Things I never thought I’d do, lessons I never thought I’d learn.

You know what Tinder is right? Probably, but for those of you, like me, who had absolutely no clue what “they hooked up on Tinder” meant until a few weeks ago here’s a quick rundown:

Tinder is a bi-product of what our parents like to call ‘Hook up Culture’ and what we like to call ‘Life.’ Essentially it is a dating website condensed into App form. It works by connecting to your Facebook profile and using your GPS location to find ‘potential matches’ in your area.

Once your ‘matches’ have been located you are able to scroll through the pictures by hitting the X (Nope!) or the heart (Yup!). With each picture there is a titbit of information about the person (taken from their Facebook profile respectively) their name, age and mutual Facebook friends/interests.

If you like someone and they like you back then you can chat to each other through the app. You can also block your ‘matches’ you know, just in case shit gets a little weird.

I heard about Tinder through a friend who had ‘liked’ someone by accident. That someone proceeded to stalk her on Facebook and wouldn’t stop sending her weird messages. Then again through another friend who told me she was dating this “really awesome guy (she) met on Tinder.” Then AGAIN through a guy who apparently “gets roots all the time” on it. It seemed as if EVERYONE was doing it so I did the usual thing and jumped on the Tinder bandwagon.

Here is what I learnt:

One in every five of the guys I was ‘matched’ with had a picture with a girl as their profile pic. This is fine usually but on Tinder it looks like you are cheating on your girlfriend (even if it’s just one of your girl mates it still looks like that to girls who don’t know you). I swear one guy I came across had a picture from his wedding.

There were also a lot of guys with pictures of cars. In the immortal words of Alexi Wasser “If your Facebook profile picture is anything but yourself I am going to assume you don’t want to have sex with anyone on the network, or that you are unable too.”

Guys love to pull the finger.

It’s better to have no tagline than one that reads “big friendly ginger giant, love shine, love techno, love the stiff kitten, love partying, love life. That’s about it lol.”

Dudes like taking selfies too. They’re just not as good at it.

99.9% just want to have sex with you.

A lot of guys like Gossip Girl.

If one of your pictures features you with a hot famous person (Miranda Kerr) everyone will want to know about it.

If you go through X-ing everyone it comes up with this picture that says “there are no new people around you” which is hilariously depressing (and astute).

I’m really picky.

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Lucy Korn