tell her she's too fat / too blonde / not blonde enough / too flat-chested / too busty to ever make it in this town? Heck, forget all that: do you even know what's a fun date thing to do in LA outside of the tourist traps that locals can't stand? Conversely, what's the chance she knows anything about your life? Is there any shared experience between you two that could form the basis for a real relationship?

Again, IRL social networks know this, because they generally know both people well, and have a good sense of who's a good match for whom. There have been plenty of times when I asked my friends about a hot girl I saw at a party, and they warn me off, telling me "dude, stay away from her. She's smoking hot, but batshit crazy." Or conversely, seat me next to someone I might never have noticed, who ends up being a great person that I want to spend more time with. Tinder doesn't ever do this. If you swipe right on someone their algorithm tells them will only lead you to misery, does it ever flash a big warning sign "Caution: Do you really want to date this loser?". Of course not. It only wants to feed whatever notion of a "perfect match" you already have. And if you think a recently paroled ex-felon is your perfect match, then that's perfectly fine with them. Don't think for a second that Tinder doesn't know that 90% of a match is based on looking at the first few photographs. It doesn't care. There's a reason Tinder is more popular than eHarmony. People don't want to be told who their best match really is (often because who your match is usually reflects who *you* are...). People dream of their soul mate since they're kids. The last thing they want is someone who pours cold water all over that dream. And if your soul mate is someone from your neighborhood that went to your high school or plays softball with your friends, then you don't need Tinder to meet them. So unless Tinder can feed your fantasy that your best life partner is someone totally outside of all your social networks (a ludicrous proposition when you consider it on its merits), someone only Tinder can hook you up with, it won't be able to convince you to trust Tinder over your IRL social networks.

4.

There's an old saying: if at first you don't succeed, redefine success. Tinder has redefined success in the relationship world to "getting a match from someone." In the real world, it never mattered how many "matches" you got. There wasn't even a concept of that. It only mattered if you eventually found someone to spend your life with. When your friends set you up and you two decide after a couple of dates that it's not going to work out, your friends usually consider that a failure, because their goal is to help you get into a relationship, not just to go on a single date. Tinder's standards for success are much lower.

Of course, Tinder has been helped in this regard by the slut-pride movement that states the marker of a woman's success and worth is the number of dicks she's had inside her, rather than the quality of the man she actually ends up with. But Tinder's measure of success is even shallower. They consider it a success if you "match" even if that never even leads to a meeting in real life. More importantly, they've convinced *us* that the app was successful if it "matched" you with someone, regardless of whether that match went anywhere. It's instructive to see women write in their Tinder bios that they're "sick of fuckbois, not looking for hookups," etc. Yes, they're stupid because they're on a hookup app saying these things, but the amazing thing is, they don't blame the app itself, they blame the people on it. Because Tinder has redefined success in OLD as getting a match. Everything else is the responsibility of the person they matched you with, even if Tinder is the one that made the match on shoddy criteria that were destined to fail. In the early days of OLD, dating sites used to advertise the number of marriages that occurred from their site. You'll notice no one does that now. Because they realized marriages are bad for business, but to avoid the dearth of marriages being viewed as a product failure, they had to redefine success and make you accept the new definition as merely being "matched". Which we have.

5.

