Bumble Hands the First Move Back to Men

Every dating app, formally or informally, has its thing .

Hinge, with its earnest prompts, is wholesome.

Tinder, with its quick swipes left or right, is horny.

Feeld, with its 30-plus tags for communicating your romantic and sexual desires, is kinky.

And Bumble, with its “women message first” rule, was meant from the start to be feminist.

In 2014, Whitney Wolfe Herd launched the platform to solve what she saw as a problem: an epidemic of aggressive men on the apps.

If women were the only ones allowed to initiate conversation, Wolfe Herd’s thinking went, they’d be in a position of power and agency; for once, they’d get to be the pursuers.

And perhaps the Bumble man, knowing what he signed up for, would be an enlightened type—content waiting patiently to be chosen.

This was the dream of girlboss dating, and how lovely it was while it lasted.

It died this past Tuesday, when Bumble announced that men will now be allowed to message women first.

Wolfe Herd told Bloomberg that when Bumble surveyed its female users, two-thirds said they would prefer not having to instigate each interaction.

Younger women especially reported that having to go first added pressure.

And many said they were fed up with men who seemed to put little effort into romance.

In the game of online dating, an opening line is a delicate, high-stakes maneuver: Send something too basic (“Hey”) and you’ll fail to catch someone’s attention; send something too quirky or try-hard (“What’s your biggest fear?”) and you might scare them away.