These people share their Tinder experiences that made them wish they'd swiped left.
Dude, Where’s My Car?
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“My buddy isn’t the smartest man. He met a chick on Tinder, picked her up and drove to a motel. They were walking into the room and she says, ‘Oh crap, I forgot my purse in the car do you mind if I go grab it?’ He says, ‘Yeah that’s fine,’ and tosses her the keys.
Ten minutes later he walks outside, wondering where she is and his car is gone. He got his car back. I think the police found it about a week later. I don’t think she was ever caught though.”
Hello Stalker!
“Started speaking to this guy on Tinder a few months ago. He seemed alright, but not my normal type. Regardless, we started speaking for a couple of days. I didn’t realize how stupid I was until now, but I mentioned where I worked.”
The night I mentioned my workplace, I saw a guy walk past that looked a lot like him. I hadn’t met him in person so I wasn’t 100%. I forgot about it and a couple of days later, it was quiet in work but my phone battery was low. I said I’d speak to him later before my phone died. Que him coming in 10 minutes later with a freaking iPhone charger. Yes, this might have been a nice gesture if you know, I’d actually met him face to face before.
This was really weird because he said he lived the other side of the city from where I work. I wanted to cut ties straight away, but I thought I’d return the charger after I finished work.
He said he would be in a bar around the corner, so when I finished I met up with him, gave him his charger and made some excuse to go home. To my horror, I saw on his Instagram that he’d taken a smiling selfie earlier in the day with the caption ‘I’m now a taken man ;)’. I’d seen him like not even twice.
To make it even scarier, for a good few weeks, every time I’d finish work I would see him casually walking past on his own, exactly at the time I finished. Really creeped me out for a while.”
The Foot Fetish Wasn’t Even The Worst Part
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“I met a guy on Tinder. He seemed nice, fairly attractive, but seemed a little vanilla, actually. He didn’t drink or smoke, he wanted to be a meteorologist, he was super close with his grandfather, and he was gentlemanly and family-oriented.
We went to Starbucks and talked for a couple hours, it was nice. So, I set up another date. We went for ice cream and again talked for a while. We were sitting outside and I mentioned something about how guys have obvious body parts to be attracted to on women while girls pick out odd things like calves and such.
He gets weird and says ‘I don’t know if I should tell you this,’ so of course I prod him until he tells me. First, he says he’s got a foot fetish. That’s not super strange and I’m mostly curious so I ask him tons of questions about it. He’d never been in a serious relationship so I ask him if he could handle being with a girl who wasn’t into it and he said no. Then he said, ‘I’ve called a girl from back pages a couple times because I couldn’t take it anymore.’ Still not that weird.
Then he asks if I have ever heard of a ‘Crush Fetish.’ He tells me not to google it because it’ll freak me out (still haven’t, never will). There are two levels of a crush fetish. Level 1) Becoming aroused watching someone crush invertebrate animals under their feet, like bugs (which was his fetish) and Level 2) watching someone crush vertebrate animals like bunnies or kittens. This got me thinking about our previous date.
We had a conversation on the first date about how I had been getting a lot more bugs in my room that summer and so I’d been like squishin’ bugs all dang day (I live near the woods). He said that ‘really got him going.’ I also realized he had asked me what kind of shoes I typically wear and I had just brushed it off and answered him. I was wearing moccasins and (being a pretty open person) told him how they make my feet smelly so I try to avoid them. He told me that ‘I got really turned on when you said that. I’d love to smell your shoes if you’d let me.’ Among other very forward, very specific and unwelcome statements about what turned him on about me.
The best part was I told him a week or so later I’d met someone and that we should end our communications. He texted me a few months later four or five times asking me for my ‘help’ and that he’d pay me to let him do stuff with my feet.”
