I’m using Bumble BFF to meet friends… and still haven’t met my BFF

I moved to a new city two months ago without really knowing anyone besides three guys who are my only three friends here. While that’s fine, sometimes I need girls to hang out with.

It’s connected through Facebook like all of these dating apps, so there’s this preset filter that shows this is a real person

Not knowing anyone at all makes it hard to meet other people because so many times you meet people through other people. The whole friends of friends thing. Of course there’s people at work, but sometimes I need an escape from that because I want a world disassociated with that. Another wrinkle is that I don’t live in an apartment complex, so I can’t meet people at the pool or happy hour events. So how to meet friends in a new city?

Meetup is still something I’m working on trying out – it requires more effort to go out to places and meet people with basically no context about them at all. I also have to wait for events that fit my interests, and sometimes there are no events.

Bumble BFF allows me to meet people on my own schedule as it’s Tinder / Bumble, but for friends with the same concept of swiping right if you want to be friends with someone, and swiping left if you don’t. It sounded like a good idea because I can’t be the only person looking for girlfriends in this city. Bumble BFF makes it easier in a way because it provides a small context about the person. You also include a tiny blurb about yourself to show your interests and personalities.

I actually first heard of Bumble BFF through another girl at work who had a kind of bad experience (awkward brunch date) and immediately deleted the app right after

One night I decided to take the plunge and downloaded the app. The default option is to use Bumble as a dating app, but you can toggle to the BFF option. I created a profile and used three photos from Facebook. Two of them are me by myself (one drinking out of a coconut and the other at Harry Potter World) and the last one is a picture of me at graduation with my friend. I should probably have more pictures with other friends, so people know I’m social and that I am not too weird to have friends, but I don’t feel like hunting through photos trying to find the “best” version of Slovakian milf fru me. I forget what I first put in my bio, but it currently reads:

recent college grad. all my friends moved to chicago / new york / stayed in michigan and I decided to do something crazy and move to dallas.

I set my age range to 20–26 because I wanted people who were in the same life stage as me. My mile range is set to 30 miles. Not that I would actually drive 30 miles to see someone, but it widens the net a little bit.

Now onto the actual swiping. It was weird swiping right and left on people. I didn’t think I would be picky about who I wanted to be friends with. Considering I wanted friends, I shouldn’t be choosy anyway and match with whoever, but I learned that I was. Even though I set my age limit to include 20, I discovered that I wanted to be friends with people who were recent college graduates too. It’s only a few years off from where I was, but there is a different mindset with someone in college and someone who is working. In my mind, it was easier to have friends who were also working professionals. Huge bonus points if they just moved to Dallas too; we could share in not knowing anyone together.