What Is the Difference Between Location and Hometown on Hinge?

On Hinge, Location is where someone is now and Hometown is where they are from. Location appears next to a compass icon in the vitals bar, and Hometown appears next to a house icon just under that bar. One tells her where you are, the other tells her where you started, and both give your matches something easy to ask about.

Hinge's help page on location settings draws the line in one sentence each. Location is where someone is now. Hometown shows where a user is from.

To change either one, open the edit screen: tap your Photo Icon, then the Pencil Icon. Location is listed under My Vitals, alongside things like your age and height. Hometown is listed under My Virtues, alongside your job, your education and your dating intentions. They sit in different sections, and they answer different questions.

When you first set up an account, Hinge asks where you want to meet other daters. You can tap the compass icon to use your phone's location, or type a city, neighborhood, address or zip code into the search bar under the map. Either way, you can move the pin before you save.

The same help page is where Hinge explains your distance preference. You set a maximum distance with a slider, and by default you only see people inside it, unless you tick the box to show people outside that preference. Hinge's subscriber tools even let you sort incoming likes by Nearby, meaning daters whose set location is close to yours. So the location field is doing real work, not just decorating the page.

Set it to where you actually live or are actually staying. A location that says one city while you live in another wastes both people's time the moment somebody tries to plan a drink.

This is the detail men miss. Hinge says it does not update your location automatically, and it does not record where you are each time you log in. If you move or travel, you have to change it yourself: Photo Icon, Pencil Icon, Location under My Vitals, then adjust the map.

So the man who moved across town months ago may still be showing the old neighborhood. The man back from a long stay somewhere else may still be showing the place he left. If you travel and update your location, say so early in the chat, something as simple as "here until Sunday," so nobody plans around a version of you that leaves in three days.

One more thing from Hinge's own page: being able to set your location somewhere is not the same as Hinge being available to download there. It suggests checking its availability page before a trip.

Location names come straight from Google Maps. Zoom in and you can pick a neighborhood. Zoom out and you get a broader area, the way Hinge's own example moves from West Village out to Manhattan. If you set your location by hand, Hinge says it only displays the name of the neighborhood you pick and never your exact address.

For most men, a neighborhood is the better choice. It tells her roughly how far away you are, and it gives her a small hook: the park, the bar on the corner, the train she also takes. If privacy matters more to you, Hinge itself suggests zooming out to a wider area, and that is a perfectly normal choice.

Hometown does not change when you move. It is a fact about your past, and it does not appear on Hinge's complete list of dating preferences, which is the list of things people can filter by. Its job is conversation.

That makes it one of the most useful small details you can fill in. A hometown gives her a second place to picture you in, and a gap between hometown and location is a story by itself. A man from a farm town now living downtown has an answer ready for the question she was going to ask anyway.

Her hometown is the easiest opener on the page, which is exactly why so many men waste it. "Oh nice, what's it like there?" puts her to work answering a questionnaire. A string of questions about where she grew up and what she does all day turns the chat into an interview, and interviews rarely end in a date.

Say something instead of asking something. If you know the place, say the thing only a person who knows it would say. If you do not, make a light guess and let her correct you: "Grew up near the coast, so you definitely have an opinion on which beach is overrated." A guess gives her something to push back on, and pushing back is the start of a real exchange.

Do the same check on your own page. Would a stranger reading your hometown and location have anything to say to you? If the answer is yes, you have made her first line easier, and that is most of the job.

These are two small fields, but a first date depends on both of them: where you are, and something to talk about when you get there. Keep your location current, fill in your hometown if it helps her start, and never use either one to pretend you are somewhere or someone you are not.