This might be one of the most important blogs I’ve ever written — because if you’re on Hinge, I can almost guarantee you’re using your Hinge Dealbreakers and Preferences wrong. (Especially if you’re paying for Hinge Premium!)
Hinge is great — it gives you a lot of preference options to narrow down the profiles it feeds you. If you aren’t open to traveling outside of your city, you can set the maximum distance in miles your matches can live from you. If dating someone who shares your same faith is a requirement for you, you can filter for certain religions.
But almost every client I’ve worked with has confused Hinge “preferences” with Hinge “dealbreakers.”
Hinge allows you to check or uncheck a box marked “Dealbreaker” on each category. For example, you can list your age range preferences as 40-52, but you might wind up seeing profiles in your queue of folks who are in their late 30s or mid 50s. But if you check that “Dealbreaker” box, you will only see profiles of 40-52-year-olds.
What people don’t realize is that while Hinge requires you to list your age and location on your profile, none of the other biographical information is required. I might not drink alcohol, but I might choose not to list that on my profile. That means if someone marks “does not drink” as a preference on Hinge and marks it as a dealbreaker, they won’t see my profile. They will only be fed profiles of people who proactively marked on their profile that they don’t drink.
Here’s another example. Say I want to date a nonsmoker, and that that’s a dealbreaker for me. I set my preferences to “does not smoke” and I tick the dealbreaker box. Then, say my soulmate is also on Hinge — he doesn’t smoke, but he keeps things minimal on his profile, so all he marks when setting up his profile is his age, location, that he drinks occasionally, and that he’s open to kids — nothing about smoking. That’s a shame, because I will only be fed profiles of people who marked that they do not smoke, and I’ll never meet my soulmate!
It’s fine to personally have dealbreakers — I wouldn’t date someone who wasn’t open to someone with kids, for example. But 9 times out of 10, people will list vices that might be dealbreakers openly on their profile. It’s easy to click the X on people who, for example, say they smoke, if you want a nonsmoker. It’s when you use Hinge dealbreakers to ace out all the people who are nonsmokers but who don’t bother to list it on their profile that you’re shooting yourself in the foot.
So: take off your Hinge dealbreakers!
Read people’s profiles to see whether they may or may not be compatible with you. Plus, you might discover that someone with a so-called “dealbreaker” quality might just be your cup of tea after all. . .
Happy dating,
Alyssa
p.s. Speaking of Hinge: answering Hinge prompts is a whole different ballgame from writing a Tinder or Match bio. Learn how to craft a Hinge prompt that will have people reaching out to YOU, complete with language to include, language NOT to include, and both great and not-so-great prompt answers that we analyze line by line. Get the guide for just $7.