He Was Up All Night Babysitting
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“I got a mutual like. Fairly pretty girl, some of her teeth are crooked, but I’m not judging. We talk a little bit, exchange phone numbers, and talk a little more. I’ve just moved from out of state, I haven’t made any friends, and I’m missing my once a week trip to the bar for drinks and wings. So, we decide to hang out and have a few drinks at her house, no biggie, I’ve done this before with other people without a problem.
I get to said home, and she’s started without me. She’s double fisting: her drink in one hand, soda in the other to chase it down. We talk a moment, then she says she wants to go outside so she can smoke. No worries, I’d prefer that so the house doesn’t reek. She proceeds to chain a few, then we go back inside, all the while she is consuming her drink and I am refilling for her while we chat.
She continues to drink and wants to go outside every twenty minutes or so to smoke. Just when she’s starting to get really wasted, her son wakes up (I didn’t even know she had kids). He is autistic and she asks me to tell him to go back to bed so she can finish smoking. I go in and have a chat with him, he’s had a bad dream. Mom comes in and puts on a Scooby-Doo movie that he likes a lot. At this point, she is stumbling and slurring most of her words. She has started talking about this guy she’s really angry at because he wasn’t interested in pursuing anything beyond friends with benefits.
Throughout the whole night she has boasted about being a plus sized model and the success of her career and how terrible people are about telling her she needs to lose weight. She is adamant that they can all bugger off and that she is absolutely stunning and can have any man in the world she chooses. I’ve gotten extremely uncomfortable at this point and would like to leave, but she is so messed up I would feel irresponsible leaving the child and don’t think of simple solutions like calling family services in the moment.
I watch Scooby-Doo with junior while mom continues to ramble on about her messed up life and how everyone should love her and be attracted to her, repeatedly asking why people are so rude to her and why no one listens to her. She insists that I listen more than anyone she’s met because I’m an Aquarius. No one else will listen to an Aries. She’s smoked the whole pack of smokes by this point and is complaining that she does not have anymore. She then proceeds to shuffle through multiple CDs, tossing the ones that are too scratched to play onto the floor and cussing out her TV for not playing them. She breaks two while trying to get them to work.
Eventually, she starts to sober up and is asking me to go and buy her more drinks. I explain that I don’t have any money (an honest response at the time), and tell her that I am sorry and that I will have to leave, I just wanted to make sure she was sober enough to take care of her kid. She asks me to take a gift card and go to a local grocery store to purchase the drinks, and I let her know (after quickly checking my phone) that they will not be open for another two hours and I have to leave to get some rest before I go to work.
The next morning, she messages me on Facebook and asks how bad things were. I explain kindly, but let her know things did get a little out of hand. She says, ‘OMFG… I suck balls. So many balls,’ then proceeds to block me on Facebook. That is the last I ever heard of the only model I’ve ever met in person.”
It Wasn’t His Date That Was The Nightmare
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“A few years ago I was dating this girl and her father really hated me. This was a bit odd as most parents love me (or at least lie about it really well). He was just a huge prick and I always called him out for the annoying things he did. Anyways, her parents got divorced, we broke up a few months later.
Fast forward to around a year later. A girl I met on Tinder and I were dating for a few months and things were starting to get serious. We’re at the point where she wants me to meet her family. Mother, stepfather, little sister. Why not? I have no problems meeting them.
‘Let’s do it,’ I said. She told me how excited her stepdad was to meet me as it turns out we both happen to be Kansas City Chiefs fans.
Well, in an unexpected turn of events, it was the same jerk father of my ex-girlfriend.”
He’s Stuck With A Girl He Doesn’t Like, Or Is He?
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“A friend of mine started hooking up with this girl on Tinder about a year and a half ago. She wasn’t very attractive, and he would always talk about how much he hated her, but I guess the ‘intimate act’ was alright because he kept seeing her. About two months into this he decides he’s going to end things with her and find a new buddy to fool around with. Well, he heads over to her house to break up with her and is instead greeted with the girl telling him that she is pregnant and that it is his.
