First, a few essential ideas. Facebook Dating and its predecessors’ main difference is that it is the first of its kind to be hosted by a popular social media network. This growing worry people are still haunted by dating app shame from 2014 and don’t want their Facebook friends to know they’re dating online.
You must opt-in to use your Facebook Dating profile, which is different from your Facebook profile. Your Facebook profile will not state that you’re using Facebook Dating, and neither will your Facebook mates. Suppose you want to keep your profile private. In that case, you can tell Facebook Dating not to reveal it to friends of friends — which, as Insider pointed out, might be an unintentionally useful method for cheaters trying to move out on a girlfriend without being spotted by single friends on other dating apps, so use it wisely.
When you first sign up for Facebook Dating, Facebook offers to create a “suggested profile” for you using photos and info from your standard profile because it thinks it knows you pretty well. Suppose you’re like me and haven’t updated your Facebook status in over two years. In that case, this is entirely meaningless and will result in a dating profile that is either outdated or borderline incoherent.
The platform’s first attempt at creating a dating profile for me resulted in the following:
“I went to Connecticut College to study.”
Isn’t it true that one out of every three is a good number? Meanwhile, it picked a blurry picture from 2017 with an ex-boyfriend for my profile, which I replaced with a black-and-white selfie from 2016 when we broke up. Excellent!
You have the option of modifying everything or completely disregarding Facebook’s recommended profile and starting over. Sorry, catfishers, your name, and age are the only items missing. In the edit, you can add/adjust the following:
Sex, height, and hometown are all included in the essential information section, as well as a 500-character profile.
Your jobs and education include your job title, business, high school, college, and graduate school.
Your Lifestyle: Oddly, it seems only to include “kids” (for which you can choose between “doesn’t have children,” “has children,” or “prefer not to say”).
Your Beliefs: This only applies to “religious views,” which you may categorize as Agnostic, Atheist, Buddhist, Catholic, Christian, Hindu, Jewish, Muslim, Sikh, Spiritual, Other, or don’t want to tell.
Except for Tinder, which has maintained a steadfastly minimalist approach that essentially reduces users to the number of their age and first profile picture, most major dating apps have pretty standard profile information (as well it should be).
Photographs
Facebook Dating requires you to upload up to nine profile images, which is fairly typical with most dating apps. Is there a significant error in the architecture of Facebook? Once your photos have been posted, you won’t be able to alter their order, so make sure you upload them in the order you want them to appear. If you don’t notice and end up with three pictures in a row where you’re essentially sitting in the same cross-legged pose because that was clearly a phase you went through last fall, you’ll have to delete them and redownload them in the order you like. This was an annoyance in the early days of dating apps, but it has since been addressed by the majority of them. You can drag and drop your photos to reorder them on Tinder, Bumble, and Hinge at any time.
You have the option of responding to questions or not. Hinge popularized this feature, in which the app presents a series of prompts to which you can respond and have your responses displayed on your profile to give users a complete picture of who you are as a person. On Hinge, you must answer a certain number of questions, but later adopters such as Bumble and now Facebook Dating have made it optional.
Finally, you can connect your Instagram account to your Facebook account as part of Facebook’s ongoing attempt to integrate the two social media platforms. Facebook Dating users will be able to see your Instagram posts and captions, even though your Instagram account is private. Almost all major dating apps have this feature. According to news, Facebook is planning to integrate Instagram stories into Facebook Dating in the future, which will “help you explain, rather than say, who you are” more authentically than a “static profile.”
Personal Preferences
After you’ve finished filling in your details, it’s time to set up your expectations or what you’d like to see in your potential matches. You can filter your matches on Facebook using the following criteria:
In New York, dating someone who lives four miles away is considered generous. If you’re looking to enter an LDR, you can use Facebook to find matches up to 124 miles away. Tinder, Bumble, and Hinge both have a 100-mile limit, so maybe Facebook is trying to get ahead of the game by giving you an extra 24 miles to find your soulmate.
Want to Date – You can select from women, trans women, men, trans men, and non-binary people. You have the option of choosing as many as you want.
Around 18 to 100 years of age (same as Tinder)
Height varies from less than three feet to more than seven feet.
Their Lifestyle: This section is dedicated solely to children and contains the same options as your profile. Although you’re “more likely to see people who meet this preference,” it also says that “we’ll sometimes show you people who don’t.”
Their Values: Religious Points of View Facebook reminds you that it will consider your needs while still allowing you to broaden your horizons.
In general, the profile development process is straightforward and similar to that of other common dating apps, with many of the same features.
After you’ve finished your profile, it’s time to start swiping and just kidding! Like Hinge, Facebook Dating avoids the swiping model popularized by Tinder to enable users to consider potential matches more carefully.
Read Also: How to meet singles in your area
Finally, pressing a heart or an X on a profile indicates whether you “want” or “pass” it. Like Hinge, Facebook Dating allows you to like and comment on unique aspects of a person’s profile, such as pictures or prompt responses. In contrast to Hinge, you can tap the heart to like an entire profile if you don’t want to worry about it.
Facebook aims to show you potential matches based on your interests, habits, communities, and other information you’ve accidentally exchanged with the social network platform over time. You might like anyone on Facebook, and they’ll get a notification. If they want you back, you’ll fit, and you can then message them. This works both ways — Facebook Dating will tell you who has already liked you and give you the option of matching or rejecting them.
This is, once again, regular fare that illustrates many elements of popular dating apps. On the other hand, the “Hidden Crush” feature is one of the few features that genuinely distinguishes Facebook Dating from its competitors. Despite the fact that Facebook Dating does not show any of your Facebook friends, the Secret Crush feature allows you to fire a shot with someone you presumably know in real life while remaining anonymous online.
With this feature, you can designate up to nine Facebook friends and Instagram followers as “Secret Crushes.” When you do, they’ll get a notification that someone likes them, but unless you’re also on their Secret Crush list, Facebook won’t disclose your identity as their secret admirer. I have not tested, and will not test, this feature because my only Facebook friends are random locals from my hometown, and the fact that years of app-dating have broken my brain, and I can now only be drawn to strangers on the internet.
Finally, there are chances to be had. When Bumble launched as Tinder’s first big competitor, it was commonly believed that the new app’s swiper pool was more appealing than Tinder’s. According to common belief, Hinge is now generally recognized as the best source for high-quality matches.
This pattern hasn’t yet manifested itself in Facebook Dating. Apart from my Facebook Dating matches, I’ve yet to meet a natural person who uses the app in person. However, I must confess that the pool of possible matches I’ve seen has pleasantly surprised me. On every dating app, there’s plenty of garbage to sift through, but it’s not the garbage heap of locals and Republican uncles I expected to make up the majority of Facebook Dating’s primary user base.
Read: How to meet people on Facebook and find love.
That’s about all there is to it. In my professional opinion as a five-year dating app veteran who has spent nearly my entire adult dating life on smartphones, Facebook Dating is okay, and that’s about all there is to say about it. Apart from enhanced protection against running into friends/coworkers/friends of friends on the app, it doesn’t really offer something special that you couldn’t get on any other major dating app. So, unless you’re suffering from 2014 levels of dating app guilt or trying to cheat without going to Ashley Madison, there’s really no need to use Facebook Dating, and it’s also not the deterrent I think its creators thought it would be against permanently deleting your account.
Do I recommend Facebook Dating as a last resort? No, not at all. Is it something I’ll prohibit you from using? No, you are free to do whatever you want. I’m going to delete Facebook Dating for the time being, mainly out of principle, but I’m always on Tinder if someone needs me.