Does Tinder Tell People You Blocked Them?

No. Tinder states that people you block through its Block Contacts feature are not notified, so nothing lands on their phone and nothing tells them it was you. Blocking someone does not even mean that person has a Tinder account. Tinder also says a block leaves the matches and messages you already have exactly where they were.

Block Contacts works from people you already know. You choose the ones you would rather not run into on the app, and Tinder handles the rest in the background.

The usual list is short. An ex. A woman from work. A client. Your sister's best friend. These are people whose opinion of your dating life you would rather not hear about at a family dinner.

You can set it up before any of them ever appears. That is the point of it. It is a precaution you take once, on a quiet evening, not a reaction to something that went wrong.

Nothing. There is no alert, no email, and no note saying a man from her contact list has blocked her.

She also cannot read anything into it from her side. Tinder notes that blocking a contact does not mean the person has a Tinder account at all. You might block ten people and find that only two of them use the app. For the other eight, nothing changed, because there was nothing there to change.

That matters if the worry behind the question is social. You are not telling anyone anything. You are changing a setting on your own phone, and the only person who knows about it is you.

Blocking contacts does not reach back into anything you already have. Tinder says it does not affect your existing matches or messages.

So Block Contacts is the wrong tool if the woman you want gone is someone you have already matched with. Her match and your chat with her will still be sitting in your list. For that, you open the chat and unmatch her, which takes each of you off the other's list. Tinder says she is not notified of that either, although she may notice you are missing.

Think of the two buttons as covering two different kinds of people. Block Contacts is for people you know from your life. Unmatch is for people you met on the app.

Most men do not need to block anyone. Being spotted on a dating app by someone you know is awkward for a few seconds, and she is there for the same reason you are.

A few people are worth the minute it takes:

• An ex you are still getting over. Seeing her face every few days keeps the breakup raw. The standard advice for getting over someone is to put as many barriers between you and her as you can, and a block on the app is one more barrier.
• Someone you work with, especially someone you manage. Keeping your dating life away from the office is worth one setting.
• Anyone who has made you uneasy in the past. You do not want to see her, and you would rather she did not see you.

Everyone else can take their chances, and so can you.

A block is a quiet, one-sided precaution. It is not a way of saying something, and men who use it as a statement get nothing back, because nobody receives the statement.

If you block an ex to make a point, she will never know you made it. If you block her hoping she notices and reaches out, she will not notice. A block is for your own peace of mind. It works best when you set it and stop thinking about it.

The other wrong use is blocking out of embarrassment. Some men block half their contacts because they feel strange being on the apps at all. Plenty of men you know are on the same apps, and so are some of the women in your phone. Being there is normal. Hiding from everyone you have ever met turns the app into a secret, and a secret is a bad place to date from.

A block on Tinder does not have to last forever. Tinder lets you unblock contacts from the same Block Contacts screen in Settings, one at a time or all at once.

So if you blocked an ex in a rough week and you have since made peace with seeing her around, you can undo it in a few taps. It is your setting, and you can change it whenever the reason for it has gone.

Tinder does not tell anyone you blocked them. A block does not reveal whether that person is even on the app, and your existing matches and messages are untouched. Block the handful of people you have a real reason to avoid, leave everyone else alone, and put your attention on the conversations that are actually going somewhere.