First thing I tell him to do is to get a DNA test to make sure that it is, in fact, his kid. He insists that it is, and doesn’t get the test. He convinces her to put the baby up for adoption, but she decides pretty late into the pregnancy that she doesn’t want to give up the baby and wants to raise it.
Fast forward to a month ago, and my friend is stuck raising this kid with this girl he doesn’t like. Well, I guess she didn’t actually put my buddy down as the father on the baby’s birth certificate and had been collecting money from the government for being a single mother or something, and the government wanted her to try and track down the father.
That is how my friend found out that he might not actually be the father of the baby he’s been raising. Still, haven’t heard back on whether he is or is not the father, but I hope for his sake that he isn’t.”
He Was Walking Into His Own Personal Nightmare
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“This is the story of my second day using Tinder and my very first Tinder date. It’s Tuesday. I matched up with this girl, I’ll call her L, and we chatted back and forth for a bit. She’s cute and I suggest meeting up and I try to find a nice neutral spot near her where we can get together. She invites me to a barbecue with some of her former co-workers. I’m pretty hesitant to this at first as I don’t want to meet someone for the first time at some BBQ.
Well, I caved and I ended up meeting her at this BBQ and in all honesty, it was pretty fun. L and I are getting along pretty well, she’s trying to feed me shots (I don’t have any because I have to work in the morning), and all is pretty great. Anyways, BBQ comes to an end and she abruptly says, ‘Okay, I’ll talk to you later’ and leaves. Confused, I drive my butt home and as soon as I get off the freeway she shoots me a text saying, ‘You could have come over to my house if you asked.’ I tell her I still can, she shoots me her address, and I turn my butt around and speed to her house.
She doesn’t live in the greatest part of town, but I was too certain that I was going to get some so I didn’t really care. I pull up to her house and she meets me out front and greets me as I walk up. As I’m walking up the stairs to her door she mentions that she takes in stray cats. I’m allergic to cats, but really as long as I don’t touch my eyes it’s a non-issue. Also, I’m thinking she probably has maybe four cats at most. These thoughts are running through my mind as I’m still walking up the steps when she says ‘Yea, so I have like 15 cats,’ and then opens the front door.
The front living room was pitch black, but I saw at least a dozen pairs of eyes all turn and look at the now open front door. Then they all scattered like a bunch of cockroaches. Now I haven’t broken stride this entire time and continue right through the door. As I crossed the threshold I thought I had walked through a wall as the smell that washed over me was horrific and it felt like it had weight. Cat pee, undeniably it was pure cat pee from 15 unwashed stray cats. There isn’t a light on in this house, but I can still see stacks of bins all over the room like it was something out of one of those hoarder TV shows. From the tops of these rubbish towers sat some of the cats, peering down at me.
L quickly ushers me to her room – which happens to smell like bleach – as my nostrils have started to burn from a smell other than cat pee. She mentions having just cleaned her room and having scrubbed everything down with bleach as if that’s a normal thing to do when you clean a room. Any sane guy probably would have backed out well before now, and I should have too, but I had come too far and couldn’t turn back now.
We get comfy on her bed and she puts on Netflix. This is before I knew ‘Netflix and Chill’ was a thing, but I knew where things were going. She picks a Sawesque type movie called ‘Adrenaline’ (I think) and makes herself comfortable as the little spoon. I make some advances during this freaking horror movie and she’s completely unresponsive. So after about 45 minutes of nothing, I tell her I need to get home and go to bed since it’s 2 am and I have work in the morning. During my entire time at her house, I tried really hard not to touch my face, but I knew since entering the apartment, there was no way I was getting out unscathed. I drive home and my eyes are itchy and are starting to water.
After getting home, I look in the mirror and my eyes just look like total trash, completely bloodshot and itchy. The allergy has never lasted more than a couple hours after starting so I went to bed and figured I would be fine by the morning. Boy, was I wrong.
