How to Add Date Ideas to Your Hinge Profile

Hinge says you add Date Ideas when you update your profile in settings. You choose from presets such as drinks, coffee or tea, dinner, a walk, live music, mini golf, trivia night and bowling, or you write one in yourself. They are optional, and they are separate from the prompts every Hinge profile needs, so adding them takes nothing away from the rest of your page.

Hinge's own wording is that daters select their Date Ideas when updating their profile in settings, and that you can include one you write yourself. Your profile's edit screen opens from your Photo Icon and then the Pencil Icon, which is where Hinge's help pages begin their profile instructions.

Once they are saved, they show on your page as a short set of first-date activities. Anyone viewing your profile can pick one of them from a dropdown, along with when they are free, before they like or comment on you.

Hinge's page on the feature lists it in English in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia. If your app is set to another language, or you are somewhere else, that is the first thing to check before assuming something is broken.

The full preset list is longer than the few above. Hinge also includes dessert, a movie, a picnic, a museum, karaoke, an arcade and thrifting. Most of them are fine. They are not equally good first dates.

Choose with one test in mind: can you talk, sit close, and either stay longer or leave easily? Drinks, coffee or tea, a walk and dessert all pass. Mini golf, bowling, an arcade or trivia also pass. They add something useful too, because a shared activity gives you both something to react to besides each other.

A movie does not pass. Two hours facing a screen tells neither of you anything. Dinner is a heavier first date than many men assume, with a table between you and no graceful way to end it at the forty-minute mark if it is not working. Save both for a second or third date, when you already know you want the long evening.

Pick activities you would actually suggest this week, in your own city, at a place you can name. If she picks one, you want to be able to reply with a specific spot and a specific evening, not start researching.

The write-in is the one part of Date Ideas where you can show her something about yourself rather than pick from a menu. Hinge's newsroom lists popular write-ins such as pool, board games, an escape room, a bookstore, an art gallery and a record store.

A good write-in is specific and real. "Record store, then coffee next door" is a plan she can picture. "Something fun" is a blank. If you have a genuine habit, that is your write-in. It might be a Sunday market you go to anyway, or a bar with a pool table you know well. It is true, and you will be relaxed there.

Keep it simple enough that saying yes costs her nothing. A write-in that needs tickets, a car and an afternoon off asks for a lot from someone she has not met.

Anything you type yourself falls under Hinge's Terms of Use and Community Guidelines, like the rest of your profile. Hinge lists Date Ideas answers among the free-written sections it may ask you to review if the content goes against those rules. Keep the write-in clean and literal. It is a plan, not a place for a joke that needs context.

Date Ideas do not do the job of your photos and prompts. Those are what make her want to meet you. Date Ideas tell her what meeting you would look like once she does.

That means they should match the man in the rest of the profile. If your prompts are about cooking and your photos are at markets, a food market or a cooking class as a write-in makes the whole page hang together. If your photos are all nights out and your Date Ideas are a picnic and a museum, she notices the gap, even if she could not say why.

When you have saved them, open the preview: Photo Icon, Pencil Icon, then View at the top of the screen. Read your Date Ideas as if they sat on a stranger's profile and ask whether you would pick one. If the honest answer is no, change them before anyone else has to decide.