Tinder, the dating app phenomena that since its 2012 inception has made more than six billion matches across the globe, like me has Iranian roots. After several months of matching, messaging and arranging meet-ups through Tinder, I was surprised to learn that two of its Los Angeles-based founders, Sean Rad and Justin Mateen, are both of Iranian descent. But back in Iran, a country that is considered the world’s most internet censored nation, let alone a place that restricts interactions between unrelated women and men, is such an app accessible?

I recently returned to Tehran after two years, defying incessant and increasing calls from my family to marry, and had the opportunity to find out firsthand. During my time in Iran’s capital, I noticed that dating had evolved from being a covert operation to something quite commonplace. Even though on several occasions I’d been stopped by the patrolling moral guidance authorities who questioned my relationship with the woman I’d been walking with, in many other ways dating is no longer as complicated as it once was.

Aside from illicit parties while mum and dad are out of town (or even illicit parties while mum and dad are in the house), an increasing number of cafés, restaurants and parks are popping up, making meeting and subsequently dating so much easier. But I wondered how much easier things might get for Iran’s young hopefuls with the introduction of dating apps. Having just arrived from London, staring down at Tinder’s familiar red flamed icon on my mobile, I was excited to find out if the app would work in Iran, and if so, how many here would be using it.

Even before mobiles got smart, their increasing presence in the socially conservative Islamic republic seemed to bring about a profound cultural shift. For the nation’s bulging post-1979 Revolution baby boomers – the under thirty-fives that still account for nearly half the nation – mobile phones allowed individuals to interact with one another with less interception from moral authorities, be it the paramilitary militia known as the Basij, the Moral Guidance authorities or parents. But with my recent visit I noticed that things had shifted up a gear, with the nation’s largest network operator offering cheap and widely available 3G and its closest competitor advertising a new 4G service. It is with the introduction of services like these that Iranians can more freely access app-based, location-sensitive dating services.

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With Tinder, Facebook details are selectively displayed for others to swipe right to show interest or left to reject – mutual interest gets a “match”, allowing for messaging and then more. Tinder has shaken off its reputation as a hook-up (read casual sex) app since going worldwide, representing itself more as a game for which users are asked if they want to “continue playing or chat” after each match is made.

For this player, Tehran’s Tinder total availability tallied at 20 throughout my two-week visit. My preset London settings had only allowed me two swipes to the left before a message popped up below my profile picture telling me that there was “nobody new nearby”. Realising that two kilometres – my default distance setting – doesn’t cover much of Tehran’s ever-expanding metropolitan area of nearly 9 million residents, I slid my profile settings wide open, 50 kilometres and 18-50 age range. With this change, I saw my profile quickly linked with, among others, Sara, 22, not her real name, which goes for others in this article. (Publication was also delayed to protect the privacy of those who may have been active.)

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Tehran’s Milad Tower cafe. Photograph: Tehran Bureau

Sara’s first profile picture showed her casually dressed, wearing a loose, white V-neck top and without a headscarf. I swiped right indicating to Tinder that I’m interested. Later that night it appeared she’d done the same as a message flashes up on my mobile informing me that we’d made a “match”. Following a brief exchange of messages and numbers, we made vague plans to meet.

To set up Tinder, you need to be on Facebook, but unsurprisingly social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter are blocked in Iran. Even with these blocks at least 4m Iranians use Facebook, according to the government’s own statistics, with the Supreme Leader – or at least his office – being an avid tweeter, boasting 122,000 Twitter followers.

A site can be blocked outright, like the BBC, or filtered for containing a suspicious word in its name, like the Sussex police website. Despite such restrictions many Iranians continue to access these sites.

Within a day of arriving in Iran, a tech-savvy friend kindly set me up with one of the more common methods used by Iranians to evade the blocking, a virtual private network, or VPN. With his local bank card he’d pulled up a local site, made a payment of about one pound for a month’s access, tapped in a few setting changes on my mobile, and as far as any server is concerned, I’m back accessing the digital world from the United Kingdom. My mobile’s GPS however, still recognising me as a local to Iran, lets the active Tehran-based Tinder users know I’m in the same city.