I wake up with my alarm at 4:45 am, bleary-eyed and feeling like total crap as I expected. My eyes are heavy and I can barely open them as I shamble to the bathroom to take a shower. I flip on the light and see (or rather, barely see) a freaking horror show. My right eyelid had swollen out to the point where it was nearly in line with my brow and was completely swollen shut. My left was not much better. Even worse, it felt like sand had been poured in both of them. I had to call in sick to work and go to the doctor to get a prescription to bring the swelling down when it looked like it wasn’t going down after a couple hours. I text L mentioning that apparently I was more allergic to cats than I remembered and I never got a response. It took five days for the swelling to completely go away.”
She Couldn’t Believe What He Did
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“I was on a Tinder date with a ‘famous’ chef. I was taken to a dive bar where he promptly starting talking about how famous he was. We drank and watched sports. He proceeded to tell me, ‘you’re cute,’ and this eventually went to, ‘I am going to make you bleed.’ What?
He then invited one of his friends to come along. I went outside and he came up to kiss me. I was pretty wasted, so I kissed back. Eventually, he proceeded to tell me how he was ‘being charged with battering his ex-girlfriend,’ but he ‘totally didn’t do it.’ Eventually when it came time to pay the bill, ‘he lost his wallet.’ Of course, I get stuck with it. He said, ‘I’ll pay you back.’ Needless to say, I never got a payment.
Then he leaned up against me. I thought he was trying to kiss me again, but I looked down, and he was peeing on me. In the street. Peeing. On. Me. I swiftly, being too inebriated to drive, went and got myself a hotel room and a hot shower. Never again.”
She Had No Idea What She Was Walking Into
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“Matched with a guy and we messaged back and forth a few days before meeting up at a concert. I actually had a great time, I thought he was really cute and was definitely feeling good about the whole thing. He was about nine years older than me, but a very clean cut looking guy, total gentleman, and a chef at a local higher-end restaurant. He invited me back to his place after the show, and I agreed because, well, I liked the guy. Since he lived pretty close to the venue I told him I’d just follow him back. That’s when he said he didn’t own a car, or drive (apparently he walked there). That didn’t seem like a huge red flag at first so I gave him a ride back to his place and ended up going inside with him. He casually mentioned on the way up the steps to his apartment that he didn’t expect company so he apologized for not cleaning up better. Yeah, sure, that’s something we all say because we left a dish in the sink by accident, right? No big. But I was not prepared for what I was about to walk into.
The front door opened into his kitchen where there were heaps of garbage and dirty dishes covering the table, the counters, and the sink. There was also dirty laundry strewn all around on the floor. Piles of it. I’m talking hoarder style. The only light was coming from the hallway behind me but I could already tell I’d made a huge mistake. It reeked of cat piss and rotting food. As he ushered me hurriedly through the kitchen to his bedroom I found out my nightmare was only just beginning. He flipped the light switch to his room and I kid you not, I saw the cockroaches scatter. Well, some of them anyway. The others didn’t care and swarmed around his cat’s food bowl which he’d left sitting in the middle of the floor (poor animal).
The place was a complete pigsty. Trash and everything is just strewn about. He told me to have a seat on his bed, aka a mattress on the floor completely covered in cat hair. As I did, this guy just goes for it! He whips his shirt right off to reveal pierced nipples and the worst gigantic tribal chest piece tattoo. It looks almost like he drew it on with a sharpie, but I can tell it’s real. Now, I have tattoos and piercings myself, but for some reason his just made me want to vomit. I’m too grossed out to even set my purse on the floor and so I’m sitting there clutching it tightly to my chest. He puts some movie on before sitting down next to me and he starts trying to make moves. At this point, I’m looking for an escape plan and fast. I apologize, tell him some bull about being tired and work in the morning and I book it out of there. He continued to text me and call me a couple times but he did actually get the hint fairly quickly.
