How To: Find Love or Lust on the Down-Low Using the New "Tinder" Dating App for iPhone

Finding love is tough.

Movies like The Notebook and Twilight have ruined the expectations of love and relationships for us guys. Some women's ideal love situation is being kissed by a glittery sparkling vampire.

"I know we only met a few seconds ago, but I'm deeply in love with you."

While that may be a gross generalization of females, movies do create unrealistic expectations of what love should be. I'll give you a few examples between expectations and reality:

Expectation: A kiss in the rain is romantic.

Reality: You're pouring wet after the kiss and you muddy up your floors at home because you've accumulated a large amount mud on the bottom of your shoes. Now you have to mop your floors and change your extremely wet clothes.

Expectation: You'll meet your one true love in a romantic manner, by pure chance.

Reality: It's a boring Saturday night and your friends invite you to go bowling (so awesome). You meet your friend up and she introduces you to some of her guy friends. You end up talking to one of them, you exchange numbers and a few weeks later you're on a date.

How romantic, right?

NOT.

Love never pans out the way you want it to, so why adhere to its over-glamorized Hollywood expectations? You're not going to find the love of your life on the hull of a doomed ship, so let's get real.

You'll probably have a higher chance of meeting them on Facebook...or maybe even on Tinder.

Tinder

Tinder, an iOS app, allows you to connect with potential love interests nearby if they're also interested in you. It uses your current location, then finds other people that it thinks you might be interested in, all anonymously. If that person happens to be interested in you, then the app will connect the both of you.

To begin, you'll have to log in to Tinder with Facebook. Don't worry about embarrassing yourself—Tinder doesn't post anything on your Facebook, nor let any of your friends know you're using the application.

It uses your Facebook profile picture as your Tinder profile picture, then allows you to add four more pictures from your Facebook, to show the opposite sex (I looked for all my sexiest pictures). You can then choose your basic settings: your sex, who you would like to be matched with, and you preferred search distance.

From there, the fun begins.

It takes you to a page with a picture (where you will the spend the rest of your time). The page should show you a photo of a potential interest, including the name and age of the person, as well as your mutual Facebook friends and interests. You can tap on the picture (or on the i) to see who these friends and interests are, as well as other information (distance and last time on the app).

If you like what you see, you can either tap on the green heart below the picture or swipe the picture to the right. If you want to pass, you can tap on the red X or swipe the picture to the left.

I've spent about 4 hours on Tinder and it's pretty fun. If I find the girl attractive (inside attractiveness too!) I swipe to the right, everything else I swipe to the left.

It's pretty hilarious what you stumble upon too. I've categorized pictures into several categories:

• Girls that are really cute.

• Girls that hide their face.

• Girls that take group pictures so I can't tell which one you are and that's not very helpful, thanks.

• Girls I would never go out with (Laker fan and Bieber hater).

• Girls that go QUACK.

• Girls that aren't even trying.

• And my personal favorite—Girls with boyfriends?

If you're a female, don't fret. You too can find love (or whatever it is you're looking for).

I've only been on Tinder for 2 days now, so I have yet to receive any matches. Should I have received one by now? Am I not good looking enough? *starts crying*

Well, if you do receive a match, it will appear in the right hand corner. This is what it looks like for me at the moment.

I'll be patient and give the application a few more days to see if they can find me a match.

On Twitter, Tinder is all that everyone can talk about at the moment. You can read interesting tweets about Tinder here, here, here, and here.

Or just read this tweet from user David Portnoy and see if you want to try out Tinder for yourself.

Sold. Download Tinder for iOS now.