Maybe the love of your life is just one swipe away — give or take 500 miles.
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, where she is from, had either previously dated a friend or had a known dating history among her social circle.
“I just was bored of the same people,” Ms. Karakyriakou said. “I wanted something fresh.”
Using Hinge, Ms. Karakyriakou 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, and going on a date with him. She now lives there. “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. (Ms. Karakyriakou, who was a contestant on Season 9 of the popular 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 “neighborhood” 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?
During the Olympics last month, users on TikTok were playfully encouraging 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 use it while traveling for work, vacation or while 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 that 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 from New York City to Atlanta for her job with Delta Air Lines last year meant changing her dating app locations 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.
Ms. Rodriguez 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. In January, once she realized that this might make socializing in her new home difficult, she changed her location to Atlanta.
“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.” (In an amusing twist, she said she comes across many people who are former New Yorkers or who live in New York but are planning to move to Atlanta.)
Some might view this practice as being disingenuous, but Ms. Karakyriakou and Ms. Rodriguez, who are both currently single, said they let their matches know that they didn’t reside there.
According to Jared Freid, a 39-year-old comedian and co-host of the 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 really are living somewhere else entirely.
“Men generally change their location to hook up,” explained Mr. Freid, whose TikTok video on the topic made waves online this month. “And women are generally changing their location to find better dating scenes.”
Mr. Freid, who lives in Manhattan, said that 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, in the meatpacking district, implying that they should meet. She then revealed that she wasn’t actually a neighborhood 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.
