r/Bumble

I haven’t been on Bumble in years, and I just made a profile yesterday. I’ve already gotten about five likes, but of course I can’t see who they’re from unless I pay.
And then I see Bumble Premium+ is $50 A WEEK?? 😭
That is straight-up robbery. There is absolutely no way you can justify charging $50 every single week for a dating app subscription. That’s $200+ a month just to see who liked you and access some extra features. At that point, I could spend that money on an actual date.
I genuinely don’t understand how anyone can look at that price and think, “Yeah, that’s reasonable.” Trying to justify that price is honestly morally wrong. Dating apps already monetize people’s desire to meet someone, but $50 a week is an absurd level of greed.
I’ll just sit here wondering who the hell liked me.

OK so just a little about me first. I like to keep track of things. Like literally I have been manually keeping track of every dollar that has entered or left my bank account within an Excel spreadsheet for the last ~13 years, with 100% accuracy. Detailed enough that if you asked me “How much did you spend on food in May of 2019”, I could go back, tell you exactly how much I spent, at what location and on what day. I have been dating off and on for my entire adulthood (currently in my mid-late 30s) and mainly used Hinge and Bumble for the last 10 or so years. The reason why I am writing this post is because I’ve mentioned multiple times on various dating subs over the last ~10 months that I kept track of my stats and lots of people have asked me to post them, so I’m doing that. Take from it what you want. If you don’t believe the stats, then that’s fine, feel free to express that but I do not care.

So after a break up in late 2024, I was dating in early 2025. Ended up going steady with one woman and then after about two months we realized we were incompatible and broke it off at the very end of June. The very next day (June 29), I got back on the apps but this time I decided to do something I’ve never done before which is keep track of my stats. I was genuinely interested in knowing how many people didn’t reply, ghosted, only gave one word answers, etc., so I kept track of all that. I did NOT keep track of swipes. I only kept track of what happened AFTER a match was established. But I can tell you that I swiped quite a bit. I bought three months of premium Hinge, used the free version of Bumble, Tinder, and Facebook dating. The match data is basically from July 1 to around mid October. I had long stopped swiping by then and was focusing on particular women. There were sometimes lulls in swiping and matches for me as I was meeting and evaluating women, and sometimes I would stop completely as I was getting further down the road with a few of the women.

As for who I am as a person and what I was looking for. I am a mid to late 30’s black male. I’m not tall, but I'm not short either. I’ve been measured at 5’7, 5’8, and 5’9 on various occasions, so I put the latter. But I’m probably more 5’8 if I'm being honest. No one has ever grilled me about it or really mentioned it at all. I’m also bald but thankfully have a great bald head shape. Even dating back to grade school, I’ve never really had trouble getting attention from girls/women, but I’ve always had to work for it on some level. I’ve got a handsome friend that gets constant attention from women without doing anything, I’ve seen it time and time again with my own eyes. I’m not like him, I usually have to put some level of effort/interest in. But I’ve always been told that I’m smart, funny, handsome, interesting, etc. I’m college educated and for full transparency I do have a very high salary but I don't put any obvious indicators of wealth on my dating profiles, nor have I ever told any woman how much I make. I also don’t wear expensive brands or have expensive hobbies in general. My job just says “Finance at Finance”. Which could very easily mean a low to decent paying job. But unless they try to put two and two together on that, there's really nothing on my profile that would scream "high salary", and I make it that way on purpose. But also for full transparency, I have a very nice obviously unique sports car that I would sometimes drive to first dates, but not always. I also go to the gym a lot and eat mostly right so I am in very good physical shape (I’ve got an old r/progresspics post in my history from about 8 years ago showing what my body looked like back then, I’m not too far off from that if you want to get an idea). But I didn’t have any pictures of me with my shirt off. The closest I had was a picture of me on a jet ski that I personally don't think does a very good job at all of showing off my figure but I did once have a female friend comment that I looked muscular in the picture. Funny how different we view ourselves compared to other people. But anyway, most people compliment me for dressing well and smelling good and being a pleasant guy to be around. As for what I was looking for on the apps, I was looking to date other liberal, college educated black women with decent careers. Also wanted someone that cares about being physically fit. My ultimate goal was to find a relationship. Most every woman I matched with fit that mold. Age 30 was as absolutely lowest I would go but most women I matched with were 33 to 38. I would not even swipe on anyone in their 20’s or 40's. Also, I was NOT just looking for sex. In fact I passed up quite a number of blatant and obvious opportunities/requests for it, I was truly looking for a long-term partner. I won’t lie and say I passed up all opportunities, but I passed up the vast majority of them.

