Holly and I are breaking all the rules. Over drinks, not long after we meet for the first time (both running a good 15 minutes late), we talk about all the things we shouldn’t: our exes, laser buttplugs, doing “background research” before meeting a date and, most controversially, the EU referendum. But this is BumbleBFF, an offshoot of dating app Bumble, often dubbed the “feminist Tinder”, designed to help forge platonic relationships with people of the same gender. None of the usual rules apply.
Or, at least, I don’t think they do. BumbleBFF, which launched in March, is just a toggle away from the regular dating app, and appears to have plenty in common with its more amorous counterpart. Users swipe through the photo-heavy profiles of Bumblers nearby; right to connect, left to forget: a method arguably even more shallow for friendship-making than it has been accused of being for dating. If you both swipe right, you have 24 hours to make a move.
You are not shown those looking for romance, although, as demonstrated by some of the selfies I swipe past, it’s not possible to craft separate profiles, appealing to potential friends and lovers respectively. Perhaps it’s more honest that way; it’s a useful check on the cringe factor of your dating profile.
Even so, I can’t help being judgmental about the “profile crimes” that would put me off a date. Constantly hidden behind reflective aviators? Nope. Posing with an animal, be it a gap-year tiger or a cutesy pug? Probably not. Tricolour filter? I’m still swiping left. In comparison with other dating apps, the wedding-day pics on BumbleBFF should be perfectly permissible, but it’s still a no from me.
Perhaps it’s the rightwards swiping that varies a little more. HD brows? You’re in. Eating a giant slice of pizza? We’re probably soulmates. It’s not all photographs, of course. Holly’s a lingerie designer (“fancy silk stuff”) and big on brunch. I can chat about pants and pancakes for a bit, I thought. Sure.
And so we meet. It’s a Tuesday night and the bar is, initially, almost empty. She seems disappointed and I wonder if I was set to be more of a one-time wingman than a long-term BFF. It’s a misjudgment; once we’re chatting, Holly appears interested and observant, properly listening as I waffle on, bringing her up to speed (the way you don’t have to with old friends). It’s almost as if she isn’t preoccupied with whether or not I fancy her, or if I’m still chatting to “other people”. It’s pleasant.
I wouldn’t, incidentally, recommend telling those IRL mates about your adventures in BumbleBFF as they’re likely to be a bit miffed. The first time we were supposed to meet, I postponed , as I had family visiting, then turned down an invite from another friend on the day Holly and I did finally get together. It highlighted, if nothing else, existing friendships that are too easily neglected. More of those than I realised, perhaps.
But can BumbleBFF’s mission of “social pollination” combat the loneliness epidemic sweeping the nation? A recent study suggests we hit “peak friendship” at the age of just 25. It’s certainly not the first app to attempt it. In January, I signed up to Vina, an app that allows women to “tap into the power of your extended network to make new offline connections when you travel, move to a new city, transition life phases, or simply want to grow your social circle”. The problem, aside from it all sounding a little bit LinkedIn, was that no one nearby was using it, and no one in the UK appeared to be, either: the San Francisco startup only moved London-based users to a beta group in April. What’s more, the firm refers to “new girlfriends” as “vinas”, which I just can’t.
Going by the number of non-Brits on BumbleBFF, friendship apps are bigger abroad, or are more widely used within expat communities. Holly is from the US, but that’s not really why she uses the app. It’s because so many of her friends have been priced out of the area in which she lives, as have many of mine. East London is full of places to go for brunch, but fewer and fewer people to go with.
Yet when it comes to making new mates online, the stigma that once hovered over internet dating still seems to apply and, unlike online matchmaking, this embarrassment is unlikely to be placated by the prospect of dining out on your latest dating horror story.
Both Holly and I have found that Bumble girls are (generally) nice. In-app convos are full of compliments, minus any lascivious intent. In person, we have just two drinks, but chat for a good couple of hours and don’t try a sip of each other’s cocktails (it feels strange, somehow, to share drinks with a complete stranger when there is no prospect of swapping saliva at a later date).
But is she my new BFF, or merely a friendship fling? In our last half-hour together, I feel as though her guard drops (mine too, maybe) and I suddenly like her a lot more. She reveals an intriguing love of escape rooms that I never saw coming, and I enjoy attempting to explain the concept of Center Parcs to someone who has never heard of it (“That sounds cool!” “Yeah! Well. Sort of.”)
A few days later, we’re swapping links for sample sales and by Saturday, we’re in the queue for Meadham Kirchhoff (and I’m glad, at the very least, to have met someone willing to give me a heads-up on these things). The following week, we head to an immersive theatre show, and I find there’s nothing quite like the hysterical terror of being pressed together in the pitch black of an imitation lift that has “broken down”, while ghoulish noises emanate from every wall, to cement a friendship. I am mildly terrified and genuinely glad she is there.
I also find she remembers, in impressive detail, almost everything about which we had previously spoken and it feels good, already, to catch up: yes, I had a good time visiting my hometown; yes, I enjoyed watching that play; yes, I still hate Ikea.
I suspect that it’s a minority of people who walk away from a Tinder date feeling they have met the love of their life, and the same applies here. A friend recently described app-dating as like squeezing mangoes in supermarket – literally, finding the best of a bad bunch. Holly was not the first person I had spoken to via BumbleBFF, but she was the first (and so far, only) person I met up with. Could I have clicked with someone that easily? Got lucky using an app explicitly designed not to facilitate getting lucky? I suspect it is too soon to call. But at least no one has sent any unsolicited dick pics yet.
