One year ago, I joined Bumble BFF. For those of you not aware, Bumble (the dating app made famous because only women have the power to start conversations with people they match with) has a “BFF” platform for making friends. It also has a “Bizz” platform for professional networking, which I have never used. I downloaded the app when I moved from London to York at the end of the third lockdown in England in March 2021. It’s hard to make friends anyway, anytime, but it’s really hard when you move somewhere when everything is closed. So I downloaded it and I started swiping.
The app works the same way most dating apps do - swipe left for no, right for yes. The profiles of the women on the app (it’s not just for women, but it was almost exclusively populated by women) looked a lot like dating profiles. Cute selfies, a tasteful array of pictures that showcased hobbies and pets and the fact that they had other friends. I felt instantly better about myself when I joined, because everyone had written something similar to my little “About Me” blurb - “I moved here during the pandemic and I don’t know how to make friends!” Or, more dramatically, “I don’t know who my friends are anymore after lockdown.”
I went on a lot of friend dates - about fifteen in the first few months of having the app. I had conversations on the app with even more people, and I still follow some of them on Instagram and feel weirdly invested in their lives, even though we never ended up meeting up. I’ve never been the kind of person who finds “community” online, in comment sections or Reddit threads, but this felt kind of similar. Talking to people I never met, or even really intended to meet, made me feel like I was a little less isolated. I wrote about virtual friendships a few weeks ago, and my experience with Bumble feels related to my thinking about parasocial relationships on Instagram. But in this case, I did meet some of them in real life. A lot of my friend dates were first dates only, and they were awkward and funny and weird. But some of them weren’t. A lot of the people I still hang out with now, a year after moving, are people I met on Bumble last summer, or people I met through them. They’re really great and I’m so happy I know them.
Whenever I bring it up to friends I met the normal way - at school, at work, through my boyfriend, whatever - they act a little surprised, a little awkward, like they’re not sure if they should pity me or congratulate me. It’s weird, because I also have conversations with a lot of them about their struggles with friends - someone moving away, not being invited to something, feeling like they want to meet new people but not knowing how. But using an app feels too desperate, too impersonal, too AI for real friendship.
It would be awesome to be able to make loads of friends by just becoming a regular at a coffee shop or doing a lot of yoga at a cute little studio. But did we ever make friends there, anyway? Even before the pandemic, the struggle of making friends in your twenties (or whenever) was well established. Most people coast through with the friends they’ve already got, but if you find yourself somewhere without them, it takes a huge amount of effort to find new ones. It’s not weird to meet your boyfriend on an app - the only people I know who met their partners in real life met in college. So why is it weird to meet friends?
Something that is nice about dating apps is that once you decide to meet up with someone, you have reached a basic level of understanding that you both find each other attractive and vaguely interesting and that you are both looking for a romantic relationship - maybe that evaporates once you meet, but that’s the general premise of going on a date. None of this “is he flirting?” from across the room at a party. That is a nice thing about friend dating, too, if you are, like me, not an extrovert. You already know that whoever you’re meeting wants to be friends, so you don’t have to feel weird about taking up their time or being too keen to hang out again. Is this indicative of my own insecurities about taking up space or being an imposition on someone else’s life/time? Yes! But it is also a solution!
All the drawbacks to meeting people by swiping through them like a game are definitely real, too - sometimes when I feel friend anxiety or don’t have weekend plans, I open Bumble and swipe away, and I feel like I’m one coffee date away from knowing enough people to actually host a house party. That’s the problem with online dating, too - one weird date and you’re back to swiping, imagining your life with dozens of much hotter and cooler people. But if you keep swiping forever, you’ll never actually HAVE the community, the relationship, whatever it is you’re looking for. The studies about friendship that say you have to just spend hours and hours of time with someone before you’re true friends feel pretty true to me. But you have to find people to spend all those hours with first, and I think however you do that is great. I’m so jealous of people who are still surrounded by their besties from childhood or university and had their little pods during lockdown and I would absolutely love to have a fun group chat with people I’ve known for years who actually live in the same city as me and get messages that say things like “It’s sunny, who’s around right now for drinks in the park?” But I also really love meeting people whose lives have been different from mine, and I like moving to new places, and so I have to start from scratch sometimes.
So I’m a fan of Bumble BFF. Happy anniversary to me and it. I don’t really use it anymore, because I know people now (~bragging~), but I’m really glad I did. I think everyone is looking for friends - literally everyone. It’s not lame. Why would it be lame? Friends are awesome.
Some Other Things I’m Thinking About:
Sneaky England making it harder to get an abortion, against the advice of medical experts
This piece about the relationship between capitalism and poor mental health, and why the resulting nihilism of making this connection isn’t helping us, either
I’m so fascinated by the results of this study of pre-K for low income students in Tennessee, which demonstrated that kids who had been put in public pre-K had demonstrably WORSE outcomes by sixth grade. The researcher says that she hadn’t realized that designing highly structured pre-school programs for low income kids, while rich parents put their kids in play-based preschools with lots of arts and crafts and running around, was really an example of a pretty profound bias against low income families that hasn’t served them well.
I was a diehard Marvelous Mrs. Maisel fan until the trash fire of season 3, but I think they really came back strong with season 4
Speaking of trash fires, Caroline Calloway is one, and I get such a kick out of the way she continues to lean in to it as her brand. I think it’s on purpose but also not?