Two very important things to note that work very hard against me is that I am non-religious and I do not want kids. Reality is, in the black community, being non-religious is a very taboo thing (stats show time and time again that we are by far the most religious race in the US) and I’ve outwardly been passed on by women for that reason alone many times over the years. And I also don’t want kids which is going to make a lot of women uninterested in general. Despite having both of these stances listed in my profile, on multiple occasions women were surprised when I mentioned it (showing that despite what people try to say, a lot of women don’t fully read profiles) and then ultimately ended up passing on me. I’ve been told on quite a few occasions over the years of some variation of “You are pretty much exactly the kind of man I’m looking for except for the non-religion and/or no kids. If you ever change your mind, feel free to call me back”. Eventually I started pointing it out to women BEFORE meeting just to make sure they read it and to not waste either of our times (and my money). And those are just the women that match with me, I’d wager that I’ve been passed on quite a bit by women that would otherwise be interested if it were not for at least one of these two factors.

As far as matches, first of all I literally got zero play on Tinder. Like no matches or likes or anything. I used it for like 2-3 days and then deleted my profile. The majority of my likes were from Hinge, with a good amount also coming from Bumble. Full transparency, I didn’t keep track of the stats on FB dating because I felt like people weren’t taking it seriously. Although I ended up meeting two wonderful women on there, one of which is currently my GF. I put their info in the stats, but didn’t pull any other stats from FB dating, meaning I technically matched with more than 137 women.

I have access to my Google calendar from back then and can see how many dates I had per week, I would mark red the ones that cancelled and green the ones that kept. Even in the first week I had 7 dates lined up. The most I ever had in one week was 10, I also had another week with 8, but on average I would have around 4-5. As for where we went on first dates. I always offered them three choices: coffee, ice cream, or drinks (sometimes dinner). I had several different common spots that I would meet, depending on what area we were meeting. Thankfully, most women had no problem with coffee or ice cream. And yes, part this was to keep the cost down. But also I personally care MUCH more about getting to know the person before investing my too much money in them. I want to be able to feel like I can talk to you on a random lazy day and still enjoy their company. So that’s another reason why I prefer sit down low cost type of first dates. On the second date, I would usually go bowling or sometimes mini golf. I would find out what days & times they would have cheaper pricing and try to go at those times if possible. It mostly worked haha.

One last thing that I know a lot of people are going to hate but I had a bit of a “script” during the match phase. Not some diehard, stick to the script at all costs sort of thing. Just that over the years I kind of developed a natural cadence and set of questions that most pleasant women would respond to, so I usually end up asking those and asking other questions based on their responses and what else was in their profile if necessary. It was very helpful in keeping up with so many ongoing conversations at once. No, I don’t try to write a unique opener for every single woman, I found that to be a waste of time over the years. I learned a long time ago, if they want to respond they will respond. And if I have to jump through hoops to get them to respond, I’ll be jumping through hoops the entire relationship. So I would usually first ask them how their day/weekend was going and then go from their based on how they responded. If they gave one word answers more than once, I would happily move on to the next woman. People are going to hate and that’s fine, but most pleasant women have no problem responding to “How has your day been”. If that’s not good enough for any particular woman, that’s totally fine by me. But anyway, the stats and my perceived reason for the match ending are below

Total matches – 137

Set first date – 44 (32%)

Actually met – 37 (27%)

No response to my first message – 21 (15%)

Rejected due to religion – 5 (4%)

Rejected due to not wanting kids – 9 (7%)

