In our Love App-tually series, Mashable shines a light into the foggy world of online dating.
I may be a single 27-year-old who’s never downloaded a dating app, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t swiped.
While I don’t think online dating is for me, I have nothing against anyone looking for love virtually, wading through an endless digital catalogue of romantic contenders or awkwardly breaking the ice with strangers on a daily basis.
My closest friends use dating apps and I not only support their quests to find love online, I occasionally take part in a little technique I call friend-swiping: the act of temporarily managing your friend’s dating profile, swiping in their place.
I genuinely want to help my friends find love. Selfishly, friend-swiping is also an absolute blast.
Each time a friend hands me her phone, she’s placing her trust in me, so managing dating apps isn’t a responsibility I take lightly. I genuinely want to help my friends find love, relieve them of app-related frustrations for a time, and lift their jaded online-dating spirits. Selfishly, friend-swiping is also an absolute blast.
What exactly makes swiping for others so fun? I spoke to several proud friend-swipers (some single, others in committed relationships) to learn about its appeal and why it can be more fun to swipe for friends than it is to swipe for yourself.
Single and sort of ready to mingle
The first time I friend-swiped, I was in college. A guy friend and I were commiserating over the fact that — despite being two hilarious, kindhearted, seemingly awesome people — we were both still single. Our complaints were similar, but he expressed one major frustration I couldn’t relate to: dating app fatigue.
He’d been using apps for quite some time but still hadn’t found a relationship. As someone who had never used a dating app I was fascinated and eager to hear more. He handed me his phone, gave me the honor of navigating his love life, and for a few exhilarating minutes I read other girls’ bios, scrolled through profile photos, and kept everything I knew about my friend in the forefront of my mind when deciding who would receive my potentially life-changing right swipes. Did I take my role as friend-swiper too seriously? Perhaps. But damn, was it fun.
Since then, I’ve done my fair share of friend-swiping — while sipping hot chocolate at Starbucks, sitting at a bar during happy hour, and chilling on living room couches. I’m an expert now, and while I’m still not ready to online date, swiping for friends has helped quell my app-related curiosity. For people who haven’t used dating apps, whether they’re single or in a committed relationship, I’ve found friend-swiping has cured their online-dating FOMO, too.
Happily partnered people swipe for friends, too
Brittany Begley, a 32-year-old in Brooklyn, New York, has been with her now-fiancé since 2008, so she loved swiping for friends whenever they asked for dating advice or surrendered their phones during a girl’s night out.
“It was kind of like playing a game where I would read bios and look at pictures and take the knowledge of who my friend is, her likes and dislikes, and what she finds attractive and make a choice,” Begley explained in an email.
Dating app curiosity “definitely” played a part in her desire to secondhand swipe. “It was this thing that everyone had experienced and would talk about. I just wanted to see what it was all about,” she said.
Online dating curiosity was partially behind Chrissy Brownson’s hankering to friend-swipe, too. The 42-year-old elementary school teacher living in Falls Church, Virginia, has been married to her husband, who she met in high school, for nearly 20 years, so she’s never had personal online dating experience.
“I absolutely have both curiosity and FOMO about the different dating apps, and it’s also fascinating to see what people post about themselves,” Brownson explained in a Twitter DM. “I am a stereotypical extrovert so I love the opportunity to peek into other people’s lives and picture them with my friend.”
“I have an amazing partner … We’re both very open and enjoy looking at the boys, so its fun for us to grab our friend’s phone and see what kind of guys each of us is attracted to.”
In hopes of vicariously experiencing the online dating hype through her friends’ profiles, she offered to be their “surrogate swipers.” Now, she says her friends “hand me their phone and tell me to find their Mr. Right.”
It’s clear why friend-swiping appeals to people who’ve never used dating apps before, but people who’ve online dated or met their partners on apps occasionally like to get back in the swiping game, too.
Leeor, a 28-year-old friend-swiper from New York, met his current girlfriend of more than two years on a dating app, but he still swipes for friends every now and then.
“I am in a happy and committed relationship … But I still find it fun to help my friends swipe or come up with responses [or] topics of discussion,” Leeor, who asked that his last name be omitted from this piece for privacy reasons, said via email.
Leeor doesn’t credit online-dating FOMO for his friend-swiping. He views it as “a social activity” that helps him carry out a genuine desire to help his pals find someone special.
Alanna Gardner, a 27-year-old in Atlanta, Georgia, also used to be active on dating apps when she was single. Nowadays, Gardner is in a committed relationship, but both she and her partner delight in helping friends navigate the apps and discussing men’s profiles.