I later found out through the grapevine that apparently that guy had been fired from his previous job for breaking in and attempting to steal all the drinks during a snowstorm. The kicker is I ran into him a few months later at another concert where he was wasted and dancing alone up at the front before knocking over a microphone stand. Then he came up and introduced himself to my boyfriend in a very, ‘Oh, you must have heard about me’ kind of way. Truly one of the most bizarre human beings I’d ever met and a real Tinder nightmare.”
She Was Scared For Her Life
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“I can say this is one I probably won’t forget because I was actually scared for my life. For the past five months leading up to this, I had been having a lot of issues trying to sleep. Get into bed around 10 or 11 pm and I won’t be asleep till about 3 to 5 am, constantly tossing and turning. So, I wouldn’t call myself a Tinder addict, but I have been using it for quite some time and actually have gone out on a lot of Tinder dates. I’m known as the ‘Tinder veteran’ by my friends and even my younger sister.
Anyways, this guy and I matched probably two months ago and we hit it off. I would be a liar if I said he wasn’t good looking in his pictures. We ended up texting and calling for about a week before deciding to meet in person. We ended up picking a day after I worked, and it was supposed to be a local bar close to where I work (keep in mind I worked half-an-hour away from home).
Fast forward to the big day. I didn’t end up sleeping until about 5 am and had to wake up to go to work at 7 am Worked a full 12-hour day and left work to meet with this guy. I didn’t realize how tired I actually was until I got to my car. I thought about texting him to ask to rain check as I really wanted to go home and just lay down or take a bath. Instead, I sucked it up and went to go meet him at this bar which was supposed to be five minutes away. It ended up being 15 minutes away from work and 45 minutes away from home. Ugh.
I follow my Google maps to a part of town I have never been to, arrive at the location but end up circling the block five times cause there were zero signs indicating that the bar was at this location. End up parking my car in this dimly lit parking lot, looking for this place. Scared, I start thinking up of all these awful scenarios that would happen to me. So, I see all these people leaving this old beat up looking building. I looked and saw a wooden sign that had the name of the bar written on it. Now, this just reminded me of a bad horror movie or something. But having made plans and being one to not stand people up, I get out of my car and walk to the front door and go inside.
I texted the guy saying, ‘I’m here, where are you?’ Instead of getting a reply like, ‘Hi, I’m sitting by wherever.’ I get, ‘Come inside, I’m here.’ Like, okay. I know you’re here. Odd.
I go inside and stand by the door looking for the one person who might be looking toward the door. Finally, this guy sitting at the bar looks at me and I walk up to him. Bam! It hits me. He looks absolutely nothing like his pictures. Now at this point, I thought ‘Just leave, you don’t owe it to this guy who lied online any of your time.’ But I decided to give him the benefit of the doubt and I went and joined him.
We start talking and he’s super shady. He’s already eating and probably had a couple drinks already, as he was there beforehand with a buddy or something. I explained my situation of the day and apologized for my mediocre company. He was annoyed by this and thought I was lying. We didn’t end up talking much as he was constantly on his phone and eating. I ended up just sitting there watching highlights of a basketball game trying to understand what’s going on.
He finally puts his phone down and starts saying how I should relax a bit more and have a drink instead of water, that I should share his food with him and also give him a kiss on the cheek. I didn’t agree and politely declined each one of his offers, to which he did not take well. He started getting angry toward me and a bit aggressive, pulling on my chair trying to get my sweater off of me, trying to touch me and so forth. Then he called me snobby, the worst company ever (mind you I never have my phone out when I’m on a date to be polite and let them know that they have my full attention) that I’m lazy and not worth his time. At this time, he was starting to get a bit more physical, so I finally stood up and told him if that’s how he feels he shouldn’t contact me anymore and I was going home.
I was shaking so much when I was leaving. I had no idea what to do other than to run to my car.
I left the bar as fast as I could, calling one of my friends. I honestly thought that he might have had someone waiting outside to kidnap me. I ran to my car started it and I was out of that parking lot faster then you can say ‘uncle.'”