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The Daily Tar Heel

I used Tinder Social to find moves and it was lit

I love Tinder. Sorry mom. Catch me swiping on the toilet, in class and while I’m writing this article. If that makes me a trash person, I’m proudly a trash person. 

So this past Friday, when my girlfriends and I found ourselves without plans, we decided to give Tinder Social a try. 

Instead of swiping and matching with people you are attracted to the way you do on regular Tinder, on Tinder Social, you can form a group with your friends and swipe on other groups of friends. Once your friend groups match, you get put into a group chat where you all can talk to each other.

What I found was that Tinder Social is a lot like regular Tinder in that it’s a sausage fest. Most of the groups we interacted with were groups of all guys trying to find groups of all women. It seemed like people used the app more so to go on casual group dates rather than friend dates. The thirst was real.

Because there’s no direct message feature, men were really in the group chat claiming specific women. “You guys are all cute. Especially you, Mariam ;),” one guy sent, calling out my friend by name. We cringed.

We ended up accumulating a lot of matches — but actually conversing with them was as difficult; it was overwhelming. 

There was at least three groups that started conversations with “How much does a polar bear weigh?” Most preferred to start conversations with terrible gifs. How do you even respond to a gif of Bob Saget raising his eyebrows? I was shook.

As a group of black women, we expected not to get a lot of matches. However, what happened was that groups swiped right because we were women and then later realized we were black. The worst of it came from two groups of white men.

“We’re in the KKK” one troll squawked. Our next troll was not so creative. He just called us the n-word. With the hard r, y’all. I almost broke my finger un-matching.

I’m not gonna lie, it was painful. Racism exists, we encounter it often. But we were determined to not let this ruin our night.

We contoured and put on eyelashes for this! It was get lit or die trying. Goodnight bigots!

Very few of the groups actually followed through with plans. Out of 60 matches, only three gave us definitive plans. We decided to hang out with the first group who gave us an address.

We pulled up to the plug and a girl opened the door. A wave of relief washed over us. We weren’t getting murdered tonight!

We walked in and the group of three dudes was hosting a pre-game with several other friends. Everyone introduced themselves and we learned they were an interesting and hilarious group of grad students. We exchanged jokes, roasts and flirts and ended up talking about everything from hazing to Asian glow to our international backgrounds.

After mingling for a bit, we all decided to head out to a club. There is no better way to spend an evening than throwing it back to Drake tracks. Don’t @me. And when someone at the club wouldn’t leave my friend alone, one of the Tinder guys stepped in and talked to him. We felt surprisingly safe.

Once we were done getting our twerk on, we headed back to their place to decompress. I helped whip up some pancakes for the new squad and chatted. Everyone then exchanged numbers and we headed home for the evening.

Using Tinder Social was like trying to find a diamond in a turd factory. It was a little stressful trying to find people we wanted to hang out with (and who weren’t racists), but when we found our people, we had so much fun.

There are a lot of interesting folks at UNC who you really don’t run into in your day-to-day life.

Tinder Social helped us meet these people we never would have encountered otherwise.

Next time my phone is dry, I just might try it again.


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These are the results of the questions I asked my friends to answer about the night on a scale from 1-10.

@noni_ski

swerve@dailytarheel.com