Bumble, Swipe Left of Right (2024 Edition)

At its most basic, when you swipe right on a person's profile, you're indicating that you're interested in the person. Then it's up to them to right swipe also — if they do, that's when you get a match.

The swipe is just the first step in the matching process. If you end up getting a match, that's when you can start thinking about the best first message to send, and how to get a strong conversation going.

The counterpart to swiping right, swiping left means you're not interested in the user that Bumble has presented to you, whether that's because of their profile picture or any other information presented. In this case, it doesn't matter if the other user swipes left or right, they can't become a match for you.

Swiping through photos can put you into an almost trance like state, so don't forget to pay attention while you're staring at the screen! It's all too easy to left swipe by accident because you weren't paying attention. And there's a particular kind of sinking feeling you get in your gut when you realize you accidently swipe left on a person that you might have been interested in.

What happens next? That depends. If the other user has already swiped right on your profile, you'll get an immediate notification that you've got a match, and the person will be added to your match queue. You can access to the list of people that already swiped right on you via the Premium feature: Bumble Beeline.

Your match queue is the list of people available for you to initiate conversations with — or who you're waiting to have make the first move, depending on the gender breakdown. Remember, on Bumble women need to make the first move when matching with men. But with same sex matches, anyone can message first.

Finally, once you've swiped (in either direction), you're presented with the next profile and you need to decide witch way to swipe all over again.

If you're worried about what happens if you accidentally swiped left on someone you're interested in, or if you find yourself hitting your daily swipe limit, you might want to invest in premium options on Bumble. As a paid feature, you can backtrack on an accidental swipe and can even get an unlimited swipe limit.

So if you're willing to pay for Bumble premium, you can get even more potential matches by swiping on Bumble even more and have a way to undo accidents and even rematch with your expired matches.

A lot of factors dictate how many potential matches you'll find in your swipe queue.

A potential downside of paying for unlimited matches is that you could blast through everyone in your area and then find yourself running dry. Another downside of this strategy is that you may not give yourself time to focus on sending good messages to the people you've already matched with. You could also be too distracted swiping to focus on a conversation that's already started.

It also depends how many people in your area are using the app, what distance from your location you're willing to go to meet someone, and also what age range you're looking at. In general, the more flexible you can be on search parameters, the better chance you'll have meeting people that might be a good fit.

After all, you still get to decide who you right swipe, so there's no downside to fols landing in your queue who might not be a perfect match.