How Do You Change Your Name on Hinge?

Tap your Photo Icon, then tap the Pencil Icon next to your photo, and edit Name under My Vitals. Tap the Back arrow, then Done, to save the change.

1. Open Hinge and tap your Photo Icon.
2. Tap the Pencil Icon next to your profile photo.
3. Under My Vitals, tap Name and edit it.
4. Tap the Back arrow, then tap Done to save.

That is the whole change. The more useful question is what should go in the box.

Name is not picked from a menu. You type whatever you like into it, and that is exactly why Hinge keeps an eye on it.

Hinge's help page explains the catch. Name is a free-written field. If what you put there goes against Hinge's Terms or Community Guidelines, you may get a notification asking you to review and update it. So if you ever see one of those, it is about what you typed. Change it to a plain name and move on.

The right answer is the name people call you. Your first name, or the version of it your friends use.

If everyone calls you Mike, write Mike, not Michael. If you have gone by your middle name since school, use that. The name on your page is the name she will say when she walks up to your table, and it should be the one you answer to without thinking.

Skip the last name. A first name is plenty for someone deciding whether to send you a like, and a full name makes you easy to look up before you have even met. That is your choice to make later, once she is actually getting to know you.

Some men try to get clever here. An emoji, a joke name, a nickname nobody calls them, a word in capitals to catch the eye. It rarely does what they hope.

a dating coach puts it this way. Your page is your marketing and your texting is your sales. Good marketing makes her feel she already knows what she is getting. A gimmick in the name box does the opposite. It reads as a man trying hard in the one spot where nobody else is trying at all, and it is also the kind of free-written entry most likely to earn one of those notices from Hinge.

Let your photos and prompts do the persuading. They are built for it. The name just needs to be your name.

The same goes for stuffing anything else into the box. A handle, a line about what you are looking for, a tagline after your name. The name field is read in a split second on the way to your photos, and anything extra there reads as a man who could not wait for the rest of the page to speak for him.

Men change the name field for normal reasons. A typo at sign-up. Switching from a formal name to the one they go by. Deciding to show a shorter version.

If you change it after you have already been talking to women, the ones in your chats may notice. Say something if they do. One light line covers it: "Everyone calls me Rob, so I finally fixed it."

The same goes if she only learns your real name later, say from the name on your number once you trade them. Mention it before she has to ask. Something small said early is charming. The same thing found out on the third date feels like something you were hiding.

What matters is that everything lines up. The name she reads on the app, the name saved in her phone when you swap numbers, and the name you say when you meet her should all match.

a dating coach's gameplan moves a good conversation off the app and onto the phone once the flirting is going and she is clearly engaged. That step goes smoother when the name she saves is the same name she has been reading all week. Nobody wants to wonder which of their contacts the new text is from.

Photo Icon, Pencil Icon, Name under My Vitals, then the Back arrow and Done. Use the first name people actually call you, keep jokes and pitches out of the box, and if Hinge sends you a notice about it, swap in your plain name and carry on.