In online or app dating, you must swipe through hundreds of matches, read each profile, chat online, set up a date, and actually go—only to repeat the process over and over again, until you find. 37% of men DO NOT think using dating apps while in a relationship is cheating unless there are flirty messages being sent. Overall 95% of millennials still prefer to meet someone offline, proving that our generation has not lost all hope for romance and love yet. Society seems to think Millennials are the Netflix-and-Chill generation, but POF’s study found otherwise. Seventy-five percent of Millennials surveyed want to find a serious relationship from a. Welcome to Plenty of Fish! Being part of our global community means that you have a commitment from us to help ensure that you feel welcomed, safe, and free to be yourself. This app works best with JavaScript enabled. 5 Apps Millennials Love and How They Inspired Social Change. Millennials get a bad wrap. As a 29-year-old smack in the middle of this generation, I often feel misunderstood by other generations.

If you ask me, us Millennials have an unfairly bad rap when it comes to our dating lives and habits. Like with any generation, there are Millennial dating problems, but the general assumption that we're addicted to our apps and incapable of making genuine connections is pretty much BS, right? To find out if Millennials are really as flaky and love-averse as they seem, ABODO Apartments — an online apartment marketplace helping college students find their next off-campus rental — surveyed 3,500 college students across the country about their dating app use and their views on love and relationships.

'I think the biggest misconception is that Millennials are just looking for hookups or casual sex,' Sam Radbil, Senior Communications Manager at ABODO, tells Bustle. 'So much of the popular narrative makes Millennials look like opportunistic hedonists, glued to their phones and always looking for short-term flings… or nudes. Millennials get a bad rap when it comes to just about everything. Their love lives are no exception. But if our survey data shows anything, it’s that Millennials aren’t all that different from the generations preceding them. They’re just using the tools available to them.'

Do we like our dating apps? Sure. But we're also optimistic about finding love IRL — not just casual sex. If you want a glimpse into the minds of younger Millennial daters, here are seven surprising findings about the way college students are actually using all those dating apps.

A whopping 91 percent of those surveyed said that hooking up was not their primary reason for using dating apps. In fact, plenty of folks wanted the opposite: 11 percent of men and women were searching for love, and around 10 percent were just looking for some new pals — aww.

Looking for new friends is cute and all, but there are still people who use their dating apps for less wholesome purposes. For people of all genders, about 34 percent said entertainment was the number one reason they use dating apps. Also un-romantic? Around 15 percent of women and 10 percent of men said they used their apps mainly for an ego boost. And the grand finale: nine percent of women and eight percent of men said they're on dating apps for the ~nudes~ .

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Tinder was the most popular dating app among the students surveyed, with 84.4 percent of people saying they used the app. Other popular dating apps included: Bumble (17.3 percent), OkCupid (8.6 percent), and Coffee Meets Bagel (7.4 percent).

There's nothing wrong with having sex on the first date (assuming you're both comfortable and consenting), but that's actually not the goal for most younger Millennial daters. While 5.6 percent of respondents said sex was the goal of the first date, most people were pretty neutral on the issue: 31 percent said they wouldn't normally do a first-date hookup but would consider it if they had a great connection, and 22 percent didn't really care about hooking up either way. On the flip side, only around a third of women and nine percent of men said 'no way' to a first-date hookup.

Younger Millennials might enjoy dating apps, but only four percent of people surveyed said they prefer to meet potential partners that way. Actually, 79 percent of people said they'd rather meet someone offline — through mutual friends or mutual interests. Fortunately, it's totally possible to meet someone IRL, so don't be afraid to delete your dating apps and try some new ways to make romantic connections.

It would be great if we could all treat each other with respect online, but unfortunately, the ABODO survey found that 35.5 percent of women and 14.1 percent of men have experienced harassment on dating apps. The app with the worst reputation for harassment was Grindr, with 51 percent of respondents saying they'd experienced harassment on the app. After that, OkCupid had the next-highest percentage of reported harassment, with 40 percent saying they'd been harassed on OKC (though this could be because you don't have to match with someone to receive a message from them on the site).

Luckily for those who are coupled up, almost 70 percent of respondents said they considered using dating apps while in an exclusive relationship to be cheating. For some, however, the lines were a little blurry: 20 percent of men and 17 percent of women said dating app use was only cheating if flirty messages were exchanged. Similarly, around nine percent of men and four percent of women thought meeting up in person makes it cheating. And then there were the eight percent of men and five percent of women who apparently don't consider dating app use to be cheating at all (hey, to each their own).

We may not always be perfect, but Millennials aren't all hookup-driven, app-addicted serial daters who avoid love at all costs. Even though modern dating looks different than previous generations and comes with its own set of problems (like being ghosted or breadcrumbed), the fact remains that Millennials still desire love, and want to make real, in-person connections — and that gives me hope.

