Dating keeps its own location, and Facebook keeps a Primary Location for your account. When the two stop lining up, Facebook may ask you to update your Dating Location. Until they match again, you can keep messaging your existing matches, but you cannot make new ones. If you have just travelled, your Primary Location should update by itself as you use Facebook. Facebook also warns that using a VPN may cause the mismatch.

Two locations that have to agree

Most men assume Facebook has one idea of where they are. It has two.

Your Primary Location belongs to your Facebook account. Facebook updates it on its own as you use the app. Your Dating Location is the place Dating uses to suggest people to you. Facebook only changes that one when you choose to change it.

Most of the time the two sit in the same city and you never think about either. The warning appears when they drift apart.

What still works while they do not

The mismatch does not lock you out of Dating. Facebook says you can keep messaging the matches you already have. What stops is new ones. Nobody new gets added until the two locations agree.

That matters for how you spend the next few days, which is covered further down.

After a trip

This is the most common cause. You flew somewhere for work or a long weekend, used Facebook while you were there, and your Primary Location followed you. Your Dating Location stayed at home.

After a trip, Facebook says your Primary Location should catch up on its own as you keep using Facebook. So if you are home again, use Facebook normally and give it a little time. Open Dating again after that and see whether the warning has cleared.

If the trip was the whole story, there is nothing else to do.

If you are still away, your existing conversations can carry on. Just be clear with any woman back home about when you return, and set the date for after that. A plan made from a hotel room for the Thursday after you land is a perfectly good plan.

If you use a VPN

A VPN sends your connection through a server somewhere else, so to Facebook you can look like you are in another city or another country. Facebook warns that using a VPN may cause exactly this mismatch.

If you leave a VPN running on your phone, switch it off, then open Facebook and Dating again. Many men forget the VPN is even on, since it was set up months ago for work or streaming. If the warning goes away once the VPN is off, you have found the cause.

How to update your Dating Location

If the mismatch is real because you have moved, update Dating to match where you now live.

  1. Tap Menu, then tap Dating.
  2. Tap Profile in the top right.
  3. Tap Dating preferences.
  4. Tap Dating location.
  5. Tap Update.

Your Dating location only changes when you do this yourself. Moving house does not move it for you, which is why men who relocate so often run into this warning.

Use the pause well

While new matches are on hold, the conversations you already have are all you have. That is not a bad thing. It is a push toward the part most men put off.

Go through every chat that is warm. Where she is replying with real answers and questions of her own, suggest a specific plan. A drink on Thursday at a place you both know is easy to say yes to. Something as plain as "I've enjoyed this. Are you free Thursday for a drink at the wine bar on Fifth?" does the job. Where the chat is friendly but slow, ask for her number so the conversation can carry on outside the app.

Men who have been at this a long time say the same thing about online conversations. The longer a chat drags on without a plan, the flatter it gets, and the more chance she meets someone else in the meantime. A few days without new matches is a good excuse to stop collecting conversations and start turning them into dates.

Do not fake where you are

Setting your Dating Location to a city you do not live in and are not visiting, just to see different women, helps nobody. Those women cannot actually go out with you, and Facebook built this check to keep the two locations honest.

If you are genuinely moving somewhere, update your Dating Location when you get there. If you are only visiting for a few days, enjoy the trip and let Dating catch up when you are home.