Tap the Photo Icon, tap the Dating Preferences icon, choose the preference you want to change, adjust it and tap Save. Your Dating Preferences are private. Hinge says they only act as filters on who you see, and nobody else can view them. So you can set them however you like without a woman ever knowing what you picked.

The steps

  1. Tap the Photo Icon, the last icon on the right of the menu at the bottom of the screen.
  2. Tap the Dating Preferences icon.
  3. Tap the preference you want to change, such as Age Range or Distance.
  4. Make your change and tap Save.

That is all there is to it. You can come back and change any preference whenever you like, as often as you like.

Each preference also has a box you can tick if you are open to seeing people just outside it. When a box is ticked, that preference shows the word Flexible on your Dating Preferences screen. Gender is the exception. Hinge keeps it strict and does not let you loosen it.

Which filters you can set

Every member can filter by gender, distance, age range, ethnicity, relationship type and religion. Subscribers get a longer list on top of that, including height, dating intentions, children, family plans, drinking, smoking, politics and education level.

You do not need all of them. Most men do better with a handful of settings they have thought about than with a long list of boxes ticked on the first night.

Your preferences are private, and that matters

Since your filters are invisible, you never have to announce them. That is a gift, and plenty of men throw it away by writing their requirements into a prompt anyway.

Picture her reading "must love dogs, no drama, under 30 only" on your page. Every item is a small instruction aimed at her, before you have said a single friendly word. It makes you sound hard to please and slightly bitter. The setting on your Dating Preferences screen does the sorting silently, and your page is left free to be warm.

Set each filter by asking one question

For every preference, ask yourself whether you would genuinely turn down a great first drink with a woman outside it. If the answer is yes, set it firmly. If the honest answer is "probably not," leave it loose or leave it alone.

Age range is where men get this wrong most often. The range usually gets typed in during sign-up, half asleep, and then left for a year. Check yours now against your real taste. A lower limit you actually hold is fine. An upper limit set a couple of years below what you really like removes women you would have been glad to sit across from, and nothing on your screen ever tells you they were there.

Distance is the other one worth real thought. Set it to how far you would actually travel for a first date with a stranger on a weeknight. Too tight and your feed runs dry. Too wide and you spend your evenings chatting with women who live too far away to meet.

Height and style are easier to judge from her photos than from a checkbox, and a checkbox never reports who it hid.

Too many filters shrink your matches

Every hard filter removes women before you have seen them. One or two rarely matter. Five or six stacked on top of each other can leave a feed so thin you run out of people to see halfway through the week.

This is sharpest in smaller towns, where the pool is small to start with. In a big city you can afford more filters. Anywhere else, keep the list short and let your own judgment do the rest.

It works the other way too. Women set their own filters, and there is nothing you can do about hers. What you control is whether your page gives the women who do see you a reason to say yes.

Preferences are rarely the real problem

A settings screen is a comfortable place to spend ten minutes. It has sliders and boxes and a Save button, and it never tells you anything uncomfortable about yourself.

The harder questions are elsewhere. If plenty of women pass your filters but few like you back, study the photo that leads your page and the three things you wrote. If likes arrive but the chats die after a few lines, look at your own side of the conversation. Are you asking her questions she has answered forty times, or saying something she would actually enjoy replying to? Do you suggest a drink while she is still enjoying the exchange, or wait until it has gone quiet? Those two habits decide more dates than any filter, and they are much easier to see when an experienced coach goes through your actual chats with you.