Bumble now lets men make the first move

Bumble was famously built around exclusively giving women the power to initiate messages in heterosexual matches when it first launched in 2014 — but now the times they are a-changin’ for the dating app. Today, Bumble has announced a “global evolution to its signature conversation experience”: anyone can now send the first message, and the deadline to respond before the match expires has been extended from 24 hours to a 72-hour window.

“While women making the first move was a radical idea, being women-first was never about prescribing just one way to connect. It was about designing an experience with women’s needs in mind to create better outcomes for everyone,” Bumble founder and CEO Whitney Wolfe Herd said in a statement. “Today, our community is asking for more flexibility, less pressure, and more opportunities to create real, meaningful connections and that is what this new experience provides. This evolution isn’t a departure from our founding vision, but the realization of it.”

The change was partially driven by results from user surveys, with Bumble finding that 66 percent of women reported a preference for men to send the first message. During tests, Bumble also reports that opening messages became more evenly distributed between men and women, and chat initiation increased. The changes also aim to address “a growing reality of modern dating,” in which both men and women are busier than ever and the ability to connect with each other is “often lost due to timing, not lack of interest.”

The app is now instead focusing on the quality of those first messages instead of restricting who can send them. “If a member sends a low-effort message, such as a one word opener, they will be prompted to be more thoughtful with their message before they send,” Bumble said in its press release. Bumble released an “Opening Moves” feature two years ago that technically gave men a way to make the first move by responding to prewritten prompts, so this isn’t completely new territory for the dating app. Wolfe Herd first announced this overhaul during Bumble’s latest financial earnings, which reported a continued decline in both revenue and paying users.

Still, that’s a heck of a pivot for the women-first branding that Bumble has built its entire identity around, often being referred to as the “feminist Tinder” of dating apps. A big part of its appeal at launch was enabling women to avoid interacting with creepy men, and the statement on its website once read: “To challenge outdated heterosexual norms, women make the first move on Bumble.”