Hinge Just Ruined It For Polyamorous People

Written By Leanne Yau

Are you a @hinge user? Have you suddenly noticed a spike in attention from monogamous people you don’t want to match with as a non-monogamous person? That’s because Hinge made two changes: they removed their “relationship type” filter, which previously meant you could filter out people who did not share your desired relationship structure for monogamy/non-monogamy, and also shifted “dating intentions” (short term, long term, etc) away from the free plan and onto the paid plan.

Practically, this means that monogamous people are suddenly seeing non-monogamous profiles they don’t want to see, and non-monogamous people are now dealing with stigma, judgment, and negative comments from monogamous people who they have zero interest in matching with. For me personally, I suddenly got a bunch of unwanted messages from people who were more interested in sexualising and insulting me for being polyamorous than actually connecting. It’s been so unpleasant I’ve since deleted the app.

I sent a complaint to Hinge and they sent back a nothingburger of a response. If this was Hinge’s attempt at creating more connection between people by widening the dating pool, this was the wrong move. You could pick literally any other filter to remove and it would have sucked less than this. Right now, you can filter by ethnicity on Hinge, but not by your shared relationship values. I think I know which is higher on people’s priority lists.

Hinge was never particularly friendly in its messaging to non-monogamous people as the dating app that was marketed as “designed to be deleted” - but the non-monogamy filter made it a step above its competition of the more “mainstream” apps out there. However, with this decision, they’ve just significantly lost their edge.

Monogamous and polyamorous people generally don't want to date each other. Stop forcing them to have to swipe on each other - they're annoyed to see us, and we don't want to deal with their judgment either. I met one of my partners on Hinge and now I will never meet another.

If you’ve been affected by this, please make it known far and wide. If enough people make noise, hopefully they will realise how terrible an idea this was.

Non-monogamous people hardly have a reason to delete dating apps. It’s time that they catered to and included us more, so that everyone can meet who they want to meet.

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Leanne Yau
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