"We Met On Tinder...and Got Married!"

Tinder seems to be the quintessential ‘bad-boy’ of the dating app universe—it has a bit of a reputation for unreliability, and only being good for something fun and meaningless. But these three couples managed to make an honest app out of it by finding their forever-after ending in true, tech-gen style. And trust us, their stories will make you want to get your swipe on Right. This. Minute...

Anushka Moore, 27, and James Moore, 30

“It’s really strange, but we knew it on our second date. I took him to my favourite restaurant for fondue and he held my hand on the pretext of examining my tattoo. Oh, the electricity that passed through me!” Anushka gushes. They went dancing to a seedy bar after, and she was totally hooked by his geeky dance moves. “That night,
he asked if he could kiss me and it was the best first kiss ever. I knew right then that something about this was different. He was a game-changer,” she smiles. James,
who was working with Barclays then, was in India for two months. They threw caution to the wind and decided to meet every day for the next six weeks! The whole
long-distance thing was just not an option. They were miserable without each other. So, when Anushka flew down to London with her mother a few months later to meet his family, he went down on one knee against the backdrop of London’s iconic Millenium Bridge. “Mum was so taken by him she said she couldn’t have found me a better groom if she’d looked for one herself,” she gushes. And then, after dreaming, planning, and re-planning across two continents, Anushka and James finally had a Pinterest-perfect white wedding in May last year. “I like Tinder’s ability to help you break out of your social circle. You’re bound to exhaust your friends and their friends as potential matches at some point. Meeting someone completely new online comes with a thrill of its own,” Tinderella smiles!

Pragati Shukla, 29, and Varun Kapoor, 32

A Software Engineer for Android at Google, Varun made a trip from San Francisco to New Delhi, an unplanned one at that, for some visa renewal business. While introducing his mother to the joys of swiping right, he came across Pragati’s profile, replete with witty one-liners and pop culture references. As a TV junkie himself with a penchant for good grammar, Varun was immediately intrigued. In the week that followed, arbitrary conversations soon took a personal trajectory and continued till wee hours in the morning. So, they decided to meet for coffee that week. According to Pragati, he came across as intense and gritty— “A complete contrast to my rainbows and butterflies personality,” she chirps.

But of course, I had to see her again,” Varun laughs. He had only three days in the city, and she made each one of them worth it. Being 8,700 miles away only stoked their longing for one another, and, after a couple of particularly lengthy Skype dates, he made his intentions of a lifetime of togetherness clear. Three months later, on the day of the Summer Equinox, the couple finally tied the knot back in the capital. “I was attracted to who she was at a fundamental level. We had the rest of our lives to get to know each other,” Varun mused

 ’Course Pragati had to quit her job as a sub-editor at NDTV to move to California. Plus, there were a tonne of legal formalities to be taken care of. But here they are, a year later, blissfully married and enamoured by each other in a way that elicits collective ‘awws’. “What I love about online dating is that it really maximises your chances, and helps you go beyond the realm of people you’d ordinarily come in contact with or be attracted to,” Varun propounds..

Alisha Ahmed, 28, and Varun Shah, 28

Varun admits that he was enamoured by Alisha’s pictures—but it was a snapshot of her in Chandra Taal, Himachal Pradesh, a place that he too had visited recently—that stood her out. The whole ‘solo traveller with an insatiable appetite for adventure’ thing was a terribly attractive quality to have. The conversation then took its natural course from Tinder to Facebook and WhatsApp. Varun, who is the co-founder of an advertising agency, commissioned a project to Happy Finish, the production studio where Alisha works as Business Development Manager. “As a part of this ‘correspondence’, he sent me a Google invite with a date and time asking me to pick a place for our ‘meeting’,” she laughs. “We ended up going to AER (Mumbai) that night and had such a great time!” Varun is obviously all about the grand gestures—and his proposal really blew her mind. After seven months of officially being a ‘couple’ he threw a small do at his best friend Yuvraj’s house, and invited her under the guise of it being ‘his birthday party’. What ensued was a full-blown Bollywood-style performance by their inner circle (the dance troupe Alisha is a part of, included). It ended with a performance by Varun—particularly endearing because of a bit
of a ‘two left feet’ situation. And then, he moved the lady to tears by going down on both knees and asking her to marry him with their closest friends as witnesses, and gave us major #couplegoals by tying the knot early this year!