How easy is it to get laid off Tinder? If you are happily loved up or not interested in dating apps, you may think Tinder is a sexual free-for-all, populated by callous dudebros and disappointed women. After all, you must have heard the horror stories.

Online dating disaster stories are everywhere. They are a staple of newspapers, magazines, blogs and popular user-generated content forums. Sites like Tinder Nightmares, Not OKCupid, Nice Guys of OKCupid and Bye Felipe all call out bad behaviour on the part of users. The vast majority of these — although certainly not all — come from straight women. The most common complaints are a sense of entitlement (on the part of males), misogyny, sexual aggressiveness, insults and even threats of physical and sexual violence.

My own online dating experiences included demands for naked pics, aggressiveness, some downright weird interactions and approaches from a surprisingly large number of musicians. But while dating sites have a veneer of respectability — after all, you could be looking for your future spouse — Tinder has a reputation as a hook-up app.

That’s not surprising, since Tinder was initially described by the founders as a sort of Grindr for straights. These days, the users are of all sexual orientations and the company is keen to distance itself from the perception that it is just for casual sex, preferring to style it as a social network, bringing all kinds of people together for all kinds of reasons.

Tinder has a reported 50 million users. On average, there are 1.4 billion swipes — both right and left — every day. Of those, only 26 million result in matches. Men tend to be less choosy than women, swiping right 46 percent of the time; women swipe right for just 14 percent of potential matches. Of those 50 million users, an estimated 10 million use the app daily. At 26 million matches per day, that averages out at two to three daily matches per user — although factors such as age, gender, sexual orientation, location, profession and perceived level of attractiveness skew the numbers in favour of some users; others may go weeks, or longer, without a single match.

Tinder may ostensibly be a dating app, but it is just as much an endless game of “hot or not.” It was for this reason that the company introduced limits to the number of times a user can swipe right in 2015. Reports suggested that many users, generally men, were trying to improve their chances of getting a match by indiscriminately swiping right on all the profiles they saw. The limits seem to have worked, at least partially. Prior to the new rules, Tinder made an estimated 12 million matches per billion swipes — a paltry proportion.

Despite the promise of an almost endless array of potential matches, quite a few people aren’t having much luck at all. An online search for “how to get a date on Tinder” returns over 1 million hits. Not all of these offer dating advice, but the scale shows that, for many, turning a Tinder match into a date, let alone sex, is a lot more complicated than pearl-clutching articles about the horrors of hook-up culture would lead you to believe.

That was certainly James’s experience. He estimated that he has had a total of around 600 matches. Of these, thirty resulted in dates, and three of those dates led to sex. That’s a lot of right swiping and messaging for a pretty poor return. Brendan did a whole lot worse. During a six month period when he used Tinder daily, he racked up a grand total of 179 matches, three dates and no sex. “I do a lot better meeting women in bars,” he told me. James agreed: “Girls get so many matches that it’s hard to get them to respond. Getting a reply is basically down to timing or good luck.”

Now you might think that straight men simply have a harder time getting laid through Tinder, especially if these men are not conventionally attractive, particularly witty, or endowed with an impressive sounding job. Since men swipe right on almost every second profile, and women respond positively to less than two in every ten, the ladies have the numbers working in their favour. But even so, finding a date, let alone sex, is not that easy for straight women either.
Beth has been using Tinder on and off for two years. With her wavy dark hair and big blue eyes, Beth looks like a film star from Hollywood’s Golden Era — Ava Gardner with a dash of Vivien Leigh. She gets a lot of matches — almost every man she swipes right for, matches with her.
“I am really mercenary when it comes to Tinder,” Beth told me. “I go on it for maybe ten minutes when I am bored. I’ll check my matches and then click into their profiles. If there is anything on there I don’t like, I’ll unmatch them. But if there isn’t, I’ll send a message. I always send a message, unless they message 
me first.”

Messaging first has an unexpected bonus, explains Beth. “Since I started being more pro-active, unmatching guys and messaging them first, I get a lot less harassment messages than I used to. You know your obvious, ‘Nice tits’. We’ve all gotten messages like that. Now I don’t get any messages like that. I feel I am much more cut-throat than I used to be. Before it would have been fifty-fifty. It’s weird because I would have always unmatched guys who sent those messages before.”

Beth estimates that around 70 percent of her messages receive a response, but that most of the conversations go nowhere.

“So many guys on Tinder are just looking for someone to chat to, they are not actually looking for someone to meet up with,” she said. “I’ve only been on about ten dates.”

Beth’s ten dates resulted in three sexual encounters. “One was fine, one was really good, and the other was really good too. Success!”

“I joined Tinder in the hope of being a bit slutty,” Sorcha told me. “Hasn’t happened.”

Sorcha is a petite blonde in her late 20s, and the kind of woman who attracts admiring glances when she walks down the street. After spending seven years in a serious relationship, she decided to have some fun. However, her Tinder experience hasn’t been a debauched orgy of non-stop sex. In the five months she has been using it, Sorcha has had over 500 matches, eight dates, and two sexual encounters.

“Most of the time the conversation just fades away, and keeping them going begins to feel like work. I think it is easier to meet people when you’re out because you can tell straight away if there’s any chemistry,” she says.

Beth and Sorcha are doing a lot better than Natalie. In the year or so she has been on Tinder, she has had five dates, none of which ended in sex. Her last date spent the whole time on his phone — possibly on Tinder — and hardly spoke to her at all. “Frankly, I am beginning to think it’s me,” she said ruefully.

Tinder may be quick, easy and fun, but nothing compares to catching the eye of someone in a crowded bar or club. For all our technological advances, humans haven’t changed. We love the frisson of excitement and the initial spark of attraction that leads to sex. But perhaps most importantly of all, we like people to be in the same damn room!

People do meet and mate through Tinder. Some users may even find themselves inundated with offers – but for many people the dating app is not so much a sexual smorgasbord as yet another avenue of sexual frustration and rejection. If this has been your experience, you’re not alone. It’s not you, it’s not even them — it’s the medium.