Tinder who?? Well, unless you live on another planet or you’re completely disconnected from everything going on around you, if you’re between 20 and 35 years old, you must have heard of or used the famous dating app that everybody’s talking about. It’s already given rise to some new words like Tinderella and Tinder-Surprise, to which we would have to add Tinder Addict!

For obvious reasons of ease of use, speed and anonymity, Tinder is hugely successful and has managed to get an entire generation hooked. Everybody’s talking about it, lots of people use it, but the sceptics are hanging back. There seem to be no limits to its popularity because it has even seduced the stars. Leonardo DiCaprio was found using it during the Coachella Festival! We went to meet a young Parisienne who’s hooked on mobile dating.

Do we need to say how it works? Essentially based on physical appearance, it allows you to scroll down, literally with a flick of your finger, through hundreds of profiles of people geographically close to you. If you like the look of somebody, just swipe their entry to the right to “like” them. If they’ve done the same thing for your own entry, the “You’ve got a new match” window will open and you’re away. It’s also possible to “block” somebody at any time so they won’t be able to find you again (we hope).

Our Tinder Girl is 30 years old, she’s a success in her career, and she lives in a chic district of Paris. However, she admits that she doesn’t like being single, so she uses all the means at her disposal to do something about it. She has already notched up 300 meetings, she spends hours looking through photos, and she dedicates several evenings per week to “dates”, sometimes more than one per evening…

Tinder no longer has any secrets for her. Based on looking at the photos, she can tell a person’s height or pick out other points about their physical appearance, because appearance is what counts here. “I look to see how long their neck is or I ask for full-length photos to see if he’s tall, usually you can see fairly easily if the person has short arms and legs!” she tells us, laughing, and she adds “If he’s wearing a hat, it makes me think he must be bald or balding.”

Tinder Girl says she’s very demanding and has no time to waste, which is why she chooses carefully and arranges to meet the lucky winner very quickly. You don’t want to wait too long before a face-to-face meeting, because the other person may move on, or you may find you’ve been wasting time if in fact the other person falls short of your expectations. One meeting is enough for her to rule out people who don’t match up to her profile of the man of her life, because that’s what she’s looking for … and maybe more. The result of these 300 meetings? She may not have achieved the desired results, but she has collected some funny stories, some disappointments and some experiences that really freaked her out.

How about a few anecdotes?

“What with men who invite me to go to their apartment for the first meeting, the ones who cancel at the last minute, and some who don’t bother, I could write a book! Some men have asked me, at the very first meeting, to let them use my employee benefits at work.

Others had signed up with a photo of their brother, or they’d changed a lot since their profile photo. Once I met a surgeon who I’d agreed to go out for dinner with, but with hindsight I told myself I should have run away the moment I saw him. He wasn’t very good looking, he was wearing a dental appliance and I had to pay for his meal! Yes, when it was time to pay the bill, the waiter came towards me and the gentleman didn’t lift a finger. Naturally, he didn’t say thank you.

Men are getting less and less chivalrous. I think they don’t want to take you out unless they know they’re going to get something out of it. One man told me quite clearly that he wasn’t going to buy me a drink unless I was going to see him again… Also, there are people who just don’t get the message that I don’t like them. However much I ignore them, they carry on, or they disappear for a while and then pop up a few months or even a year later! That kind of person is quite scary, I just continue ignoring them.

Still, let’s stay positive, men on Tinder are no less good than men elsewhere, you just have to stick with it until the moment when you find “the right one”. It’s the same with the other ways you meet people. To finish with a smile, on a trip to Barcelona a friend “matched” a really good-looking man, we wanted to meet him but he was super arrogant and said he wasn’t going anywhere just to have a drink.

Although he only lived two streets away from our hotel, he said the meeting had to be in our hotel room. It wasn’t at all what we had in mind, but he was so handsome that we didn’t want to go back without at least having seen him. So for our last evening, we went along with his game, but without any intention of taking him up to the room so we agreed to meet him in front of the hotel. He was so different from the photo that I wouldn’t even have recognised him. My friend made the connection and hurriedly told me that we should just run for it.

We started to run like a couple of kids, and in less than two minutes we found ourselves back in our hotel room, totally out of breath and dying of laughter. She told me he looked more like a scarecrow than the handsome man in the photo”.

Nu