It’s difficult to say whether e-dating has weakened or boosted the pickup line game. It probably depends on who you ask.
To get to the bottom of it, we ventured on over to Reddit to check out the general state of cheesy one-liners to be deployed in an online dating setting. And the results are, well … the results kinda speak for themselves. But as far as we can tell, pickup lines, like cockroaches after an apocalyptic event, have survived the shift to online dating and are doing just fine.
From the looks of r/pickuplines and other threads we dug into, they continue to be as prevalent — and face-palm inducing — as ever.
To determine the honor of which lines appear on our list below, we looked to Reddit’s point system, which allows users to upvote posts and responses, signifying popularity, which is how we selected our top 20. Some of these zingers weren’t necessarily used on Tinder originally, but if we could imagine them feasibly being used in an online setting, they made the cut.
Cringe warning: Viewing these Tinder pickup lines may cause you to recoil away from the screen in secondhand embarrassment. Using these pickup lines on an actual human in an online setting may result in a swift block — a digital severance of communication from the person you’re talking to — because your pickup line was just so damn cringe-y your intended couldn’t bear to talk to you anymore.
Could the target of your pickup line turn out to have a fond appreciation for corniness and end up being the love of your life? Maybe. A very, very, very, featherlight maybe. Like, probably not. The odds are stacked against you there. But who knows? Anything’s possible, we guess.
That said, gaze upon the results of our rigorous content analysis below and, beyond that, proceed with caution.