Swiping across borders: How location-hopping is changing dating apps

Adjusting your location on dating apps may broaden your romantic prospects. Photo / 123RF

Some apps let users check out the dating pool miles away from home. Should they?

Maybe the love of your life is just one swipe away – give or take 500km.

That’s the bet some people are making on dating apps when they set their location to a city, state or country that is miles (or even an ocean) away from their actual location, all in hopes of broadening their romantic prospects.

After Lydia Karakyriakou’s long-term relationship ended more than a year ago, she said she felt as if the single men she was seeing on dating apps in Glasgow, Scotland, where she is from, had either dated a friend or had a known dating history among her social circle.

“I just was bored of the same people,” Karakyriakou said. “I wanted something fresh.”

Using Hinge, she began searching for matches in and around London, since she would often travel to the city as part of her work as a content creator.

She later ended up matching with a man in Manchester, England, where she has been living since March, and going on a date with him. “It was so refreshing to be in a city that I’m not used to, go to new places, be with someone that I’ve never seen before and nobody that I knew knew of them,” she said. (Karakyriakou, who was a contestant on the ninth season of the reality dating show Love Island, says it’s a plus whenever a match isn’t too familiar with her.)

Most major dating apps offer some version of virtual location-hopping. Tinder allows users to like and match with others in different destinations via its Passport Mode, which is available with a paid premium subscription to the app. Hinge lets users change their “neighbourhood” at no additional cost. And private, membership-based apps like Raya make it possible to match with people all over the world.

In the short term, expanding your dating pool might seem like a good idea. But what if you hit it off with someone two time zones away? Are you willing to undertake the journey of a long-distance relationship? Or potentially move away from your home, job and friends to be closer to the person?

Location changes on dating apps can lead to long-distance relationships, which can also be challenging to maintain. Photo / 123RF

During the Olympics last month, TikTok users playfully encouraged one another to change the locations on their Tinder profiles to Paris in hopes that they might match with an Olympic athlete and fall in love. It’s also common for people to change location while travelling for work, vacationing or visiting their hometown (you never know!).

In general, the experience of using a dating app in big cities may look quite different from the experience of users in small towns or suburbs. Combine that with the fact social media makes it easier to stay connected with people abroad, and it’s easy to see why the grass might be greener elsewhere.

For Milly Rodriguez, 38, moving to Atlanta from New York City for her job with Delta Airlines last year meant changing her dating app location from the Brooklyn dating scene she had grown accustomed to. But not immediately.

“I had heard such horror stories of dating in Atlanta,” she said.

Tinder’s Passport Mode lets users match with people worldwide. Photo / 123RF

She moved to Georgia in early December but kept her location on dating apps set to New York in hopes that she could continue making connections there. When she realised that this might make socialising in her new home difficult, she changed her location to Atlanta in January.

“I used that as a way to meet people and start dating,” she said. “But I was not looking forward to doing that at all.”

Some might view this practice as disingenuous, but Karakyriakou and Rodriguez, who are both currently single, said they let their matches know they didn’t reside there.

Many people use location-hopping on dating apps when travelling or relocating temporarily for work. Photo / 123RF

According to Jared Freid, a 39-year-old comedian and co-host of dating podcast U Up?, this is known as hoodfishing, a coinage – though not his own – referring to people claiming to be from the city they are dating in but who are living somewhere else entirely.

“Men generally change their location to hook up,” explained Freid, whose TikTok video on the topic made waves online this month. “And women are generally changing their location to find better dating scenes.”

Freid, who lives in Manhattan, said withholding your actual location from a match until the last possible second is poor form. He recalled letting a match know that he was down the street from her current location, implying that they should meet. She then revealed she wasn’t actually a neighbourhood resident.

He said that this kind of geographic bait-and-switch raises the stakes on what might have otherwise been a chill date, to dubious effect.

“Everyone thinks their town is the worst town for dating, but what you also find out is that there is no Garden of Eden out there where dating is great for anyone,” he said.

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.

Written by: Gina Cherelus.

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