Friday is Tu B’Av, the 15th day of the Hebrew month of Av, known as the Jewish Day of Love. In ancient times, young Jews would meet in the fields on Tu B’Av. Today, all you need is your phone. Here’s what we found with ours:
Tinder
Tinder has a reputation for not being the best place to find long-term love. Or long-term anything, really.
It encourages you to completely ignore the old saying, “Don’t judge a book by its cover.” Your decision to swipe left or right is pretty much based solely on a few pictures and maybe a witty few lines from your potential match describing him/herself. If you find that person attractive, you would swipe right.
One of the biggest turnoffs (aside from the relentless gym selfies guys seem to really love posting) is the mutual friends feature.
Because Tinder connects to your Facebook profile, for someone who grew up in and went to high school in Philly, seeing all of your mutual friends pop up on the profile of a match can either be a good thing, as it gives you something in common right off the bat, or makes you swipe left faster than Usain Bolt. The latter seemed to be our more frequent reaction.
While sometimes it’s funny to see someone you had AP Government with pop up, nine times out of 10 you won’t want to match and create a high school reunion.
With the short-term love mentality of the app, the conversations were shorter:
Guy: “Hey how’s it going?”
Girl: “Good how about you?”
Guy: “Good, just watching TV.”
But enduring a few awkward message exchanges like the one above — and a few really crude ones — for 30 minutes of swiping, we got a cumulative 27 matches and four messages, though we didn’t initiate anything because we’re classy broads.
JSwipe
JSwipe is the go-to free Jewish dating app, giving matches 18 days (get it?) to talk to each other.
Probably the most curious part of the app is the “Willing to Convert” feature, allowing non-Jews to join in their quest for love, too. And if you’re not interested in featuring your religious background (Reform, Conservative, Orthodox, etc.), you can choose “Just Jewish.”
Here, too, the mutual friends feature can make you feel a little hesitant, but with the knowledge that all Jews know each other, having connections in common probably shouldn’t be that much of a surprise.
Coffee Meets Bagel
This app probably differs the most from the others, providing the user with only one other profile each day based on similarities and preferences in a match. But there’s also the option to buy more matches, showing that you really can buy love.
You can buy virtual coffee beans that allow you to view more matches — aka bagels — and extra details of their profiles.
With just one match and very little activity, it’s hard to say how worthwhile this app is, though it might be better in the long run.
Bumble
Bumble puts the pressure on the ladies.
Most guys make the first move in dating app chat rooms — by the way, a subtle “Sup?” has not and will not ever get our attention — but on Bumble, women have 24 hours to make the first move before the match expires.
However, that usually means the guys who are on there actually want to be on there because they know they can’t really do anything about a match unless the girl initiates a conversation.
Because of that, using Bumble was better than using something like Tinder. But keeping up with matches within that 24-hour window was rather exhausting as the phone buzzed for three straight minutes alerting us to the final hour of matching.
Overall: great pickings, too much effort.
Happn
Finally, an app that lets you casually cross paths so you can tell your future grandchildren that you actually met at a coffee shop — he grabbed your order by mistake, and the rest is history. But sadly, Happn is just not going to make that happen for you.
This main feature of this app is that it continuously tracks your location and tells you how many times you’ve physically crossed paths with another. You could be walking down the street, driving by — sounds reasonable, right?
Until you realize that you take the same route to work and back every day and you’ve crossed paths with Tom six times already.
For safety reasons and creepiness, we deleted our accounts pretty fast.
Rachel Kurland and Marissa Stern are staff reporters for the Jewish Exponent in Philadelphia.
