Bumble Bff Me? A New Way To Find Friends

I’m going to be honest, making friends in a big city like London can be hard and I’m a pretty friendly and approachable person, well I think so anyway. So that’s why I’ve decided to put Bumble BFF app to the test.

I remember when I first moved to London, I wasn’t scared by the big bright lights, the busy culture or working my way up the career ladder, I was scared about the fact, would I be able to make new friends? You know the kind that you can ring up on a random Wednesday and be like ‘Wine Wednesday?’ and not even a hesitation or ‘I’m tired’, just a solid ‘Yes!’. Everyone dreams of moving to a new place and having the Charlotte, Samantha and Miranda, yes I would be the Carrie, but sometimes life doesn’t work out that way.

Sometimes you might live with someone you don’t get on with at all, even if it didn’t start off that way in the beginning. Sometimes you might end up in a job, where there is not one, not one person you could see yourself spending time with out of work and sometimes going to that spinning class, because your mum’s friends daughter who is really into fitness suggested it and you absolutely hate fitness, is just well exhausting and you certainly don’t like that healthy juice bar she makes you go to after.

As you get older, you do lose touch with friends. They get married, have children and maybe you don’t have the same interests anymore and there is nothing wrong with that. Everyone goes through different phases in their lives, which is why there is over 7.4 billion people in the world, because you don’t have to stick with the same 3 friends from high school for the rest of your life. Oh and sorry Taylor Swift, not all of us have #SquadGoals either.

Yep, making friends is pretty much as complicated as dating. So with that in mind, could a dating style app be the key to finding a new friend? Bumble BFF is an app that could do just that. The brainchild behind Bumble BFF is Whitney Wolfe, who funnily enough co-founded Tinder. Bumble BFF stemmed from the original Bumble dating app which enabled women to make the first move. Now since I met Danny (we also met online, but that’s another story which you can read here) almost 5 years ago, I’ve never been part of the swipe right culture of dating, so using Bumble BFF would be an alien concept to me. The app basically works in the same way as Tinder, yet for friends. You create a profile and you can view potential girlfriends based on their own profile, you then swipe right if you’re interested and you wait to be matched. Is this weird? It’s getting weird right? Could I really pick a friend based on their appearance?

The concept of meeting friends online, isn’t alien to me. When I was younger, I regularly frequented chat rooms, MSN and even an online site called Islandoo, which was essentially an audition forum for Shipwrecked the TV programme, where I met one of my past flatmates and people I am still friends with now. I also dated online too and never once was I terrified of meeting up with a guy I’d never met before.

In my day job being online and working from home, a lot of my new-found friends, aka bloggers all work online too, so technically we met online or via online at events. In fact most of the time I’ll start a conversation with a fellow blogger on Twitter and then we would meet at an event, so in theory what’s the difference with using an app like Bumble BFF to all of the above. Is it the fact I actively seeked out to look for a new friend, is that where I find it crosses the line a little? That it didn’t happen naturally, should friends happen naturally?

Once I was signed up to Bumble BFF, a lot of things crossed my mind, will they be weird, why are they needing to look for friends? But then here I am too, am I weird? Ok let’s calm down.

Then I kind of just went with it, I filled in my profile, awkwardly got confused between my left and right, freaked out over my profile picture, judged people way too easily and I now have a few ‘potentials’ I might just end up meeting up with. The worst that can happen is, we don’t get on and there’s nothing wrong with that. We all choose our potential romantic dates based on appearance and people’s interests, so why not do the same with friends.

At least you know they want to have someone to talk/hang out with that is like minded before you’ve even met and I think that’s a perfect combo. In real life it’s hard to tell someone you don’t want to be friends with them, but in Bumble life, you just swipe left.

Would you use an app like Bumble BFF to find friends? Do you find it hard to make friends where you live? I’d love to hear your thoughts on this.