Gave one word answers – 11 (8%)

Conversation just faded – 34 (25%)

I never reached out to them – 11 (8%)

I lost interest in her– 32 (23%)

She lost interest in me (without giving reason) – 3 (2%)

Ghosted – 6 (4%)

Distance too far – 4 (3%)

Girlfriend – 1 (1%)

For clarity here, I consider ghosted to be any woman that I actually set a date with, yet when I texted to confirm the date, they never responded to my confirmation/day of the date text. Also, the numbers above won’t add up if you include the “Date set” and “Actually Met” lines. Some women have overlap there. They should only add up to 100% if you add up the lines after those two. There’s a few observations and conclusions here that I took away from my experience.

1.       I think setting a date with 1 out of 3 matches and actually meeting 1 out of 4 is pretty damn good. And if you take out the women that I never reached out to, it’s more like 35% and 30% respectively. If you then take out the women that never responded to my first message, then its more like 42% & 35%. Meaning if I actually got the chance to talk to you, there was a ~2/5 chance that we would set a date and ~1/3 chance of meeting. I’m sure some Casanova is going to come in here and say they meet with 99% of their matches. And that’s fine but that’s just not my reality and I'm fine with that.

2.       I’m not going to lie and act like money isn’t a factor, it is. However, in my experience even with money women will ultimately pass up on you if they don’t think you can/are willing to provide the life they want for themselves (kids, spiritual, or stay at home wife).

3.       To kind of expand on what I mentioned before, I sincerely, don’t really think the questions matter too much. If they like you enough to respond, they will respond to genuinely asked questions. If they don’t they probably don’t like you enough, and I personally don't have time or energy to try to convince people to like me. Given that 21 women never responded to me, then that means 105 women responded to me. If you take out the women that I never contacted, that means that 83% (105 respondents out of 126 that I actually contacted) of the women were totally fine responding to “How has  your day been going so far”. So I personally roll my eyes when people act like it’s some sort of cardinal sin. My main goal when chatting was to see if they were pleasant, sounded reasonably intelligent, could hold a conversation, and were willing to RECIPROCATE. Like of course, you can’t be a jackass or be a total bore but I think most people are fine with someone asking with questions with enthusiasm and effort in their answers. Over-thinking the questions is mostly a waste of time. If I have to pull a rabbit out of a hat to get you to respond, I don’t want to talk to you. Sure, could I maybe get a few more to respond by going out of my way and racking my brain, sure, but I’m just not going to do that.

4.       Entitlement is real. That’s all I’m going to say lol.

5.       A lot of people are also going to hate this, but having options is super helpful in not getting too stuck on any one person. I really do try my best to not just next people cause “there’s always another around the corner”. I honestly did try to give full and complete answers to questions and to keep the conversation going, no matter how the other person answered. That way I can say that I at least gave my all to a match, even if it didn't work out. I also really did try to genuinely get to know and evaluate people based on things that actually matter. Not small random things that don’t really say much about compatibility, which I see on this sub so often that it hurts to read. Which is why I push to actually meet people because I have learned time and time again that you can't really get a good sense of someone until you are actually in front of them.

6.       One other thing, I approach dating as an open book. Early on I tell women that they can feel free to ask me literally ANY (and I do mean any) question and I will answer it 100% honestly, without leaving anything out or being evasive. I have nothing to hide. I think it’s important to be an open book cause there’s no point in having your time wasted, but also if you want people to open up to you then you should be willing to do the same.

7.       As I think back on the women, of the 37 women that I met, I can truly say that there were only 5 of them, maaaybe 6, that I felt I could have a genuine long-term relationship with. Four of them rejected me because they wanted kids, and one we decided to let it go cause of distance. The last one I ironically enough matched with FB dating in late October, met in early November and have been dating ever since. Made it official in early December. And I genuinely believe we will be together long-term and probably get married in the next two years. I’ve never felt that way about anyone. This has been the easiest most free flowing and best relationship I’ve ever had and I always tell people that I struck gold meeting her. And guess what, she seems to feel the same way, it truly feels even. We’ve already gone on three small-ish trips together and have a two week Europe trip planned here for next month, and another to Mexico in December.

