You would expect to leave any conversation with Esther Perel, renowned psychotherapist and relationship expert, with a bit more insight on love and dating. I did not anticipate, however, that I’d feel inspired to overhaul my entire Hinge profile and refresh my approach to first dates in general. The dating app Hinge tapped the relationship pro to develop a set of brand-new user profile prompts. Ones that require a bit more thoughtfulness than the surface-level “biggest risk I’ve taken…” type phrasing that they’ll soon be phasing out. And while discussing these new, refined questions, Esther offered me (and other dating-app-fatigued singles) some sage advice about how to make conversations with matches feel less like job interviews and how to take things off the app as soon as possible.
“Lower the stakes,” Esther says. “Include someone in an activity that you were going to do anyway. Instead of saying, ‘Do you want to go on a date?’ where it becomes very charged, [say something like], ‘I’m planning a picnic with a bunch of friends. Do you want to join?’ It’s low stakes, and if it doesn’t go well, they’ll find themselves talking to somebody else for the afternoon.”
Esther approached the task of creating thoughtful new Hinge prompts with the same ethos she applied to my dry dating app convo woes. The sooner deeper conversations are encouraged and the sooner that two people get introduced into each other’s worlds, the better.
“I used to spend a lot of time in record stores. And I would meet people who were in the same music category. There was a context, there was an environment, and we instantly had a lot to talk about without any awkwardness, because we were standing in the same section of the store. Same for the bookstore, same for the movie queue.” Esther aims for these prompts to recreate elements of that real-life experience. “I thought, ‘How do I bring back the world, the context that people live in, that can give you so much information about their interests, about where they spend their time, and how they make choices?’”
Her solution is 10 thoughtful new prompts, developed in partnership with the Hinge team, aptly called the “Your World” collection. They’ll ask users to provide a greater context for the world they’re living in, rather than checking off boxes of standard favorite things and fun facts. “Stories are bridges for connection. I wanted prompts that are not answered like a question but are answered with a story. What we wanted to do was to create every possible prompt that would lead you from meeting on the app to the encounter as soon as possible.” Ones like:
- In my friend group, I’m the one who...
- Something my pet thinks about me...
- The kindest thing someone has ever done for me...
- An award my family would give me...
- You’d never know it, but I….
- I’m in my element when…
- Before we meet, you should listen to…
- I could stay up all night talking about…
- It’s not a vacation unless…
- Where I go when I want to feel a little more like myself…
People just want to feel seen. And because of that, Esther believes we are moving toward a time where authentic descriptions on dating app profiles will be a greater deciding factor than photos in whether someone gets swiped right on. (But she was actually surprised to learn about one profile photo phenomenon: “I keep watching pictures of dudes with big fish. That was the real cultural [shock] for me. I don’t think in France or in Belgium, where I currently am, that anybody would post a fish.”) “There’s going to constantly be a search for more authenticity and more search for situations of truth.”
Esther’s focus on shared vulnerability early on in connections made Hinge, an app that prefers to showcase the most human version of its users, the perfect partner for this new, thoughtful prompt initiative. “A lot of the things that we do are intended to help users recognize that on the other side of that chat is another human being who’s looking for an intentional relationship,” Hinge president and CMO Jackie Jantos tells Cosmo. “The best prompts are ones that [allow] an individual to offer more about themselves in a way that feels intimate but not overtly so. And they’re ones that can exist in spaces beyond the app itself.”
