Tinder Launches Video Dating Feature: Face to Face

Whether or not you believe in cuffing season, dating during a pandemic seems to come with a particular kind of anxiety. All the places you'd normally meet people spontaneously are off-limits to those who want to keep themselves safe, and yet online dating can feel like a time-suck with little to no reward. One heavyweight dating app is rolling out a new feature that might even your odds, though.

Tinder has announced that Face to Face, its previously limited video-chatting feature, is now going global, which means anyone can opt into a live conversation with a match if both users are into it. For those concerned about safety, Tinder has emphasized that precautions are available, like reporting and blocking unfriendly interactions, declining video chat invitations, and turning off the feature if you're not feeling it. This can help you determine whether it's worth exchanging numbers and bringing the conversation off the app — a step that might save all those one-time use contacts you create early on.

A couple of video apps have leaned into video chatting as their biggest attraction, which may help those of us (all of us, really) who don't entirely know what we want from dating until we see it. Being single may be a little more expensive, depending on what kinds of tradeoffs you want, but paying for dating apps might not be the answer either. At the very least, though, dating isn't likely to be a scam in itself. If you need to look someone in the eye to figure out what's next, video chatting might be worth giving it a shot.