Anyway, I’m 100% willing to answer any questions so fire away.

Hey everyone (32M), could use some outside perspectives on this because I've been going back and forth in my own head for weeks.

Matched with a woman (31F) on Bumble. We started texting, really hit it off, and went on a first date. Things moved slow and easy at her pace. She said early on she wanted to take it slow, which I respected. We kept seeing each other, date after date, really good conversations, lots in common.

After our 5th date (slow pace) we kissed for the first time. Over the next 2-3 dates things got more affectionate more kissing, cuddling, one evening we spent hours just lying together on her couch. No sex though. She also took initiative in planning some of our dates, and even pulled me back in for one last kiss when I was leaving one evening. We started talking about future stuff too, like a trip together. It genuinely felt like things were moving in a good direction, mutually, on both sides.

Then, after about 8 dates total, the topic of exclusivity came up. basically just asking if we were on the same page about being exclusive going forward. She initially said yes, she felt the same way. A few hours later she messaged again saying she wanted to take some time to think, and admitted she'd been dating someone else recently too (before we'd talked about exclusivity, to be clear).

She asked for space, I gave it to her, no messages for over a week while she was on vacation. She actually thanked me for that afterward. Then, about 10 days after the original conversation, she messaged saying she'd thought about it and just didn't feel like her feelings were "enough" to move forward, and she didn't want to give me false hope by meeting up again.

I responded kindly thanked her for the time we'd had together, said I'd remember our dates fondly, and wished her well. That was it, no further messages from my side after that, also nothing more from her.

The next day she'd already removed me on all social media. A few days after that I noticed she'd blocked me on WhatsApp too.

No real explanation beyond her original message. It was respectful and kind in tone, but still came pretty out of nowhere given how things had been going physically and emotionally right before that conversation and given that she was often the one initiating things. And I'll admit, the speed of removing/blocking me afterward, with zero further contact from my end, has thrown me a bit.

I'm not asking for relationship advice on how to get her back. I've accepted it's over. I'm just genuinely curious what this sub thinks: does this sound like a normal "it just didn't click enough for her" situation, or does the timing/suddenness seem off to anyone else? Could bringing up exclusivity have "forced" a decision she wasn't ready to make yet, in a way that backfired? Or is this just how current dating goes?

Appreciate any perspectives, especially if you've been on either side of something like this.

Edit:

Thanks for all the reactions. It's clear there's no exact science behind it. I guess it's about finding the sweet spot between not too fast and not too slow. Experience for the future... and I probably lost out to someone who clearly found that sweet spot. It stings, but life goes on.

Original post here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bumble/s/zvv21z331o

This post got a lot of traction and I’m still getting messages about it, so I figured it would be easier to do an update in one post.

He canceled the date with me last Monday (August 10th). If you read my first post, it’s because he had suddenly gotten exclusive with someone else. Several people commented the post and said he’d be back. WELP, they were correct. I just didn’t think it would be so soon! He messaged me this Monday (August 17th) and said, “Wouldn’t ya know… if you don’t pay attention to red flags, you end up looking like an idiot 🤷‍♂️🤦‍♂️”. I didn’t respond to that, so he followed up a few hours later with “While I don’t anticipate a reply or further interest, I felt that I at least owed owning regret 🤝 I am falling on a sword and owning it.”

There you have it. I can’t lie, part of me does want to know what happened for his new relationship to go off the rails in less than a week. 🤣

Thanks for listening and all your comments!

Im a recent college graduate with a bachelor’s in games and simulation. I like working on tech so i got my degree in what i enjoy. I graduated in may and the games industry is struggling bringing new people in so im doing pool tech stuff in the mean time until i get my shot. I was messaging a girl back and forth and we had the same dog name ironically. It was going all good until i told her what i do for work. I explained my industry and that im doing a pool tech job until i get hired in the industry. After that she went ghost and distant? Im confused im average looking but i have my own place, job and dog and car i take care of outright. Just seems weird how a job can question your worth.