We met on Tinder — does that mean we’re doomed to divorce?

Ben and I met on Tinder six and a half years ago, but I almost called things off 20 minutes into our first date. We were sitting at a corner table in Vinoteca in Soho on a Thursday evening in May, glugging a glass of gavi and squinting across the packed restaurant at the specials board, when he turned to me and asked: “What’s a bavette?” I’m no food snob (OK, a bit), but having spent my twenties living and eating my way around London — and associating with those doing the same — I found it remarkable that an almost 30-year-old wouldn’t know a cut of steak readily available in Waitrose. However, seeing as I’d been 40 minutes late for our dinner and he’d had the good grace to hold the table, I put my judgment back in its box, took a deep swig of wine and resolved to give him the benefit of the doubt.

Frankie and Ben met on Tinder

CLAIRE PEPPER

Anyway, I had already decided that this was going to be my last Tinder date. After a year of swiping through every “eligible” man within the M25, and going for a drink with most of them, I was officially finished with app dating. It’s not that I hadn’t had any success; there are a handful of snogs I can recall without shuddering — some were even quite nice. Only one guy sent me a dick pic (at 7am, of all the times), and I only had to endure the humiliation of being ghosted once. All of which is pretty good going in the modern dating landscape. But I was tired. Tired of turning up to find them five inches shorter than advertised, tired of tumbleweed conversations, tired of feigning interest over their passion for Dostoevsky. I wanted out. Then came Bavette Ben.

Even putting his ignorance about steak aside, there are a million reasons why I would never have met Ben if not for Tinder. He lived south of the river, I lived north; he works in finance, I’ve spent ten years in fashion; his friends play five-a-side, mine go for martinis at Chiltern Firehouse. There is not a world where we would have bumped into each other at the bar and struck up a conversation. As for being introduced by a friend, family member or neighbour? My friends only know other women, my family live in a semi-rural village exclusively populated by over-65s, and, like many Londoners, I don’t even know my neighbour’s name.

Finding my future spouse at work — apparently the third most common place to do so — has also never been on the cards. As mentioned, I work in fashion, which means my colleagues either have a vagina or wouldn’t come near one with a barge pole. I also studied fashion at university, so sadly no luck there either — apparently meeting there, or at school, has the lowest divorce rate: 8 per cent within the first three years.

Like the other six million people in the UK who are on dating apps, I had to generate my own meet-cutes. And while this comes with some hefty downsides (a man once unmatched with me after asking for a full-length photo and presumably not liking what he saw), Tinder, Happn, Bumble and the like provide the opportunity to cross paths with those you normally wouldn’t. And, thank God, they might just turn out to be the One.

I knew Ben was life-partner material eight months after our first date. We had gone to Venice over the new year for a romantic long weekend. Too romantic, it transpired; I came down with a UTI and had to send Ben out for medical supplies. When a person will google what the Italian word for cystitis is (cistite), you know it’s love.

For Ben, the deal was sealed four weeks later, while we were at a yoga and surfing retreat in Morocco. On day one of surf school he swallowed a sizeable piece of human poo that was crashing about in the waves, causing him to spend the next 48 hours exploding from both ends in our hotel bathroom, which, as bad luck would have it, had excellent acoustics. Apparently the fact I could still look him in the eye afterwards was proof enough we could cope with life’s worst.

Did I know Ben was Mr Right when I first swiped through his Tinder profile? Of course not. It is impossible to get a true sense of someone from six pictures and a potted bio — heavily orchestrated ones at that. It is not by accident that Ben mentioned he worked at Net-a-porter on his, and was therefore eligible for the 50 per cent staff discount — catnip for twentysomething women (reader, it worked). I spent an entire evening debating the crop of a bikini photo with my best friend: not too booby but booby enough. So would I have got any clearer a first impression if I’d locked eyes with him across the dancefloor? Or flirted with him at the watercooler? Probably not. I met my previous boyfriend at the pub and we turned out to be hideous for each other.

Benson says that couples who met online are “marrying as relative strangers”. After being in a relationship for four years, two of which we spent living in the house we bought together, when Ben and I tied the knot in 2019 we knew each other inside out. Ben knows me so well that when he proposed up a mountain in Skye, he packed a bottle of nail polish in the backpack so I could do a speedy manicure before taking a selfie of my ring. When our son was born last November, I knew Ben would be an incredible dad.

