Tinder now lets friends and family pick your next date

If you’re the kind of person who asks friends and family for help with your love life, Tinder is aiming to make things a little easier by letting them suggest potential partners for you directly within the app. Tinder’s new Matchmaker feature lets users invite their loved ones, regardless of whether they have a Tinder profile or not, to view and recommend potential matches, essentially integrating a “friend test” into the dating app.

Tinder Matchmaker is available now in 15 countries including the US, UK, Australia, Canada, France, and Germany, with a global rollout expected “in the coming months.” Users can start a Matchmaker session either directly from a profile card, or within the app settings — creating a link that can be shared with up to 15 friends or family members. Participating loved ones (or ‘matchmakers’) then have 24 hours to recommend profiles before the session expires. Matchmakers cannot chat or send messages to potential dates on behalf of the user who invited them.

Once the Matchmaker session expires, the Tinder user can then review which potential dating candidates their loved ones have suggested. Profiles liked by the matchmakers will be marked as a “recommendation” but the Tinder user who invited them still has the final say on who to officially ‘like’ in the app. Tinder says that profiles marked as nope by matchmakers won’t change.

If your friends and family are anything like mine then I can see Matchmaker being used more for trolling than to actually help your love life, but it’s still a neat feature for folks who need to vibe-check their dates. According to a study commissioned by Tinder, over 75 percent of young singles discuss their dating habits multiple times a month with their friends, so this just optimizes the process a little. And if you’re down on your luck anyway, why not let your grandma vet your next date?