Today is Father’s Day, and there are many wonderful ways to celebrate. You can barbecue with the fam, make dad some breakfast in bed, take your old man out on the town…
Or you can troll Tinder for daddies.
As unfitting as that seems for such a holiday, who are any of us to judge someone’s preferences? Just because you like a little gray at the temples, a little beer in the gut, and some Eddie Bauer khakis doesn’t make you a deviant. Now I will say, that dads who are currently in relationships make for some tricky territory I don’t advise attempting to conquer. But I don’t know your life, you do you.
So: If you want to find yourself a Tinder dad this Father’s Day, pull out that phone, hit up that app, and get ready to swipe.
First, you’re going to head to your settings and tinker with the age option. I put mine between 28 and 51. But after an initial ride on the merry-go-round, I decided to bump that up to 30. And boy, did the results prove my hunch right!
After setting the age range, it’s time to jump into Tinder and look for pictures of dudes with babies or children. Now you might be thinking, “Molly, just because a handsome, dad-aged man has a picture with a child doesn’t mean he’s a father.”
You’re right. He could be a baby-napper.
Or, sure, OK, he could be standing next to someone’s new baby or his nephew and blithely unaware of the fact that his profile picture on Tinder could use a swap.
So if you find yourself in this situation, crushing on that silver fox who reminds you of an only slightly younger Dennis Quaid, then flip through the rest of his profile pictures.
Two with a kid? The same kid? Three even?
Jackpot.
You found yourself a Tinder dad.
If you want to save yourself the thumb energy you’ll waste on swiping left for all the non-kid-holding jerks, there is a foolproof method to finding some dads on Tinder. Head on over to Facebook, where you’ll type in to the Graph Search bar:
“My friends using Tinder.”
Anyone you know who is a dad and wasn’t savvy enough to disable this information from being shared (total dad move!) will show up.
Now if you aren’t impressed by the caliber of these results, don’t want to date a dad-friend, or it turns out you simply don’t know any fathers on Tinder, then open ‘er up! Type in:
“People who use Tinder.”
Guess what? It’s a lot. Look to your right: You’re going to want to use those filters.
Now since you’re looking for dads, you’ll want to choose “male,” but it gets more complicated from there. To narrow things down, choose a major city near you and then try the relationship statuses “married,” “divorced,” “separated,” “dating,” and “widowed” (sad). You can add birth year too, and there’s even a filter for looking to see if a specific dad is on Tinder (i.e., your arch nemesis’ pops would be the ultimate revenge bang).
I know none of that was fun or easy, and maybe Graph Search didn’t even yield any daddies. But no one told you this was going to be fun or easy, so onward, soldier.
If you’re generally struggling with getting dads to show up when you’re browsing Tinder, then you can always head to Facebook and “like” some things that dads do (Jimmy Buffett and Everybody Loves Raymond are a good start). This way, if you turn off location on Tinder and set the distance to whatever you want, the app will put priority on finding you matches based on your “likes.” I can hear a cacophony of California Pizza Kitchen and Dan Brown “likes” somewhere in the distance.
Do all of this, and surely, you can find yourself a Tinder dad. If it’s all too much, there’s always this site, where kids set you up with their parents.
Good luck, and godspeed. And I really hope for all our sakes, you don’t have to swipe left on your own dad.
Photo via Tinder