You can always share them, but maybe not with Bumble's own button. Its help center lists Share Date as unavailable while the company makes improvements to the app. When the feature is running, it sends a trusted friend the time and place of your date, plus your match's name, age and picture, through any messaging app. If you do not see it in your app, you can send the same details yourself in about a minute.

What Share Date does when it works

The feature is simple, and knowing what it sends tells you what to send by hand.

It shares the date's time and location with someone you trust. It also shares who you are meeting: her name, her age and her picture. It goes out through any messaging app, so your friend gets it wherever you already talk, and that friend does not need a Bumble account to open it.

It also keeps up with changes. If you edit the plan, the link you already shared updates, so your friend is never looking at an old time or the wrong bar.

How to share your plans by hand

If the button is not there, a single text to a friend does the same job. Send:

  • Her first name and age, as they appear in the app.
  • A screenshot of one of her photos.
  • The name and address of the place you are going.
  • The time you are meeting, and roughly when you expect to head home.

Then do what the feature does automatically: keep it current. If the venue changes or the time moves, send your friend a one-line update. A friend holding a plan that is two changes out of date is not much help.

Pick a friend who will actually read it, and tell them what you want them to do. "If I haven't texted by midnight, call me" is a better instruction than a plan they read once and forget.

Why a man should bother

Most men skip this because they assume the risks all run one way. They do not.

Fake accounts exist, and some of them exist to get money out of men. A date that suddenly moves to a strange address, a match who will never do a quick call first, a woman who shows up looking nothing like her photos: none of that is common, but all of it happens. A friend who knows where you are costs you nothing, and it means that if an evening goes wrong, somebody knows where to start.

a dating coach's habit here doubles as a safety step. He likes a short video call before the date, because it screens out women who do not match their photos and makes the woman more likely to show up excited to see you.

She is probably sharing hers

Assume she is doing the same thing, because she very likely is. A woman going to see a man she knows from an app has more reason to be careful than you do.

That changes how you should set the date up. A student on a dating coach's online dating program said one thing he really valued was learning what women need from a man before they feel safe going on a date, and how his own messages had been coming across to them. Women feel safer where there are plenty of people around, and a man who picks that kind of place makes the yes easier.

So choose somewhere busy and public for a first meeting. Name a specific place she can look up and send to her own friend. Let her get there and back under her own steam. None of this makes you look nervous. It makes you look like a man who has done this before.

Plans that are easy to share are easier to accept

The same qualities that make a plan easy to hand to a friend make it easy for her to say yes to.

"We should grab a drink sometime" gives her nothing to share and nothing to agree to. "Drinks at the Blue Door on Thursday at eight?" gives her a place, a day and a time, and her friend can look it up in ten seconds.

a dating coach has a neat trick for the confirmation. Leave one small detail open when you set the date, such as the exact time. Then text her on the day to fill it in. The message reads as organizing, not as checking whether she still wants to come.

When the plan changes

Plans move, and that is fine as long as everyone stays in the loop.

If you change the venue or the time, tell her clearly and early, not twenty minutes before. Then send the update to your friend too, or edit the plan in Share Date if your app has it. A plan everyone can see and trust is a better start to the evening than a string of last-minute messages.