Do You Swipe on Hinge or Tap to Like?

You tap. In Hinge's main Discover feed, you like someone by tapping the heart on a specific photo or prompt and then confirming with Send Like. You pass by tapping the black X, which Hinge calls a Skip. The only place a swipe appears is Standouts, where swiping a profile to the left skips it.

In Discover, you pick one photo or one prompt on her page, tap the heart on it, and confirm with Send Like. Your like is attached to the thing you chose, not to the page as a whole.

You can add a comment before you send. Hinge says a comment makes a response more likely, so it is worth the few extra seconds. There is no swipe-right for yes. Yes is the heart.

Tap the black X. That is a Skip. There is no swipe-left in Discover, so anyone arriving from another app will reach for the wrong gesture at first.

If you pressed X by accident, the undo arrow brings her back, but only your latest Skip and only a limited number of times for free members. So when you tap the X, mean it.

Standouts is the exception. There, you skip a profile by swiping it to the left. You also cannot send a regular like in Standouts, only a Rose.

So the gestures change by feed. In Discover, a heart means yes and an X means no. In Standouts, a left swipe means no, and yes means spending a Rose. Knowing which feed you are in keeps you from skipping a woman you meant to like.

Once you send a like, that woman's profile leaves your Discover feed until she responds. If she accepts, she appears in your Matches tab as a new match. Until she responds, she stays out of your feed.

That is why the like deserves care. You get one look, one tap and one comment. Then the page is out of reach. Read before you press the heart, and say what you mean the first time.

A new match in the Matches tab is an opening, not a result. She has said yes to a like with your comment on it, so she already knows what caught your eye.

Write to her soon, and build on that comment instead of starting over. Answer the thing you liked, ask one real question about it, and keep the message short. A man who goes quiet after a match wastes the yes he worked for.

On other apps a swipe costs nothing, so men swipe fast. Hinge makes you pick a specific thing to like and, if you want, say something about it.

a dating coach describes the difference. On Hinge, he says, his first message usually goes out before the match happens, because the like and the comment arrive together. The prompts also give him something to write about. So the like is the opener, and it deserves the same effort as a first message.

He also tells students to be selective on the apps instead of liking everyone, because the app reads how choosy you are. Tapping a heart on one specific photo slows you down in a useful way. A man who hits Send Like on every page gets worse results than a man who reads each page first.

Choose the photo or prompt you can say something specific about. A comment that could only have been written about that one thing beats "hey" or a remark on her looks. Keep it short, and make it sound like you.

If nothing on her page gives you something to say, skip her. A like with a lazy comment is a weak first message, and a weak first message is a poor way to start a conversation you might want to have for weeks.

Use Roses sparingly. In Standouts they are the only way to say yes, so they belong to the women you would rank highest. A Rose on a woman you only half like uses up something you cannot get back.

Every woman who sees your page decides in a heartbeat, with a tap on the heart or the X. So the lead photo and the first prompt have to earn the tap. If her choice comes down to one look, give her one look worth keeping.