How to Set and Edit Preferences on The League

To set your preferences on The League, open the My Account page and select Edit my preferences. Gender, distance, ethnicity, religion, age and height are open to every member. Stricter age and height settings, along with filters such as family plans and multi-city dating, need a paid membership.

Everything lives in one place. Go to My Account, then tap Edit my preferences.

You can come back and change them whenever you want. That matters, because the first settings you pick are rarely the right ones. Treat them as a starting point you will adjust once you see how the app behaves for you.

The free version of The League gives you the basics. You can set the gender you are interested in, how far away people can be, their ethnicity and religion, and ranges for age and height.

For most men, that is enough. These are the settings that decide who shows up in your Batch, and they are all available without paying.

Set them honestly for where you live. Distance is the one men most often get wrong. In a big city a short radius can still hold plenty of people, but in a spread-out area the same setting can leave your Batch nearly empty. Start wider than you think you need and narrow it later if the app shows you too many people who are too far away.

The paid tiers let you go further. The League says more restrictive age and height preferences need a paid membership. So do filters for marriage, family plans and multi-city dating.

Whether that is worth paying for depends on what the filter does for you. a dating coach argues that men are often too reluctant to pay for dating features, and that when your time is valuable, paying can be the smart call. Multi-city dating is a good example. If you really do split your time between two cities, a filter built for exactly that is money well spent.

A stricter age or height filter is a different case. Paying for it buys you a smaller pool. Only pay if the setting reflects a genuine dealbreaker.

The League's own advice is to treat your preferences as nice to haves rather than rules. It also warns that very strict preferences can lengthen your time on the Waitlist.

That second point surprises men. They assume filters only affect who they see once they are in. The League says they can slow down getting in at all. If you are waiting to be drafted, a tight set of filters is working against you twice.

a dating coach has made a point about filters that most men never think about. They work in both directions, and they hide people from you as well as you from them.

His example is simple. A woman sets her age limit a year or two below yours. You never see her, and she never sees you, even though you might have liked each other on sight. Neither of you ever finds out.

Your own filters do the same thing to women you would have liked. A height cutoff an inch too high, or a distance setting a few miles too short, quietly removes people you will never know you missed.

Some preferences really are dealbreakers, and those should stay firm.

If you want children one day and she is certain she does not, or the other way round, that is a real incompatibility. If your faith is central to how you live, a religion preference makes sense. If you will not travel more than a certain distance for a date, set the distance to match.

Everything else deserves a looser setting than your first instinct. Age and height are where men most often set limits tighter than they need to. Widen them a little and see who appears.

Your first settings are a guess. After a few weeks on the app you have real information.

If your Batch feels thin, loosen one preference at a time and watch what changes. If you are seeing lots of women who are clearly wrong for you, tighten the one setting that would have screened them out. Small changes, one at a time, tell you far more than resetting everything at once.

The aim is not the perfect filter. It is enough of the right women in front of you that some of them turn into dates.