When it comes to online dating, everybody wants to find someone with whom they have a lot in common — as long as those commonalities don't include having the same parents.
But this is exactly what happened to Erik de Vries, 24, and Josephine Egberts, 22, according to Mic.
The long-lost siblings reconnected after matching on Tinder and flirting for a few days before figuring out the truth.
The Dutch online daters have a story straight out of "The Parent Trap" — which is funny, because something similar happened to the star of that movie, Lindsay Lohan, when she discovered her own brother on Tinder in 2013.
Thankfully, Lohan recognized him as kin before any saucy texts were exchanged.
Egbert and de Vries didn't catch on that quickly, though.
The backstory: their parents divorced in 1999 and, instead of sharing custody of both kids, they divvied up their offspring, Mic reports. De Vries and his twin brother moved to Belgium with Dad, while Josephine stayed in the Netherlands with their Mom.
When they came of age and de Vries moved back to the Netherlands for school, he and his sister saw each other on Tinder.
"The first time I swiped her profile I had absolutely no idea," de Vries 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."
Like any red-blooded Dutch male, de Vries started flirting with his cute new Tinder match. But "in our next conversation," he said, "I started to get some clues and figured she might actually be my sister."
Instead of throwing an impromptu family reunion, de Vries was apparently a little freaked out. He terminated contact for a few days, Mic reports. But then:
Curiosity eventually got the best of him, so he confronted his Tinder match about her full identity. The two exchanged stories about their pasts — parents with a rocky divorce, long lost siblings — and soon realized: They were brother and sister.
After meeting up about a week later, they were brought together once more in a reunion of all three siblings by the Dutch website Datingsite Kiezen.
As for this new Tinder use case — reconnecting with lost family members — Tinder cofounder and CMO Justin Mateen is likely not surprised. He has insisted from the outset that the app is for making every kind of connection.
"The vision is more about social discovery than just dating," he said in a 2014 interview with the Observer. "We launched our dating vertical first, because it was a sticky place to start."
