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Millennials are finding love, not just good sex, on Tinder

Local lovebirds — and some folks who wish they were — explain the allure of the wildly popular free dating app.

Philly is among 10 U.S. cities with the most users, says app official.
Philly is among 10 U.S. cities with the most users, says app official.Read moreMATTHEW HALL / STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

DAN MATHERS remembers the first time he laid eyes on Morgan Quinn - the way the yellow shirt she wore and the waterfall of blond hair spilling onto her shoulders offset her sky-blue eyes.

"Yellow shirt. Big, blue eyes," Mathers, 28, of West Chester, recalled with a grin. "Pretty irresistible."

Within seconds, Mathers knew that Quinn, 24, of Berwyn, was something special - and he wanted to let her know.

So he swiped his finger to the right, across the glowing touchscreen of his iPhone - a hopeful gesture that would quickly connect him with Quinn on Tinder, a dating app on which she, too, had "swiped right" when she saw his profile pop up on her iPhone.

This virtual love story may seem out of the ordinary, but it isn't: Since its late-2012 launch, Tinder has exploded in popularity among twentysomethings who use the smartphones at their fingertips to find love, sex and everything in between.

After Quinn and Mathers "matched" on Tinder, they exchanged messages for two weeks. Sparks flew, and on May 22, Mathers took Quinn on a real date, showing up with a bouquet of flowers to pick her up and take her to dinner at Bryn Mawr's classy Yangming.

"I must have made a spectacular impression, because I still thought it could've gone either way at that point," Quinn said, flashing a smile at her brown-haired boyfriend. "But he killed it on the first date."

"I knew at that point, having talked every day for two weeks, that this was something I wanted to make an effort in," Mathers chimed in. "I was sold."

Playing the game

This suburban Philly love affair that began with both parties making a "swipe right"on Tinder represents an increasingly common millennial phenomenon.

Unlike dating websites like OkCupid and Match.com, which have users fill out lengthy profiles to be paired with potential mates, Tinder "matches" people based on a simple profile formula that includes up to five photos and an optional, open-ended "about" section that's 500 characters or less.

Users indicate what gender's profiles they're interested in seeing, and an age range and a geographic radius they prefer, and the app spits out profiles of users who meet those criteria. Swiping right means "like" - and when two people mutually swipe right on each other's profiles, a "match" is made, allowing them to begin chatting. If they're not interested, users can swipe left - saying "nope" - and pass on a person.

Although Tinder officials said they could not estimate the number of users in the Philadelphia area, Rosette Pambakian, vice president for corporate communications and branding at the app's Los Angeles headquarters, said Philly is among 10 U.S. cities with the most Tinder users.

The app makes 22 million "matches" per day, processing a staggering 1.5 billion "swipes" left and right daily, Pambakian said. The average Tinder user opens the app 11 times a day and spends more than an hour a day "swiping" potential mates and chatting with matches in the app, she said.

Experts and users alike attribute Tinder's skyrocketing popularity to its fun and simple setup. The app is designed to be a game in many ways, giving users the option to "keep playing" after it notifies them of a match. Matches are then saved in a queue, where users can exchange messages and photos within the app. If someone is not interested in a "match" after all, an "unmatch" blocks any further messages.

"It's supposed to be fun," said Quinn, an accountant, as she sat with Mathers sipping post-work beers Tuesday night at the homey Berwyn Tavern. "It's a game."

Her Tinder match-turned-beau agreed.

"I was in a long-term relationship when Tinder became a big thing, and even while in that relationship, I was very interested in trying to play this game," said Mathers, publisher of the WC Press, a West Chester magazine.

"Early on in being single, once I sort of got myself back together, I knew exactly what I wanted to do: I wanted to play this game that my friends had been playing, that my cousins couldn't stop talking about."

Kevin Cook, a Philadelphia-area dating coach who plies his trade on RootOfAttraction.com, said he attributes Tinder's popularity to three basic characteristics: It's fast, easy and free.

"A lot of people like that," said Cook, who was a mechanical engineer before launching his dating-coach career five years ago.

He said he encourages his clients to use Tinder if what they're looking for seems aligned with the app's approach.

"The more options, the better," Cook said. "It's so much harder today to meet people, so we need all the help we can get."

'The hookup app'

Tinder's pros are also its cons: Although the app is intended for just about anything users may be looking for, from hot hookups to romantic relationships to finding platonic friends, it has become infamous as "the hookup app."

That's part of the reason Mathers hopped on Tinder when he was newly single, he admits: "I was 100 percent hoping it would be the hookup app that I had heard it was," he said, joking with Quinn about how he tried to stay out of a relationship even as they fell for each other over several months of taking it slow.

"He was actively avoiding it, yet so intentionally pursuing it," Quinn recalled, adding that she often discovers that other couples met the same way.

"Someone just had a Tinder wedding," she said.

