I Try: Hinge

Sure, Tinder and Bumble are fine — but what about the modern woman who wants something more? (aka the bitch who’s already swiped through the entire region, aka me) There’s a whole app store full of alternative apps that hope to socially engineer our generation to happily ever after, each with their own gimmick. This time, I try: HINGE.

Jeannie spends a lot of time on boats. Good for you, but some of us have to go to class, JEANNIE.

Tinder is the baseline — the first thing that people think of when they think of dating apps — which means that everyone is on it. Everyone: from ‘getting back out there after a breakup’ to ‘looking for true love’ to ‘one night stand’ to ‘I’m going to murder you in my basement’. For that reason, Tinder provides the largest number of options… but requires filtering to get matches who are looking for the same things that you are. I’ve matched with hundreds of guys on Tinder, and have been on maybe 5 dates?

Bumble is more concentrated in terms of audience. Like I originally remarked wayyyyy back at the start of this project, Bumble is very white and ‘young professional.’ Wall-to-wall financial analysts — maybe the interface encourages this, since Bumble was the first of these apps to pull your workplace from Facebook along with name and age… so maybe people who identify really heavily with their job like it? Man, who knows. You’re definitely more likely to go on dates from Bumble matches.

I downloaded Hinge once before — maybe two years ago? At that time, their gimmick was twofold:

• 1) you would only see people who were friends of friends
• 2) you would only be presented with a limited number of possible matches per day.

It’s not a bad concept, right? Their premise was that successful relationships come from people introducing single friends to one another, and that those people tend to have more in common.

I didn’t enjoy it, I think because only a really specific group of people were using it at that point — 90% of my potential matched were linked through two of my older sister’s friends who went to college near my hometown. Basically, the app had taken off with like… bankers from the midwest who were now in NYC. As a 19-year-old, I was not into it.

Also, a major part of my enjoyment of dating apps at that point was intermittent bingeing — you know, getting tipsy and swiping for three hours straight — not consistent, casual usage, so the ‘you get three dudes handpicked and presented to you each day’ thing didn’t really work for me.

Now, Hinge has changed their approach — they market it as ‘the relationship app,’ as the antithesis to… basically everything I wrote about above with Tinder and Bumble.

The ‘friends of friends’ element is gone, replaced with promises about an algorithm that will ‘learn’ what you like in a partner and provide tailored options to you each day. There are a few elements of the Hinge setup:

• You can give a LOT of information — age, location, job, height, race, religion, etc — and people do actually tend to fill most of it out, which is… unusual. But fun! MANY users of Hinge are VERY SHORT. But it’s easy to identify them, since almost everyone gives their height.
• Profiles are a series of pictures and responses to question prompts, like “What are you reading right now?” or “Guilty pleasure?” There’s no ‘bio’ component. This so works for me — I can answer a question with no trouble, but trying to sum myself up in 500 characters??? Kill me.
• You get a limited number of ‘impressions’ (basically likes) per day — anywhere between 3 and 7, as far as I can tell. It varies, but I think you get more for having your profile filled out, for responding to messages, for using the app consistently, etc. It’s a bit Big Brother for suuuuure, but as someone who actually does use dating apps daily (Thanks, ThursDating!!!), I’m down with it.
• In order to match (or ‘connect,’ as they call it) with someone, you use one of your ‘impressions’ to like or comment on one of the elements of their profile. This gets a bit iffy if they’ve chosen to not really answer questions — I feel way more comfortable being like ‘I liked this!’ about something funny someone said than just… their face. If someone already ‘connected’ with you, then you just straight-up get to accept or decline that connection.

So that’s Hinge! I’ve already gone on one date from it (ill-fated Colin #2), and, honestly, probably could have gone on two or three dates, easy. The dudes on Hinge are READY TO DATE. It is almost alarming. But I’m about it, and the interface really works for what I’m doing here on ThursDating, so I’m definitely working Hinge into my regular rotation.

However, it wouldn’t be ThursDating if we didn’t make fun of some dudes with shitty profiles while we’re here. Let’s gooooo.

This goes back to one of my old-school dealbreakers, but c’mon man. You get one shot at a first impression, and choose to say… ‘find me in the coke room.’

There’s a lot going on with this guy — ‘death by taco’ hat with a cross as the ‘t’ in taco covering a head that has more hair than I do right now, muscle tee, classy black-and-white photography — but needless to say I didn’t use one of my three remaining impressions on my cokehead friend here.

You kinda can’t tell, but the top and bottom pictures here are the same photo… as were ALL OF THE PICTURES. There’s something to be said for sticking with your strengths, but I can assure you — it wasn’t that strong of a picture. Also, not to harp on the drug theme, but… “I am into plant medicine (not just weed)” is one of the funniest things I’ve read in months.

If the dog wasn’t enough to get you… how about the TERRIFYING TWIN MUSCLE NIGHTMARE MEN???

This reminds me of two things:

1) the twin werewolves on Teen Wolf (yes, I used to watch Teen Wolf, and yes, you can fuck off) who could combine into one mega-werewolf.

2) that part in The Social Network where the one Armie Hammer Winklevoss twin says “I’m 6'5, 220 and there’s two of me.”

If this guy looked like Armie Hammer, maybe this picture would have worked. Alas, he did not.

Let’s take a moment to appreciate Armie Hammer in The Social Network. Yessssss.

The above images fall into a category I like to call ‘literacy is key.’ “Never have I ever Loves life” and “What is book?” are not endearing quips.

Finally, to close us out:

“When I met my husband, he was shilling free iPads via a social networking scam… I messaged him, he responded, and it was love at first sight! We dated, got married, and now we have six kids! I couldn’t ask for a better love story!”

Ok, this got INSANELY long (and is a day late, whoops), but since I’m missing two weeks of ThursDates while on spring break, I think it’s all good.

SEE Y’ALL SOON!