When we met in 2015 it wasn’t unusual to be on dating apps. Tinder had launched three years earlier, and Bumble’s founder, Whitney Wolfe, was already on her way to becoming the world’s youngest self-made billionaire. Nevertheless, the connotations it had with hook-up culture initially made me wish for a different origin story. Ben and I used to half-joke that we needed to invent a more romantic version to tell the grandchildren — and our parents, who found the whole thing baffling. Now? We couldn’t care less. As a millennial, this is how my generation find love. I know more couples who met on apps than off them. Our wedding vows even made reference to us swiping right for each other.

So while we apparently aren’t in the clear yet, and a lot can happen in 12 months, I have faith in my app-found marriage. My prediction? We’ll live appily ever after.

Andrew Billen and his wife, Lucy

SOPHIE LASLETT

It began unromantically, but that was 13 years ago

Andrew Billen
The last time I was obliged to defend the courtship of my wife in this paper (The Times is a cruelly inquisitive mistress) was in 2013 after the publication of a Chicago University study that claimed that internet dating led to longer, happier marriages. Having then been married for all of five years, it was presumptive of me to hurl my weight behind this research, but I sort of did. I had been a bachelor for the first five decades of my life: I was very happy that my on/off relationship with datingdirect.com had led to a marriage at all, let alone a cheerful one that had produced two healthy and happy children.

Eight years on, and here comes another study, this one commissioned by the fanatically pro-nuptial Marriage Foundation. Its findings were summarised by The Sunday Times headline “Dating app love likelier to end in divorce”. Divorce! It had surely been enough hassle, even aided by the then pre-app technology, to get into a legally recognised relationship. Untangling myself from it after 13 years would be like switching energy, broadband and mobile phone supplier all at once, and doing so sadly, brokenly, alone.

Happily, The Sunday Times went on to offer reassurance. I was now so mired in marriage, divorce was no more likely for me than anyone else. The study had indeed found that 12 per cent of marriages between couples who had met digitally ended in divorce, compared with just 2 per cent who had met IRL — but this was true only of marriages three years old or less. An analysis of marriages after five, seven and ten years revealed no significant differences in divorce rates depending on where couples originally met.

The Marriage Foundation’s founder, Paul Coleridge, a well-meaning barrister and judge who specialised in family law, was nevertheless moved to make an observation from the bench. While his foundation was “solidly supportive” of tech’s role in “massively expanding the marriage market”, he feared that the marriages that resulted from its intervention were significantly more vulnerable early on. “The old, more gradual system which helps to inform selection and choice is somehow blunted with the more formulaic online system,” he theorised.

This seems to me unlikely. A digital romance is digital only until the online meet offline, at which point it becomes as gradual (or in my case as speedy) as any other relationship. People lie, and unintentionally mislead, almost as easily in person as they do behind a mobile phone. Take Lucy and me.

I had posted on the dating site a reasonably recent photo but one that showed me with brown hair. Living alone, being colour blind and with tactful friends, I had genuinely not realised I had gone grey in the couple of years since it had been taken. During a messy (not emotionally, but tomato sauce everywhere) dinner on holiday in Sardinia a few months later, it emerged that Lucy was not quite who she had seemed either. A journalist like me, she had not been a true datingdirect.com punter but working on a dating comparison feature for a Sunday paper. She apologised. I thought her confession hilarious and reassured her that I was on the level and as desperate for love as she was for copy.

As to the checks and balances of friends and family, don’t they come along soon enough? That encouraging picture of a fleece-wearing Lucy up a mountain was, her brother told me when we first met, an aberration: she hated long walks. Then Lucy met my brother and sister — let’s just say it turns out no man is a hero to his sibling. And, anyway, has anyone fallen out of love with an unsuitable suitor on the advice of that hated beast, the candid mutual friend? I have tried to warn against marital errors in the past. Believe me, my eloquence never fails to fail.

My theory, and I admit it may be old-fashioned, is that “digital” marriages are more “vulnerable” because people searching for love online have already failed using the “gradual system” of preying on work colleagues and friendship groups. People like me are either hard to live with or else hard to please.

But what do I know? Here I am, married not on this occasion too recently but for too long either to prove or disprove another doubtful study fretting over the ways people hook up. All I can say is that, although our story began unromantically one afternoon when I found it preferable to browse datingdirect.com than write a feature, Lucy and I have lived together peaceably for five, ten and now 13 years, rowing fiercely but only over what telly to watch. As far as I am concerned, and until further data emerges, that counts as happily ever after.