As a single person wandering through the world, it can be difficult to find someone who loves all the right things: parks, subways, bike lanes, human-scale buildings, high-density housing, debates over the ideal length of a city block. With about 8, members living mostly in North America, the United Kingdom, and Australia, NUMTinder is a makeshift dating environment for those who consider liking public transportation to be a core part of their personality, or those for whom a lack of interest in urban planning is a deal breaker.
But transit-themed! But when she found NUMTinder at the beginning of the pandemic, she switched allegiances. Tinder, she told me, is too cold and uniformโthe app pushes everyone to present a bare-bones profile, and makes swiping feel like a chore. By comparison, NUMTinder is colorful and welcoming and full of life. Also, not every private conversation has to be romanticโplenty are simply about โฆ trains! Still, nobody is completely joking either. Even the premise of the group is only half-sincere.
But some end up finding love anyway. Murphy shared her first post at the beginning of quarantine, when the group had a huge influx of posts. New members were joining, old members were putting up new profiles, everyone was looking for virtual friends and flirtations. From there, she ended up chatting with someone from Portugal, with whom she was obviously never going to meet up in person, but who served as a fun fantasy during lockdown.
She also learned that several of her Temple classmates were in the group, and ended up dating one of them. Others in the group have given up on dating apps altogether.
Godfrey, her friend and co-administrator, agrees. NUMTinder heads off this behavior by cultivating community norms for public conversations and relying on human moderators who are well known and trusted within the group. He says that he started it as a joke, but people took it seriously almost right away. In the past few months, Ong and Godfrey have taken over as the lead moderators and admins. I recently checked in with a woman I interviewed at the beginning of the pandemic, who had been embarrassed at the time about her choice to start dating a fellow NUMTinder member during lockdown, in spite of stay-at-home orders.
