First - an apology to my mother. Mom, I'm sorry you had to hear it like this. I'm sorry my confession is blatantly displayed on the Internet, in front of all the Internet people. I'm sorry I lied to you and told you Ryan and I met at Bar Louie. I told you a dumb little love story, comprised of 100 percent true facts, just in the wrong order. So, technically, I just did a "lie of omission" which isn't that bad, but you're the woman who raised me, so I just had to apologize, here, formally, in front of all the Internet people.

I swiped right on Ryan's profile as I walked to the bus station from South Campus. I first saw his wonderful face illuminated on a screen, while the harsh lights of Happy's Pizza flooded overhead. (If you're going to judge anything about me from this article, judge me on the fact I actually considered purchasing anything from Happy's, not that I met my boyfriend on a dating app.) I learned in an instant that he was 25, had a beard and was .5 miles from me. His profile said: "Automotive engineer by day, amateur dodge ball player by night, your soulmate since fifteen seconds ago." He made me laugh, so I sent him a message.

There's a rich abundance of dating apps floating around today. There's Tinder, Bumble, OKCupid - just to name a few. I was using Bumble because the only way to start a conversation was for the girl to message first. I could message people I wanted to and not need to worry about getting hit up from the creepy guys my friends matched with when they wanted to screw around on my phone.

Ryan and I started talking, agreed to meet for brunch, went for a walk, and began dating. I really liked him, and I knew that I had to tell my mom about him.

"Mom," I said into the phone. My mom and I talk a lot, but that day, I was definitely nervous to tell her about my new boyfriend. "Guess what? I met this really nice guy." She asked me how we met, and I blurted out, "We met at work. He took me for a little walk around the block, and we went out to brunch the next day."

Technically, I only switched up one detail, omitting how we actually met. The walking and the brunching both happened. I didn't know why I felt so ashamed to tell her that, alas, her sweet child used dating apps. Her sweet child wasn't getting wooed and courted; no, she impulsively downloaded Bumble one boring afternoon.

What drove me to try dating apps wasn't the possibility that, somewhere, my bearded Prince Charming was waiting to whisk me away on his snowy-white stallion* (*GMC Terrain, and it's black). Instead, I just wanted to meet people outside of my major, and even the university. I'm a music major, which is one of the University of Michigan's smallest colleges. This means that everyone knows everyone, and, consequently, the dating options dwindle when you're either as close as siblings with a guy, or you used to date his friend. I created a Bumble profile so I could meet people who I wouldn't run into on the way to rehearsal. If things went sour, I'd never have to see them again. If things went great, I could share my love of music with him, and he could show me cool aspects of his own life.

With the rise in Tinder-spawned relationships, why was I so embarrassed to admit to people that I'd met Ryan on a dating app? We are both relatively normal (operative word: relatively) people, with similar hobbies and goals in life, so it wouldn't shock anyone who knew us that we were crazy about each other. Maybe it's the stigma (usually bestowed by older people who met their significant others at a swing dance or a suffragette meeting) that those apps are only used by people at 2 AM to find someone to come over and drunkenly copulate. I mean, the access to hundreds of other college students (who are all different combinations of drunk/lonely/lustful at 2 AM, we have all been there) is definitely a handy-dandy feature of Tinder. But it's also a piece of technology that brings people together. Think of it as a Facebook, only instead of "likes", you get the love of your life (or someone you'll accidentally make eye contact with in the Diag two weeks later and immediately want to die).

Maybe the crux of admitting to my mom that Ryan and I met on Bumble was the hour-long lecture (I'm waiting for my phone to explode at any moment now...) about safety. THIS IS TOTALLY VALID. I am her little child. She does not want her little child meeting random people. However, because Tinder and Bumble are most popularly used on college campuses, I feel there's a safer vibe. Andrew, whose profile picture is him with a golden retriever, is probably Andrew, the stats major, who is .2 miles from you. He probably isn't actually some creeper who lives in a van near a polluted river and enjoys dismembering people as a hobby. There's also a feature on these dating apps that lets you know if you and a match have Facebook friends in common.

This can go one of two ways.

Tindee: "Hey, Amanda! Do you know this guy? It says you're friends with him."

Amanda: "Yeah, that's a cool, non-criminal, non-murdering dude I went to high school with!"

Tindee: "Awesome!"

-or-

TIndee: "Oh shit oh shit oh shit, we have mutual friends. This can never be a thing. This can never evolve. Oh, god, the resulting weirdness." *throws phone into active volcano*

Sometimes, when I'm watching a movie with Ryan or we're eating pizza together, I think to myself, Now how in the world did I meet this cool person on a dating app... It's crazy to think that, had I not opened the app that night, I wouldn't know my sweetheart. Is it fate? An act of God? Cosmic intervention?

Nah.

It's online dating.