Lana Momcilovich, 34, a project manager from Delaware who has used Tinder in fits and starts since the spring, said she's found a mixed bag on the app, from newly divorced men who really seem to be looking for just friends, to men trying to bed scores of women, to eligible and interesting bachelors.

"[There are men] who don't want to date and they just want a friend, and . . . they'll talk to you and talk to you and never go on a date, never take you out," Momcilovich said. "Then there are the guys on there who just want to hook up with girls."

Although she hasn't yet found a long-term relationship on Tinder, Momcilovich said she has gone on dates with five men she met on the app, experiences that have been both good and bad.

"One gentleman, he seemed interesting on his profile . . . and we went to meet up, and it was a sketchy area, and he was very sketchy and scary, so there's stuff like that, too," Momcilovich warned. "Women should be careful if they're going to be on sites like that. I never even got out of the car."

Tinder grabbed headlines when a 23-year-old Louisiana man was arrested last year and then indicted by a grand jury last month for allegedly raping a woman he met using the app.

But Tinder isn't the only dating app that accused predators have used: A Philadelphia man was charged with sexual assault, kidnapping and a slew of related offenses last year after he allegedly attacked and robbed a tourist he met on Grindr, an app similar to Tinder but intended for gay and bisexual men.

Jessica Carbino, a Los Angeles-based researcher for Tinder, said people who think it's a "hookup app" are misguided.

"We get letters every day from couples who are thanking us for setting them up with their long-term relationship or fiance," said Carbino, a Philly native who met her own boyfriend on Tinder. "We are definitely not a hookup app at all. If people think people are only evaluating people on the basis of their attractiveness, they don't understand how Tinder really works."

For men on Tinder seeking something deeper than hookups, even the slightest notion that any number of guys on the app may be looking to "hit it and quit it" can make it tricky to convince women that they really do want more than casual sex.

"Whenever I talk to a person, they're like, 'Tinder is a place for creeps,' and I'm like, 'Whoa, what do you mean? I'm not a creep! I'm just a regular guy living the dream,' " said Daniel, 34, an ironworker from South Jersey who asked that his last name not be published.

Speaking by phone on a recent evening as he got ready for a date with a woman he'd met a week earlier on Tinder, Daniel said he was excited but still wasn't sure if Tinder was his thing.

"There are a lot of girls who are really aggressive," Daniel said. "I don't even really find myself attractive. I'm not, like, Matt Damon or something. They're like, 'What are you doing?' I'm like, 'It's none of your business what I'm doing!' "

Before meeting Mathers, Quinn spent five months on Tinder, going on dates with a handful of men - a few more than once - that all ultimately fizzled. She said her brother-in-law advised her to try Tinder and helped her make her profile, and although she was uncertain at first, she found a lot more "normal" people on the app than she expected.

"Their missions might not be that much different, whether they're at the bar or on Tinder," Quinn said. "There are definitely some good people on there . . . some people, they were fun to talk to.

"[And] lots of people that are not worth talking to," she added, laughing.

A Tinder profile set up by a Daily News reporter for this article mirrored that vast array of intentions: Messages from "matches" ran the gamut from a cut-to-the-chase, "Wanna hook up?" to a more creative conversation-starter approach: "How Philly are you? Pick one word you would miss if you left: Jawn. Hoagie. Jimmies. Pollyanna."

Not just skin deep

Whatever a user's goal, experts and users say that Tinder, although its profiles are brief, is much more than meets the eye.

"People are evaluating [each other] on many other factors. Not just facial attractiveness," said Carbino, the Tinder researcher. "For example, if a guy has a hat that says Penn on it [in his photo], that's a very different message than a guy who has a hat that says L.A. Dodgers. There are a lot of people who say they are very strategic about the photos they choose."

Cook, the dating coach, agreed that photos are paramount in any online-dating profile, whether it's something as simple as Tinder or something more in-depth, like Match.com.

"The very first compatibility test is, 'Is the other person cute?' " Cook said. "Tinder just rides on that. You can tell somebody's character by how they smile. You can tell their lifestyle if they have a photo of them dancing at a nightclub."

Like Carbino, he believes that many Tinder users carefully consider the photos they choose for their profiles.

Mathers is one of them. He spent a week trying different things with his Tinder profile, he said, searching for matches, and analyzing what worked best. He came up with three photos that seemed most successful, he said: a portrait for his main picture; a photo of him wakeboarding; and one with his dog, a pit-bull mix named Odin.

"I saw it as a game, and I was gonna win the game," Mathers said. "I won the game."

Indeed, he did: By their third date, when Mathers suggested that they go hiking with Quinn's two pit-bull mixes, Petey-Two and Knuckles, she was hooked.

"That was the one that sealed the deal, definitely," Quinn said.

Both Quinn and Mathers are convinced that the idea of starting a romance on the Internet, whether via a dating website or an app like Tinder, is far superior to doing it the old-fashioned way.

"The Internet is now so pervasive and such an integral part of our daily lives that why wouldn't you use it to meet people?" Mathers asked.

"It's the new normal."