“Hey Sara, how’s your weekend going so far?” I begin in English, confident that she can speak the language based on her profile warning me that she doesn’t “reply to boring clichéd messages, in case you are wondering”.

Fluency in English in Iran can suggest a certain status, but I use it just as much for practicality, what with my Persian being on a par with any Iranian pre-schooler. “Well so far everyday has been a weekend for me since i came back”, she responds, reassuring me that she does at least respond to clichéd if not boring messages. “How’s yours?”

We shoot a few messages back and forth before I invite her to meet me at a café. “Im actually dying to find some decent coffee here,” she somewhat snobbishly answers, re-establishing her transient association with Iran and playing the foreign-thus-better card right back at me. I suggest a fancy new joint in a wealthy neighbourhood in the north of Tehran, a place that boasts urban-industrial chic interior design and more than 22,500 Instagram followers. She agrees, and we both round up by pretending to be busy over the coming days, leaving a vague timeframe by which we’d meet.

Tehran’s upscale Sam Cafe.

Then it was over to Leila, my second match, a young woman proudly wearing the Bayern Munich strip in her third profile picture. Leila seemed to be different from the average girl in Iran who likes to make an ostentatious display of herself. Leila wore little make-up and her hair seemed to be a natural colour.

“So tell me about yourself? In either language ;)”

I pick up.

A red bubble eventually pops out beside her smiling profile icon, “27, female”.

“27 and female!” I respond, not typing out how I’m figuratively ROFLing - rolling on the floor laughing.

I remind myself that she Is female by looking once again at her profile pictures and notice that she’s made a little update between my exchanges with Sara. “I like the new pictures”, I tell her, referencing her cute smile. “Thanks fer the compliment”, she says. “U have great headshape”.

I tell her that I’ve not had that one before. “I had to come up with st”, she says.

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Leila tells me she Is between jobs. “So you have time to meet during the day to go for coffee?” I ask.



“I’m hesitant,” she says. I ask why.

“Bad memories…Bad experiences with tourists slash visitors.”

In an attempt to reassure her I send a link to some of my writing online, to which she types out a smiling smiley and adds, “trust building?”

After some additional reassurance from me she writes, “…then no superior gaze?”

“Haha! That’s funny,” I respond.

“To you maybe :D” she writes back, before feeling comfortable enough to suggest we go for a stroll in the park in the coming days. And with that, like Sara before her, she leaves the specifics for later.

Several other unspecified plans chop and change during an afternoon as I take myself to Tehran’s newly developed and hugely popular recreational area, known as the Park of Water and Fire. The park displays both of the elements, and also provides a massive dose of polluted air up top the adjoining double decker bridge that oversees the city, as well as a hideous highway. I take myself to the large skate park at the far end hoping to take shots of the skater girls and biker boys flipping their inline skates, skateboards, and adapted mountain bikes.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A Tehran skate park. Photograph: Tehran Bureau

As the sun sets and the temperature drops from cold to unbearable, I pick up the conversation with Sara in a WhatsApp message and ask her to join me at a nearby popular food court named Wooden Road – a series of international restaurants separated by little bridges arching over synthetic waterways. She agrees to join me there instead of our previously planned location, but lets it be known that I apparently now have terrible taste in venues.

We meet, take a seat, order and get straight to business. She tells me about her digital startup and her hopes for it. We discuss facts and figures about Iran and its evolving online market, noting a buzz based on a rumoured $200m budget for digital startups in Iran by a South African company. Sara is frank and direct, questioning the details as I talk about my experiences of working in Iran, reconfirming my suspicion that we’re having a business meeting rather than a date. She drops authors’ names and book titles before stating that she believes everything, absolutely everything, should be commodified and commercialised.

