Campus speaks on dating apps, connections

Popular dating apps like Tinder, Bumble, Hinge and Grindr are widely used by younger generations, including college students. A Pew Research study found that 48% of 18 to 29-year- olds have used a dating app. The Daily Trojan spoke to some USC students about their experiences and general campus attitudes toward certain dating apps.

Dating apps are popular with young people because they are convenient, allowing the user to pick and choose from a large number of people — or an endless number if you pay for a premium version — and message them from your phone. Dating apps also offer users a wide range of potential interactions, such as flings, one-night stands or even long-term relationships. Bumble has even started offering services for people looking just for friends or business networking.

Charlie Wasson, a junior majoring in business administration, has used Tinder and Bumble while at USC. He only used Tinder because it was the most popular app among USC students, but he preferred Bumble because of its unique feature: women must make the first move.

“I liked the fact that I didn’t have to message first on Bumble, especially after being on Tinder and getting no one, since messaging first, as a guy, is the expectation,” he said.

Despite having used both apps and messaging with people in his time at USC, Wasson has never met up with someone from a dating app in person.

“Sometimes you talk to people and the conversation gets kind of stale or boring,” he said. “Sometimes I just swipe on people. I wasn’t super interested in using it for actual dating, it was more like just a time killer kind of thing, so yeah, I never ended up on any of those dates.”

Yaebin Park, a junior majoring in law, history and culture, also said that her use of dating apps wasn’t in search of anything serious.

“I’ve never actually met up with anyone that I’ve met on these apps,” she said. “I use Tinder just to look at who’s around, but I don’t use it in a serious manner to look for someone I want to date.”

In addition to using Tinder and Bumble, Park has used Hinge, though her reasons for using all three were the same: popularity.

“Everybody I hear about uses Tinder,” Park said. “And I think, recently, Hinge and Bumble are very popular.”

Cole Engleman, a junior majoring in accounting, sees Tinder as being more for hookups and messing around, but apps like Bumble and Hinge as being geared more towards relationships.

“My friend’s sister actually met her husband on Bumble and they just got married this past year,” he said. “So that’s why I was a little more interested in that one, because it actually had a successful relationship, versus Tinder, where I’d never heard of something like that happening. I know one other friend used Bumble and I think he currently has a longlasting girlfriend as well.”

A more specific option for USC students is the Instagram page, @usc.missedconnections. Students can send in anonymous messages for attractive strangers that they saw or met on the University Park Campus but didn’t get a chance to see again, and the moderators of the page post these messages. Wasson and Park both thought of the page as a fun idea but only knew of it through being on Instagram. Wasson said that he wouldn’t consider sending in a missed connection, and Park said she felt that there were too many entries in each post to want to look at the posts consistently.

When asked about how they viewed the use of dating apps by all USC students, it seems like Wasson, Park and Engleman all think that, most of the time, students use dating apps like Tinder and Bumble to find hookups or to kill time, even if some apps, like Hinge, are more successful for long-term relationships.

“I think a lot of [people] use it to just hook up,” Wasson said. “I don’t think people are on there for long-term relationships. I have heard that people have been successful with apps like Hinge, and I have a few friends who’ve met their significant others on Hinge, but I don’t know any of my friends who’ve met actual people that they date through Tinder or Bumble.”