Can You Hide Your Facebook Dating Profile From Friends?

Mostly yes, and you do not have to do anything to get it. Facebook says your Dating profile is separate from your Facebook profile, and your current Facebook friends and anyone outside Dating cannot see it. Nothing you do there appears in your Feed, and your Dating conversations stay apart from Messenger. Three gaps remain, and one of them is yours to close.

Dating is a second profile that lives inside the Facebook app. Your Facebook friends cannot see it, and neither can anyone who is not using Dating, so your family and your coworkers are out unless they are matched with you.

The Feed is the part men worry about most, and it is the safest. Joining Dating does not announce itself. Changing a photo, answering a prompt or chatting with someone never turns into a post that people scroll past. Your main page looks the same the morning after you sign up as it did the night before.

Your Dating conversations are also kept apart. They do not appear in Messenger, so a friend borrowing your phone to check a message will not see a chat with a woman you matched with.

Facebook's help page carves out one exception. If you become Facebook friends with someone you matched with, your matches and suggested matches in Dating can still see your Dating profile.

The rule to take from this is simple. Keep your matches in Dating until you want her in your life, and do not add a woman on Facebook just to have another way to reach her. Once you are friends there, you have given up some of the separation you came for, and that is hard to undo.

Dating can suggest friends of friends as matches. The switch for that is called Suggest friends of friends, it lives in Dating Privacy Settings, and it is on until you turn it off.

So the ring just beyond your friends is part of the pool. Your cousin's roommate can be shown to you, and you can be shown to her. If you work in a small industry or live in a small town, that may matter. To turn it off, open Dating from the Facebook menu, tap your profile icon, then Settings, then Privacy Settings, and switch it off.

Turning it off costs you something. A woman who shares a friend with you gives you a built-in first line. Decide which matters more to you, privacy or an easy opener.

Blocking someone in Dating does not block them on Facebook or Messenger. If you want a man or woman gone from every part of Facebook, you need to block them there as well.

The reverse is the useful part. Anyone you already blocked on Facebook is automatically blocked in Dating. A coworker or an ex you blocked years ago will not turn up.

If someone you know does appear and you do not want her to see you, you can block her from the match's options and move on. Do that quietly and early, before you have liked or written to her, so nothing awkward is waiting for you at the next family dinner.

You can delete your Dating profile without deleting your Facebook account. Facebook adds that a deleted profile cannot be recreated for a short waiting period, so do not delete it on an impulse after one bad week. Take a break from opening the app instead, and come back when you are ready.

Deleting your Facebook account takes the Dating profile with it. Before that, get the number of anyone you are still talking to, because those conversations live only in Dating.

Even with the switch off, strangers can read your page, and some of them will know someone who knows you. The easy standard is to write every line as if your best friend's girlfriend might see it, because she might know someone who has.

That standard costs you nothing. It keeps your photos relaxed and your prompts honest, and it keeps out the crude joke that would travel. The women who see you should meet a man who is warm, specific and easy to answer, which is also what gets a first message answered.

Private from your friends is a good start. A page worth answering is what gets you dates.