Let's say you make it through all of this. Your dream mate actually exists. He / She actually happens to be on Tinder and both of you somehow decide to swipe on each other. Then you navigate the minefield of messages / texting / phone calls until you finally manage to get coffee together. And despite your dream match being a ski instructor from Switzerland who only speaks French, while you've never made it past your high school Spanish classes and haven't traveled outside of your state, you realize he shares your passion for watching Kim Kardashian on E!. The final question: why do you think he'd be interested in you? We laugh at the women featured on WAATGM who are all looking for some incredibly desirable guy while offering nothing of value themselves. But we all fall into that delusion, and Tinder feeds that. Once they've redefined success as getting a match, something that can even happen on accident (oops! I meant to swipe left! Crap!), then you feel like someone actually likes you if they match you. Again, we laugh at instagram ho's who define their life's worth by the number of likes their ass shots get. We wonder if they ever consider that 90% of those likes are from thirsty dudes in India and Saudi Arabia that they would never even touch with a 10-foot pole. And yet, if you get a "match" from some hot girl, even if she unmatches you right away, or after a couple of text messages, we take that as a sign that, "if a girl that hot matched with me, then surely one of them will actually go on a date with me soon!" And you keep swiping. We criticize women who think that just because some dude had a one night stand with her, that she's close to getting a relationship with him. And yet Tinder has convinced us that just because we occasionally get a match with a random hot guy/girl that if we keep swiping, eventually one of those matches will turn into a real date which will turn into a steady relationship, which will turn into...all your dreams coming true! But just like a fuckboi is only into fucking you, Tinder is only into getting you "matches". It has no interest in things proceeding further, and its algorithms are not designed to help their matches do so. Indeed, just like a fuckboi hopes you don't actually find a real relationship since then you might cut him off, Tinder hopes that match doesn't lead to anything beyond a one night stand, because otherwise, you might delete their app.

Needless to say, IRL social networks are very aware of this. Which is why sometimes they tell you a hard truth like, "dude, don't bother. That girl is way out of your league. She only dates football players." Because the last thing they want to see is you getting shot down unnecessarily.

-----------

So back to my co-worker, the 30 year old who got setup with a 45 year old divorced dad by her friends. Her friends knew she was finally looking for a serious relationship (she probably told them she was "tired of fuckbois" or whatever they were called back then :-), so they eliminated all the players and even the potentially good guys who weren't ready to settle down yet. Then they waded through whatever BS checklists she had and tried to figure out what was truly important and what wasn't, then eliminated guys who didn't at least have the important stuff. Then they eliminated people that had nothing in common with her, or who wouldn't be a good match for her personality. Lastly, there were probably a few amazing guys that checked all her boxes, but who her friends knew were way out of her league and were probably dating younger, hotter girls. And they eliminated them so that my co-worker wouldn't get her heart broken when (after sleeping with her) they decide she's not up to their standards for an LTR. Finally, after all that weeding out, they figured maybe this 45 year old divorced dad, who may not have all his hair or 6-pack abs but was still a good guy who was genuinely interested in settling down, and was still young enough to be willing to have kids with a new wife, and who was at the peak of his career and could provide a good life for her and any future family, is not such a bad match for her. But all she could see was that accepting him would mean she was no longer that hot girl at the club that all the guys would buy drinks for and she wasn't ready to do that yet.

At that point, if Tinder existed, she probably would have gone on the app, started swiping left and right, get quick reassurance that indeed, she was still that hot girl thanks to all the matches she got from hot guys in random towns 50 miles away, none of whom she'd actually ever meet, reject her friends' advice and trust Tinder instead. Later that night, when she was lonely and wondering if she'd every find a guy to love her, she'd still reject calling that 45 year old guy, who would have taken her out to dinner and maybe even found a lot of common ground and shared experience despite their age difference. Instead, she'd swipe right on a random guy who Tinder selected for her mainly based on the fact that he was within her listed age range and was only 1 mile away (even if he was only a tourist visiting from Australia for 3 days), since that's the only real piece of data Tinder actually has on anyone. And she'd fuck him that night. He'd leave before she wakes up, to get to the airport and fly home halfway around the world. And in the morning, waking up to an empty bed, she'd blame a) the guy for skipping out, even though she knew he's from Australia; b) the 45 year old dude for not being younger / hotter / fashionable enough to give her the tingles; c) her friends for thinking he was in her league; d) the entire world for being cruel and leaving her single and unhappy despite being such a great catch. IOW, she'd blame every thing out there, except the one thing that actually was preventing her from doing the work and making the sorts of compromises and decisions necessary to find and keep a long-term, happy relationship. Nope. Far from blaming Tinder, she opens her phone, starts up the app again, and goes through the swiping drill again, hoping that this time, finally, she hits that jackpot the app keeps telling her is right around the corner...

All of a sudden, Tinder making $2 billion doesn't seem so far fetched, does it?