What gets your goat: Couple profiles on Tinder

Go somewhere else to find your third

By Jessica Berget, Opinions Editor

Is there anything more frustrating than not getting a message back on Tinder? The answer is yes, there is: Couple profiles. Don’t believe me? Just imagine you’re swiping through the local singles in your area, you see a cute girl’s photo and, as you look through her profile, you realize that not only does she already have a boyfriend, but they’re just looking for a “sexy girl to have a fun time with.” Ugh.

Tinder is predominantly seen as an online dating app, but it’s also used to help people find friends, get hook-ups, and, of course, engage in threesomes. Many straight couples use the app to find their “unicorn”—someone who joins a couple as a third partner for sex. Sometimes this even means being romantically and sexually exclusive with that couple. The term “unicorn” is used in this case because people willing to engage in threesomes—much less with strangers over the internet—are often rare and hard to find.

As someone who is interested in both men and women, it is irritating to me when couples make profiles looking for bisexual or lesbian women to spice up their sex life. To find these “unicorns,” couples must edit their profile to be interested in women so that only women come up on their feed. Unsurprisingly, many of the profiles on Tinder, if you have your settings set to only show women, are straight couples looking for bi or lesbian women to be their third, which is frustrating when you’re just trying to meet other women. Of course, not all couples who do this are straight, but it seems there are a significant amount of them in the way they fetishize gay women, especially when referring to them as “unicorns,” a term that I think has some underlying problems.

Couples should know better than to use gay or bi women’s spaces to get their own needs met. There are not a lot of women who identify as bisexual or lesbian on Tinder as it is, so to make a profile for you and your partner to clog my Tinder feed with your “unicorn-hunting” nonsense is invasive of gay women’s space. There are already many apps or ways for couples to find thirds in their sexual liaisons, so please stop using the lesbian section of Tinder.

I’m not saying there is anything wrong with having threesomes—if that is something you are interested in or how you want to express yourself sexually, have at it. However, there are many better and non-intrusive ways to go about doing this that don’t infringe on the lesbian or bisexual section of a dating app. Gay and bi women are already sexualized enough in pornography and the media, so don’t bring that to one of the only places women can go to look for other women to date.