You Can't Stop Swiping: The Real Reason Why You're Addicted To Tinder

It starts out as good fun to laugh about with your pals, just like Conan O'Brien and Dave Franco did, only without the Tinder “brown lightning” van. It’s a joke made up of punchlines that push the boundaries of acceptable dating plays.

However, when your friends go home, Tinder stays behind the lock screen of your phone, just waiting to play with you again. You find solace in your sleepless, 4 am early morning by counting the number of matches you can rack up.

In the beginning, you wouldn’t dare tell your friends you’ve taken up Tinder as a recreational activity instead of just immature entertainment on dull nights in.

Now, right alongside Candy Crush, Tinder has become a go-to activity for tolerating subway rides on the L-train and lonesome lunches. Opening the app becomes so habitual, to the extent that it inhibits any furthering of a connection you may find with any single person.

The multitude of perfectly coiffed profiles leaves you with the perpetual question of whether or not last night’s real-life date is actually the best thing out there.

With apps like Tinder, no one is good enough because there are too many other options.

While the Conan and Dave Franco Tinder parody is a dead-on comedic commentary of what it’s like to start your relationship with Tinder, it neglects to include what happens after a few weeks into toying with the app.

Online dating, whether via website or app, is a dangerous drug available to anyone with three bars of service or more. So, a big part of the addiction stems from the ease at which men and women can find, flirt and f*ck.

The ease of remote dating, alongside personal boredom that's likely present, provokes swiping left and right to be one’s desired activity for passing time.

Whether someone is using Tinder for dating or hookups, the method is flawed due to its high value placed on superficiality and instant gratification.

We're a species that's addicted to technology to the extreme magnitude that we can't function without cancerous rays of radiation emanating from our iPhones.

Raise your hand if the first tab you open on your browser is Facebook. You're not alone. But, the difference between basic social technology and dating apps like Tinder is the inclusion of a soon-to-be prehistoric concept: love.

Realistically, most people on Tinder are not looking for love. The issue is not the massive shrinkage of romantic hearts in the world, but rather, the fact that Tinder converts those who are dedicated to finding their hidden gem in the crowd into lax crowd surfers.

Say you just met a guy on Tinder with whom the connection is so tangible, it seems as if you’ve known each other forever.

On your second date, you spend almost 24 hours together, sharing every deep flaw embedded in your tarnished pasts. As the fourth date is penciled into your schedule, you open Tinder and check out his profile, just for fun. He was online two hours ago.

He may really like you, say he's not seeing other girls and that he just opens the app out of habit. Habit... or addiction?

He, and many other Tinder (and online dating) users, will likely never be satisfied with their partners due to the ease at which they can discover what else is out there. So, proceed with caution.