Why Is Tinder Showing You the Wrong Gender or Ages?

When Tinder shows you people outside the gender or ages you asked for, start with your search preferences. Tinder says to open Discovery Settings and double-check what you have set there. If everything looks correct, its next step is to log out of the app and log back in.

Your search preferences live a few taps from the main screen.

1. Open Tinder and tap the profile icon.
2. Go to Settings.
3. Scroll to Discovery Settings.

Look at two things: who you have chosen to be shown, and the age range. If men keep turning up in your cards, the first of those is where to look. If the women look far too young or far too old, it is the second.

Both are easy to change by accident. A thumb catches a slider while you are scrolling, or you widen the range one evening to see what happens and forget you did. Confirming takes ten seconds, so do it before you assume anything else is wrong.

If the settings are exactly what you meant and the wrong people still appear, Tinder's next step is to log out of the app and log back in. Then go back to the main screen and look at the next dozen cards.

Give it a proper look before you judge. One odd card is not the same as a whole stack of wrong ones, so go through a real run of profiles rather than stopping at the first.

If those are the people you asked for, you are done. If they are not, you have done everything Tinder suggests for this, and the fault is on its side rather than in your settings.

The filters shape a Tinder session before anything else does. Your photos, your opener and your timing all happen inside the pool those settings allow.

So a wrong setting costs you twice. You spend the session looking at people you would never date. And every minute you spend on them is a minute you are not spending on the women you would actually like to meet.

Selectivity makes this worse, not better. My reading of the apps is that they rate you partly on how selective you are, and that swiping right on everyone reads as unselective. A man who shrugs at a wrong setting and swipes through it carelessly is teaching the app the wrong thing about himself.

There is a point about filters that most men never think about, because it works on the other side.

Picture a man in his late thirties who has no trouble talking to a woman in her early twenties in person. On an app, though, if she has set her age range to top out at 29, she may never see him at all, however good his photos are. The filter decides before either of them gets a say.

You are inside every woman's settings in the same way. The women who can see you are only the ones whose age range and preferences let you in. That is one more reason your photos and your bio have to do their job. The pool you are really competing in is smaller than the number of people nearby suggests, so the men in it who look like they have a life get the likes.

Some men set an enormous range "to see more people" and then pass on most of what they see. That feels like more options. It is really just more swiping.

Set the range to women you would genuinely be happy to message and take out. If you are 34 and would honestly enjoy dating anyone from 27 to 38, set that. If you only say yes to a narrower band, set the narrower band and save yourself the scrolling.

A tighter, honest range makes each right swipe mean something. It also makes it far easier to notice when Tinder is showing you people outside it, which is how you ended up here in the first place.

Look at the range again every few months. What you wanted when you first signed up may not be what you want now, and a setting you chose on your first day is easy to forget about entirely.

Open Discovery Settings by tapping the profile icon, then Settings, and check who you have asked to be shown and your age range. If it is all correct, log out and log back in. Then set the range to women you would actually want to date, and be choosy within it.