I tried Bumble BFF and it was exactly what you’d expect

It seems only reasonable that the most basic of human interactions be committed online. We text, we Skype, we find love, and now, we find our new bestie – on Bumble BFF.

bumble bff

Bumble BFF is a subsection of Bumble, a Tinder-esque dating website. The basic premise for Bumble BFF is that you are presented with the profiles of girls in your area who are also on the hunt for a new BFF, and you swipe right if you come across someone you might be interested in.

Getting started

The first step in the quest for your new BFF begins with creating a profile that is linked with your Facebook. You then add a small bio, in my case it read “Peace, love and Netflix,” because you can’t get anymore basic (and honest) than that, and you set the distance you are willing to hunt for a new bestie.

The Bumble BFF hunt

Once you complete your profile, you begin the real process of selecting your new best friend. You are presented with profile after profile of people in your area, who are also seeking a new bestie. 99 percent of these people are women, in search of the Christina Yang to their Meredith Grey, or the Sookie to their Lorelai. Every so often I would come across a profile with a relatively sane looking individual who’s bio read something along the lines of “Books, Ice cream, and Netflix” and would swipe right, hoping they too would find me worthy of a right swipe and we could move on to phase three of the Bumble BFF experiment. Most times, they didn’t.

The waiting period

As with any location based website, the number of people in your area is very limited, and each day you are met with the dreaded “no more people in your area” message. While you could expand your location parameters even further than you already have, sometimes you just have to wait. While I expected my matches to begin filtering in within an hour of my signing up, I discovered that was actually not the case. It took almost a full 24 hours for my first match to appear, and by the time that finally occurred, I was over the moon.

Not every match is a winner

This is a lesson I learned very quickly. Just because you think their bio was funny and they swiped right on you too, does NOT mean that you are destined for one another. I endured so many awkward conversations, about a potential BFF’s ailing pet reptiles, their need for orthopedic footwear, and the struggle of finding a good x-rated t-shirt store when you’re new to an area. Needless to say, these girls and I are not on the track to best friendship.

Winners are few and far between, but they do exist

Every conversation on Bumble BFF only lasts for 24 hours after the most recent message. So after days of scouring the app for real potential BFF material, I finally found one. With a bio that claimed she was looking for the “Lane to her Rory,” I knew we would get along just fine. After a lovely conversation about everything from nail polish colors to our favorite book to movie adaptations. While our conversation was nice, and I had several similar to this one with other women on the app, all of them eventually fizzled out after a few days.

What came of it all

After a few days of chatting with several potential BFFs in my area, the inevitable question would arise, should we meet in person. This question was usually met with the potential BFF giving vague answers about possibly meeting in a week or two; agreeing to meet, and then cancelling within a day of the meet, or ending the conversation entirely. While most of the women on this app seemed beyond excited to make idle chit chat from the safety of their smartphones, the possibility of a face to face interaction halted even the most enthusiastic of potential BFFs.

What I learned

In this day and age, finding a BFF on the internet shouldn’t sound as strange to us as it does. If people can find the love of their lives on Tinder, why does finding a new best friend on a site like Tinder sound so bizarre? While the concept is actually pretty cool, finding people who are mutually interested in starting new friendships with other people in their area, the practice does find something to be lacking. I have no doubt that in the coming years this app and others like it will develop even better user interfaces and become what their developers had no doubt envisioned. Until then, Bumble BFF serves as a decent way for people who are new to an area to potentially make new friends, and women in a given area to make great new online pen pals.