How long-lost siblings were reunited over Tinder

A lot of things have been said about Tinder. Some think it’s a great way to find an amazing date and can even lead to engagement and marriage; others think it’s a fabulous hook-up tool; still others think it’s just asking for trouble. But now, Tinder can add a major benefit to its list: helping people find long-lost siblings.

According to NLTimes, siblings Erik de Vries, 24, and Josephine Egberts, 22, were separated 16 years ago after their parents ended their relationship. Their mother and Josephine stayed at home in the Netherlands, while their father and Erik left for Belgium. Eventually, they lost touch. . . until Erik swiped right. I know, it’s about to get weird—but there’s a happy, not-weird ending, promise.

“The first time I swiped her profile I had absolutely no idea,” Erik told Mic. “To be honest, it hasn’t been on my mind in the past few years after Maarten, my brother, and I finished a failed search for Josephine a few years ago.”

So Erik, thinking Josephine was just a stranger, spoke with her like he would with any match on Tinder. (So, now it’s really weird.) But after a while, he started to become suspicious, in a good way. “In our next conversation, I started to get some clues and figured she might actually be my sister,” Erik explained to Mic. “This kind of shocked me, so I decided not to contact her for a few days.  The fact that [I] had a lost sister and she had lost her twin brothers did give her suspicion as well.”

According to NLTimes, they met up two weeks later at a cafe. “When I saw him, it was suddenly very clear,” Josephine told Datingsite Kiezen. “It was so special to see my own blood brother again after 16 years.”

Datingsite Kiezen is a Dutch online dating review site, and one of the site’s writers, Sjoerd Zwart, reached out to Erik and got a snapshot of the three siblings—Erik, Josephine, and Erik’s twin brother Maarten—reunited at last.

Turns out Tinder can, indeed, help you find love of all sorts, and not always the romantic kind. We’re so happy that this family was able to be reunited. We’re also still in shock that they found each other in the weirdest of places. But then again, dating sites are increasingly becoming a fluid central artery of social media, a place where you can make all kinds of unexpected connections. Sometimes, you even find your long-lost family member.