Can You Search for Specific People on Facebook Dating?

No. Facebook's help pages describe Dating as a feed of suggested matches, and they list no feature for looking up a particular person by name. People reach you as suggestions, based on your information, your preferences and signals from Facebook. You can change who is suggested, but you cannot go and fetch one woman.

Facebook says suggestions draw on a few things. These are your profile information, your stated preferences, shared Facebook Groups and Events, and other Facebook signals. You do the choosing among the people it shows you, and Dating does the finding.

That is the reverse of a site where you type a name into a box. Here there is no box. If you are hoping a particular woman will come up, the only thing in your control is how likely you are to be a good fit for her suggestions.

You can change your preferences at any time. Age, gender identity and distance are the main ones, and you can mark a preference as a strong preference to narrow who you are shown.

A tighter set of preferences gives you fewer people and a better match to what you want. A wider set gives you a bigger pool. If you are in a small town, widen the distance before you tighten anything else, or you may run out of suggestions.

Friends of friends may be suggested unless the Suggest friends of friends setting is switched off. That setting changes how many people from your wider circle appear, so decide whether you want those people in your suggestions.

Facebook has a dating assistant, a chat inside the Matches tab. You can type a prompt, such as someone from your hometown who likes the outdoors, and it suggests profiles using fields like job, education, height, location and interests.

Facebook says it is rolled out gradually and may not be available to everyone, so you may not see it. If you do, it is the closest thing in Dating to searching. It still works from a description, not a name, so it will not find one specific woman.

Most men who ask this are thinking of one person. Maybe it is a woman you met at a party, a coworker you like or an old friend. There are better routes than Dating.

If you know her, ask her. If you met her somewhere and got no number, ask a friend who knows her or go back to the place you met. a dating coach's advice on any approach is that the best moment to get a woman's number is while you are still talking to her, because it vanishes the second you walk away.

A short message can be enough: "I enjoyed meeting you on Saturday. Would you like to get a drink this week?" It is direct, it is polite and it does not involve hunting through an app.

If she shows up in your suggestions on her own, send a like and tell her something about why you liked her page.

Do not make a second account or bend your settings to try to catch one particular woman. Dating is built on suggestions, and a woman who is not in yours may be outside your preferences, may have different ones, or may not be using Dating at all.

Also, do not read too much into who you do or do not see. Absence from your feed says nothing about whether she is interested in you.

If the person you have in mind uses Dating, the most you can do is make yourself a good suggestion. Keep your preferences broad enough that she is inside them, answer your own questions with real detail so the shared interests show, and use photos that look like you. You cannot make Dating show her your page, and you should not want to. A woman who likes what she sees, when it is shown to her, is the only kind of yes worth having.

A man who spends a week waiting for one face is wasting the women Facebook has already put in front of him. Read what each one wrote, send a like with a comment about one specific detail, and answer fast when she writes back.

Then move the best chat toward a plan within a few messages. If your likes get no replies, the cause is usually your photos or your first lines, and a coach can read both with you and show where she loses interest.