How to Make Friends On Bumble (Part 1)

Looking for platonic love in Florence.

One pitfall of the much-glamorized digital nomad lifestyle is a penchant towards loneliness. Sure, I'm here with my fiancee, whom I love very much. But given that we're both very social people, at some point we anticipate requiring human connection outside the confines of the relationship. We believe a friendly repartee with a handful of other kind-vibed souls in our area would go a long way towards making our travels more spiritually rewarding. Fortunately, the free market has already invented a solution for this modern issue in the form of Bumble BFF, an app that maintains the swiping dichotomy of modern dating apps but removes any and all prospect of having sex.

As a man, the thought of deliberately seeking out platonic friendship via a digital interface fills me with a strange and primal sense of dread that probably dates back to some unchecked middle school trauma. So it was with a heavy dose of apprehension that I decided to try Bumble BFF upon arriving in Florence, Italy for a month-long stay. Of course, Bumble BFF is just a "mode" within the broader Bumble platform, meaning to meet other men in my area seeking friendship (and they had to be men, per instruction by my fiancee), I had to actually re-download the Bumble app to my phone. This is awkward for a number of reasons, the main one being that the app still had my 4+ year-old dating profile saved.

Have you ever read something you wrote a really long time ago and cringed at how bad it was? This was my experience engaging with my old dating profile: a series of pictures that I no longer consider flattering plus not-that-clever responses to a handful of queries Bumble requires you to answer to show you have some semblance of a personality (I'll fall for you if ... you tie my shoes together!). It was physically painful to think about this profile existing in its current format a moment longer, so I hastily set about remaking it.

How do you optimize an online profile for friendship? According to the experts at Bumble, you respond to prompts like...

"If I could donate a million dollars, it'd be to..."

"Equality means to me..."

"I feel most empowered when..."

“Hiking vs. yoga…”

I don’t think my existing friends know how I'd answer these prompts, and now I'm supposed to share this information with perfect strangers between the ages of 25-38 within 10 kilometers of the Florence metropolitan area?

Additionally, Bumble requests boilerplate information like your relationship status (single? engaged? it’s complicated?), smoking and drinking preferences (socially? frequently?), religion (Catholic? Jewish? Athiest?), interests (singing? badminton? stopping Asian hate?), and—most provocatively—gender identity (male? transmasculine? neutrois?).

The last step to make my Bumble profile friendship-ready was updating the pictures. Per my fiancee's guidance, I made sure every picture in my profile featured the two of us together. We agreed this was important for three reasons: 1) It ensures nobody will confuse me as single, thereby avoiding the improbable situation where I’m pursued romantically through a friendship app, 2) society deems men in committed relationships as less likely to be weird, and therefore better friendship material, and 3) it allows my fiancee to draft off the friendship connections I make, instead of putting in the work to create her own Bumble BFF profile.

In the "About Me" section, I wrote: "Fiancee and I are traveling around Europe for the summer and looking to meet folks along the way," to make it very clear we’re a package deal. I even connected my Instagram and Spotify to my Bumble account, just to prove I do normal people things like use social media and listen to music.

Most importantly, under my fiancee's watchful eye, I changed my profile settings to disable access to Bumble Dating (a bit of an empty gesture as you can easily go back at any time and reactivate Dating, which is kind of funny to think about considering my profile is now comprised entirely of engagement photos).

Now the only people who can find me are men (or trans men, or intersex, etc.) in Florence who can speak English and are in the market for a rewarding new friendship with a guy who prefers hiking over yoga and his fiancee who still has some reservations about him being back on Bumble.

I'll let you know what happens next.