How Do You Log Into Tinder if You Changed Your Phone Number?

Open Tinder or go to Tinder.com, tap Log In, and pick the option that asks Trouble Logging In? Enter the email address tied to your Tinder account, and Tinder then lets you log in with your new phone number. You land back in the same account you had before.

Here is the whole route, the way Tinder lays it out.

1. Open the Tinder app, or go to Tinder.com in a browser.
2. Tap Log In.
3. Tap Trouble Logging In?
4. Enter the email address associated with your Tinder account.
5. Follow the steps from there to log in with your new phone number.

The old number does not need to work, and you do not need the old SIM card. What you do need is access to that email inbox, because the email is how Tinder confirms the account is really yours.

Your phone number and your email are the two ways Tinder knows who you are. When one of them changes, the other one vouches for you.

So the email is the part to get right. Plenty of men signed up years ago on whatever address they used at the time and never looked at it again. If you have a work address, an old university address and a personal one, work out which one you signed up with before you type anything. The wrong one just sends you in a circle.

Check the inbox you use least, and its spam and promotions folders too. A confirmation that lands in a folder you never open looks exactly like one that never arrived.

The awkward case is the man who changed his number and also lost the email. Maybe it was a work address from a job he left, or an account he forgot the password to years ago.

Get the email back first. Use the email provider's own recovery process, or ask your old employer if it was a work address. Once you can read that inbox again, the Tinder steps above work as normal.

Do not solve this by opening a second account on the new number. You would start from nothing, and every woman you were talking to stays behind on the old account where you cannot reach her.

Logging in with the new number gets you through the door. While you are in, open your account settings and make sure the number listed is the one you actually use now. The next login should be a normal one, not another recovery.

Look at the email on the account while you are there. If it is an address you barely check, change it to the one you read every day. The next time your phone changes, that inbox is what gets you back in.

A new number causes a quieter problem off the app. If you had already moved some conversations to text, those women are still writing to a number that no longer reaches you. From their side, you simply went silent.

a dating coach's habit when he first texts a woman is to say who it is and ask her to save the number. Do the same now. Send each of them one short line from the new number, something like "Hey, it's Sam from Tinder. New number, save this one." Skip the long explanation. If one of them had a date with you on the calendar, confirm it in the same message so she is not left guessing whether it is still on.

It is tempting to leave the app for a week and deal with it later. My reading of how the apps decide who gets shown is that they favor men who are active, because an active man is someone a woman can actually talk to. By his account, opening the app a few times a week and swiping for a few minutes is enough to count.

A week locked out is a week of not being shown, and a week of her messages sitting unanswered. Sort out the login the same day you notice it. Reply to anyone who wrote while you were away, and carry on where you left off.

The whole fix only worked because the email still worked. Keep it that way.

Use an address you will still have in five years, not one tied to an employer. Update the number on Tinder the week you switch phones or carriers, not months later. And any time you retire an old email account, check whether Tinder is still pointing at it. Five minutes of housekeeping now saves an evening of recovery later.