Tinder Fomo (It's a Thing)

Why more and more women in committed relationships are swiping right... and treating it like a game.

- Marissa Conrad and Emily C. Johnson

Manvi has been with her fiancé for four years... and she’s on Tinder. (And no, she’s not in an open relationship.) “I joined for work, because I was designing a meet-up app, and at first, I swiped right over and over,” says the 31-year-old from Mumbai. But it quickly went beyond research. “I’m usually pretty conservative, but on Tinder, I put up swimsuit pics and got hundreds of matches.”

“It felt empowering. But if you’re in a relationship, especially with an engagement ring, that stops.” An app where you get real-time affirmations that you’re still hot (and f*ckable) is a siren song that’s tough to ignore.

Plenty of committed women have grabbed a single friend’s phone and gone on Tinder swiping sprees under the guise of helping said friend find a hot guy or girl to date.

“ALL THESE 22-YEAR-OLD GUYS were messaging me: ‘You look too young to be 31!’. They wrote me poems! When I was single, guys hit on me all the time,” Manvi says.

Doing so can leave you feeling peak FOMO and make you want to try for yourself, even if you’re happily coupled. Sure enough, spend a few weeks on Tinder and you’ll likely learn not everyone you’re swiping past is single. It’s not uncommon to see other friends’ BFs, GFs, husbands, and wives while browsing. Then, there’s last year’s survey from Global Web Index, which estimated a whopping 45 percent of Tinder users worldwide are attached: 34 percent are married, and 11 percent are in a relationship. (Tinder disputes these figures and did a survey finding only 1.7 percent of its users are married, although the app doesn’t ask relationship status at sign-up.)