The Tinder Rise in Argentina

Last week, during the creative writing English class I assistant-teach at a high school here in Buenos Aires, we wrote a fourteen line collaborative poem, each student contributing one line. The semi-disjointed quasi-sonnet was titled, "When I first Met You..." and the opening line was, "on Tinder, you were so hot!"

There are currently 2.5 million recorded Tinder matches in Argentina, a number that spiked in the past year as the online dating scene exploded in Buenos Aires.

Whereas almost everyone I know in New York dabbles in some variety of online dating, Tinder is a recent, but remarkably fertile addition to the dating scene here in Buenos Aires. According to a 2014 report by Infobae, Argentine Tinder had about 400,000 users. In the U.S., this number is over a million.

Tinder has changed the dating landscape since its rise two years ago. It continues to lead online dating, processing more than one billion swipes and 6 million matches a day.

And in the same way that Facebook became increasingly popular among middle schoolers, Tinder, too, has appealed to the sexual intrigue of adolescents. People of all ages and interests are swiping left and right on the dating app.

Tinder is used everyday for a staggering average of ninety minutes per user. Some fear that this swiping surge will change the amiability and warmth of Buenos Aires, allowing us to retreat from the world of natural human collision and to depend on severed technology to find love.

Or maybe it’s not so heavy. Maybe we’re just addicted to the light-hearted narcissism of landing a match. As we’re going to the bathroom or during commercial breaks, we swipe and scroll and shop, hoping to find a sense of security in physical validation.

Tinder allows us to hold someone in our fingers for a moment, and then accept or reject them, almost without moving a muscle. And perhaps that seems shallow and unfair, but at least technology gives us the tools to hold someone.

In Argentina, which ranks second in the region to use the app (after Brazil), more and more people are having positive Tinder experiences. According to a study done by InfoTechnology, it is spurring interaction, not isolation, “se han producido encuentros--y tambien desencuentros.”