“I have an amazing partner who identifies as queer and I identify as bisexual. We’re both very open and enjoy looking at the boys, so its fun for us to grab our friend’s phone and see what kind of guys each of us is attracted to and say, ‘Ohh, that’s what you like?’ [or] ‘Look at this guy, he’s so hot,'” Gardner said in a DM.
“Part of the reason Tinder and these apps are so successful is because it was positioned to us as a game. That’s really what it is and what it feels like so of course it’s fun!” Gardner continued. “And when you’ve been literally out of the game I think it’s always going to be a bit of a rush to see what’s going on out there.”
Yes, there are benefits
Though taking control of a friend’s dating app is fun for surrogate swipers, they aren’t the only ones who can benefit from app exchanges. When app users find themselves discouraged and fatigued by the monotony of fruitless swiping, letting friends take the reins for a while can provide some much-needed relief.
“I think it was fun for them as well, to talk about the people they may or may not be interested in,” Begley said. “Also, you trust your friends, you want their opinion, you want to see who they would choose for you and why.”
Many young online daters in Brownson’s life complain about online dating burnout, too, so she thinks an outside point of view — especially from someone who knows the person seeking a relationship well — can be extremely helpful.
“I think that friends are willing to let others swipe for them because they enjoy or at least find it interesting how a third party can see them together. It’s almost like having a personal shopper,” she said.
Online dating is hard. Ask friends to help.
Image: vicky leta / mashable
Leeor and Gardner also listed “swiping fatigue” as the main complaint among their friends.
“[My friend] sent her an opening message that night and then a few years later I had the pleasure of weeping like a baby when they recited their vows at their wedding in Park Slope.”
“[Friends] expressed that although it is fun and exciting to match with someone for the first time, the novelty wears off fast. That has made them more willing to let me swipe for them,” Leeor said.
“There are so many more frogs than princes out there,” Gardner echoed. “I think most of the times my friends just need a break.”
While the majority of friend-swipers I spoke with only had a few casual conversations or dates come from their matchmaking efforts, Scott Muska, a 33-year-old friend-swiper in Washington, D.C., has seen how successful friend-swiping can be firsthand.
Muska shared that he was at a bar with two friends one night when one friend revealed he had just downloaded Tinder. “My friend and then roommate was excited about this, and asked if she could do some swiping for him. He agreed and she got after it while we kind of peered over her shoulder,” Muska recalled. “She’d show him a few women and he’d be like, ‘Yeah, I agree, swipe right.’ And then she landed on one woman who ended up being a match.”
“[My friend] sent her an opening message that night and then a few years later I had the pleasure of weeping like a baby when they recited their vows at their wedding in Park Slope,” Muska said.
Ready to take friend-swiping to the next level?
If you’re interested in playing matchmaker for your friends or want some help managing your own online dating life, apps like Wingman, Ship, and Chorus were specifically created with friend-swiping in mind.
Emily Smith, founder and CEO of Chorus, has been online dating for nearly 10 years, so she knows how monotonous and discouraging dating apps can be.
“I’m just so over the swiping for yourself thing. I feel like it makes us so callous. I think everyone’s getting so tired of it, and it’s making us all so apathetic,” Smith explained during a phone interview.
While friend-swiping on apps, Smith and her friends formed a support system to boost online dating morale and aid in each other’s partner searches. Her real-life dating app experience, along with a desire to restore a sense of accountability and community to online dating inspired her to create Chorus, which launched in 2019.
“[Friend-swiping] was kind of hard to do unless you were physically next to the person. So that was really the premise,” Smith said. “Our goal is friends helping friends.”
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On Chorus you can’t swipe for yourself. You can sign up as a matchmaker to swipe for friends, sign up as a dater and wait to be matched up, or both. The app also features a Dating Roulette feature that pairs daters on five-minute pre-date video chats so you can get to know potential matches a bit before deciding if you want to seriously pursue them.
“Our goal is friends helping friends.”
For online daters who’ve considered calling on friends for assistance, Smith says the biggest friend-swiping benefits are saving time and energy and making you feel less alone in your search for love.
“It’s so time-consuming sometimes to swipe these apps, and I think it can be really demoralizing to just churn through faces,” she said.
“When you all met through friends people had a face to a name of someone you were interested in. They were interested on your behalf, and it was very real,” Smith continued. “Now you talk about dating with friends and you’re essentially talking about a face on a screen. So for them to be able to see these people with you, see their profile, ask how it’s going, and kind of be in that experience with you, it’s just so helpful to have other people who care.”
Long story short? If you’ve tried online dating alone and haven’t had much luck, consider calling in some trusted reinforcements to swipe on your behalf.
As the wise Spice Girls once counseled: “If you wanna be my lover, you gotta get with my friends.”
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