I spent all last summer going on random dates with complete strangers. I mean, not totally random. I swiped, selected, chatted, and agreed to meet for drinks (in well-lighted public locations). My friends joked I had a type: doctors, because I once wanted to become one.

I met tons of new guys I’d never have met otherwise, thanks to my pocket matchmaking buddies, Tinder and Bumble. Coming of age in the age of technology and online dating, many of us millennials take for granted how easy it is to access other singles—and how relatively new this phenomenon is. According to a recent study published in October, online and app dating is shaking up society in profound ways, even as its rise has become something our generation has started to take for granted.

And yet, for as common as online dating is, there’s still the persistent question about whether or not tech-based dating is a more effective method of meeting a long-term relationship partner. Claims about online’s superiority in creating incredible couples have been inconclusive at best. In researching my own book on relationships, the effect of app dating was the first thing most singles wanted to chat (vent?) about. It is an exhausting process, after all.

Having so many romantic options can lead to an overabundance of choice; per psychologist Barry Schwartz’s Paradox of Choice, a few options increase our happiness, but too many can have the opposite effect. In online or app dating, you must swipe through hundreds of matches, read each profile, chat online, set up a date, and actually go—only to repeat the process over and over again, until you find a match with whom you have chemistry and who’s equally committed to forming a stable bond.

Yep. It’s laborious. It can take a lot of matches to produce a “maybe.” This has led some daters to set up multiple dates in a week. Or sometimes, marathon dating can take place in one night. I remember one person with whom I spoke who detailed a Friday from which he went from happy hour to dinner to nightcap with three different women. It’s difficult to savor each date when you have so many of them, figuring how you feel both on the date and after the date to determine your actual level of interest in one person. You have to find a working strategy for your personality, which can take some trial and error.

All that said, app dating is not all bad. At all! The method has the potential to really rock our worlds in a positive way as tech expands us. In some ways, as researchers have pointed out, online dating is displacing traditional methods of meeting a partner, like through friends and family. While metropolitan areas may still have a bustling nightlife, I’ve often noted to friends how rapidly the mingling component of bars in my mid-sized Midwestern city has dwindled since the dawn of Tinder. Why get potentially rejected by a stranger in person, when you can probably meet the exact same person on an app if you mutually swipe right? We’d rather hang with our friends on a Friday, and keep our dating lives separate.

Using online dating, you also dramatically increase your prospect pool in a good way. Just like I seemed to filter for men in medicine over the summer, you can filter for whatever your heart desires, as well. But filtering via profile goes way beyond superficial qualities, too. App dating, coupled with the rise of women flooding education and the workforce, has led to a rise in assortative mating, aka pairing off with a partner who’s rather similar to yourself in a variety of ways that go beyond the superficial.

Consider Match.com opened the door to internet-based dating in 1995, followed by sites like OKCupid in the early 2000s, and finally Tinder to start the app boom in 2012. Before all that, you were limited to meeting your significant other in one of a few ways. Maybe family or friends, maybe church or work, maybe activities or hobbies, or perhaps in a bar or coffee shop if you were feeling bold and got a little lucky. But most people met within their “loose” social network. “While most people were unlikely to date one of their best friends, they were highly likely to date people who were linked with their group of friends—a friend of a friend, for example,” explains MIT Technology Review.

Online dating has basically blown up all our social networks. If you meet an online or app dating prospect, you are far more likely to be meeting up with a complete stranger. And when a couple is formed via this tech-based method, you are drawing a new tie that didn’t exist before, thus completely changing the fabric of your social network.

As such, the researchers look at the rise of interracial marriage to prove their point that online dating is completely shaking up societal connections. I hadn’t really taken stock of these results IRL, before checking out this research, so peered around my own social circle for suggestive evidence; of my four closest friends, two of them are in interracial pairings.

There are other potential reasons for an uptick in these matches, other than online dating, but not changes this major, say the study authors; we see spikes in interracial relationships just after each online dating boom. The most recent major jump was in 2014, just over a year after Tinder debuted.

Moving beyond race, the scientists also show evidence for stronger marriages in a society that’s fully embraced online and app dating. In the past, researchers have ID’d some reasons online dating might be a notably viable method of meeting a significant other, particularly because you can filter for perceived compatibility and you’re more likely to meet someone motivated to build a relationship. Both totally viable reasons to swipe, set up dates, and invest in meeting new people.

After interviewing tons of committed couples in this age of “options,” I’ve held the hope of stronger bonds for quite some time. Although online dating can be a bumpy ride—the swiping, the ghosting, the unknown—it can also expose you to tons of different “types.”

Best Dating Apps For Millennials

Dating lots of different types, much of which is done via apps today, is now almost a modern-day rite of passage for many. If you’ve dated around, determined what you need and what you like, you can more easily tell when a relationship has the mettle to go the distance. Not to mention, you’re more likely to be confident of your decision to commit, which makes all those bad Tinder dates and ghosting episodes totally worth it.