“I believe that capitalism is the answer to our problems,” she confidently asserts. I accept the challenge and question her about functions of the state, more specifically about how street lighting should be paid for. She doesn’t up-and-leave, but the conversation intensifies as I notice the coffee kicking in – dating is easier with an alcoholic drink or three…when a nation’s laws allow it, of course.

My meet-up with Leila, date number two, took place at another nearby park, probably Tehran’s strangest. It is sunk into the ground and hosts a variety of odd animals - mostly exotic birds - caged up and taunted by a frightening number of street cats. The park is situated half-way up Tehran’s longest street, Vali Asr, which once bridged two of the former Shah’s palaces.

This was the street where I met Leila, shook her hand and stood silenced by how tall she was. Thankfully she was stumped too.

“Hi, I don’t know how to do this. What do I say now?” she asks me, avoiding eye contact.

“How are you?” I both ask and answer. She answers with another question. “Where should we go?”

I continue the game and awkwardly ask, “How’d you get so tall?” before taking the lead and guiding us through the entrance.

She continues to avoid looking in my direction, made easier by us walking beside one another, but she puts an end to the question game, and begins to open up: “My parents are doctors, quite religious I guess, but I have nothing in common with them. They find me odd.”

She doesn’t see my lack of surprise and continues to tell me about how she’d studied engineering and was now between jobs. I’m reminded that although Iran has the largest student gender ratio difference across the world – with more females than males studying at university – finding work thereafter is hard for women, even before international sanctions were imposed. She asks herself a few more questions and helpfully answers them too before asking me why I’m in Iran, what I do for a living as well as general questions about my confusing background.

We meander through the park, aimlessly choosing from the many paths separating banks of grass and trees, each with an adjoining bench and on each, a single cat shifting for the breaks of sunlight beaming through the trees that towered above. Our conversation was as fractured as the park layout, with mostly Leila feeding me parts of her life in patchwork. We passed a bench where an old woman sat feeding a large congress of cats, undeterred by the four men loudly commentating while playing on one of the park’s fixed football tables. “Crazy cat lady,” says Leila, humorously in English, causing the cats to turn to see why I’m laughing.

I ask about her experiences on Tinder in Tehran and more specifically about the “superior gaze”. She tells me about her last date, also with an English man, but unlike me, fully so. I didn’t fully understand what had happened, mostly due to my poor Persian, but it sounded like she had a good case for sexual harassment. She continued, telling me that she’s not a prude but should her parents learn about her sexual activities she’d likely be kicked out of the house. On the other hand, she was clear that she doesn’t take kindly to being treated like a sex object.

Both of my dates concluded with a simple handshake, followed by a slightly insincere “see you later,” although in the case of Sara, this still remains my hope. There was however one last Tehran Tinder encounter, but upon my return to London, which can occasionally happen when jumping between locations. I matched with Mena, 27, and after a brief exchange she asked me, “Is this a business trip?”

I then realised what had happened.

“Tinder thinks I’m still in Iran. I was there on business, pleasure and seeing family,” I respond to which she quickly replies, “So you’re back home :)”

Returning to London and seeing profile pictures of girls in bars, drinks-in-hand or leaping into the air, star-shaped, in a bikini before a sunset, reminded me that yes, I was indeed back. Her message however, sent another reminder to me: I slide my settings back down to a more narrow two kilometre range and 26-36 and “continue playing.”

Both of my Tinder dates in Tehran – although destined to be nothing more than just one-offs – were probably more successful than several of my London attempts. Tinder can be quick and callous, but this is how dating is in Iran, where the classic method of cruising here can display girls left and right, before a brief exchange that hopefully leads to a further exchange of numbers.

Although there aren’t many users at the moment, I believe that Tinder is set to take off in Iran, not only because of the nation’s quick adoption of most things digital but also because of the further empowerment that this type of technology enables the youth – allowing them to quite literally take things into their own hands for a change.