Love

relationship of two and a half years finally ended, and Eli found himself single again. He was 27 years old, losing the vestigial greenness of his youth. He wanted to have sex with some women, and he wanted some stories to tell. He updated his dating profiles. He compiled his photos. He experimented with taglines. He downloaded all the apps. He knew the downsides—the perfidy of the deceptive head shot, the seductress with the intellect of a fence post—but he played anyway. He joined every free dating service demographically available to him.

Around the same time, somewhere across town, a woman named Katherine**1 ** shut down her OkCupid account. She had approached Internet dating assertively, had checked the box that read Short-term dating and the one that read Casual sex. Then a casual encounter had turned menacing, and Katherine decided she no longer wanted to pursue sex with total strangers. But she had a problem: She liked the adventure, she had the usual human need for other humans, and she needed the convenience of meeting people online. Katherine was 37, newly single, with family obligations and a full-time job. Most of her friends were married. She needed something new.

When Katherine and Eli downloaded Tinder in October 2013, they joined millions of Americans interested in trying the fastest-growing mobile dating service in the country. Tinder does not give out statistics about the number of its users, but the app has grown from being the plaything of a few hundred Los Angeles party kids to a multinational phenomenon in less than a year. Unlike the robot yentas of yore (Match.com, OkCupid, eHarmony), which out-competed one another with claims of compatibility algorithms and secret love formulas, the only promise Tinder makes is to show you the other users in your immediate vicinity. Depending on your feelings for these people, you swipe them to the left (meaning no thanks) or to the right (yes, please). Two people who swipe each other to the right will match. Your matches accrue in a folder, and often that’s the end of the story. Other times you start texting. The swiping phase is as lulling in its eye-glazing repetition as a casino slot machine, the chatting phase ideal for idle, noncommittal flirting. In terms of popularity, Tinder is a massive and undeniable success. Whether it works depends on your idea of working.