I'm Pregnant With A Tinder Baby & Here's What That Means

If you're looking for long-term, serious, mushy-gushy love, you might be able to find it while swiping on your phone. Believe it or not, when two people are looking for love on a dating app, it can definitely lead to something real — and permanent. That's how I ended up pregnant with a Tinder baby.

OK, there's obviously a lot more to the story than that. So, how did I get here? Let's start from the beginning.

My husband and I met on Tinder in the fall of 2015 and made the choice to shack up after about six months of dating. Once he proposed the following spring, we were engaged for a year, and had a destination wedding in Hawaii in the spring of 2018.

My husband and I are now pregnant with our first child. We got pregnant on purpose, and expect to meet that sweet little nugget sometime in February 2019. If you do the math, this means that, yes, we were pregnant about three months after tying the knot. Yeah, it was a little fast, but we're not that young (I'm 29, and he's 32).

Apparently, we aren't even really an exception to the rule anymore. Don't believe me? A 2013 study by the journal PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences) showed that a third of modern marriages begin online. And it appears that this trend has continued. But wait, there's more! The study also found that marriages that start with an online romance are less likely to fail than those who meet the old-fashioned way. I don't know about you, but for a lady who's pregnant with a Tinder fetus, this sounds promising.

So, besides achieving our #squadgoals and becoming a family of three, what does being pregnant with a Tinder baby really mean? When I was on Tinder, my intent was never to make swiping right a lifestyle. I'd keep swiping for as long as I had to to find my person, but the goal was never to date multiple people at once or see how many matches I could get. In my view, Tinder was a tool — a tool I just happened to end up using to meet my husband. To me, being pregnant with a Tinder baby means that there is quantifiable proof that dating apps work.

I actually know a few Tinder babies. Some of my best friends who are married found each other by swiping right. I want people to know all of this because I want them to know that swiping the day away on dating apps can lead to the real thing. No matter how many people I met through the app who just weren't for me, I was never left with a feeling that I'd be single forever. I knew what I wanted, and I knew there were other people out there who wanted the same things.

Anyway, what I'm trying to say is that our story isn't that different than anyone else's. We're just a couple of normal people who found someone we really liked on the internet and didn't need anything more than that to start a life together.

Our love story isn't really all that remarkable, and being pregnant certainly isn't, either. But the fact that all of this started on our phones is something I want people to know, because the real deal can come from swiping right! You might meet them out in the wild, or you might meet them on your phone while you're sitting at home on a Friday night rewatching Friends on Netflix for the zillionth time. That's why if I had to give one piece of dating advice to single ladies in their 20s, it would be to keep on swiping with intent.