Pen Pals to Bumble BFF

You may remember being in grade school and having to write to a pen-pal in class. You would write one page about yourself; who you are, what your community is like, what your interests are, etc. You would seal it up, stick a stamp on it, send it out, and wait for the US mailing system do its thing. After about a week, you would receive a letter back.  Your pen-pal would exchange details about themselves and their life from wherever they are in the world. Nowadays, the concept of having a pen-pal has been completely re-invented. The desire to communicate with people outside our personal realm has existed throughout history. As it still exists today, it has transformed completely. With the use of modern technology, we can communicate with people from all over the globe with just a click or two. Not only can we text or Face-Time to stay in touch with our friends, but now there’s a new way to make friends via technology. 

You may have heard of the app Bumble; it’s probably lumped together in your mind with other dating apps like Tinder, OkCupid, and Grindr. But Bumble is no longer just a dating app; with the recent addition of Bumble BFF, the app offers a platform solely for making friends. (Currently it is only available for females to connect with other females).

Here’s how it works: 

• Set up your account by providing some information about yourself: name, age, gender, zodiac sign, religion, relationship status, etc. You can skip any of these questions, and you can filter your feed to show people based on their answers to these same questions.

• Just like a dating app, people come across your screen and you swipe left for no and right for yes. You can also scroll down on someone to see the information about them that they have provided. 

• Once two people match with each other on Bumble BFF, there’s a time limit of 24 hours for either person to reach out and start a conversation. Additionally, if someone doesn’t respond in a chat within 24 hours, the match expires and you can no longer talk to that person.

See how we set up our Bumble BFF account:

The use of technology to communicate hasn’t just snuck up on us. We live in a world where we spend more time talking to our friends digitally than we do in real life. But those are friends we already have established outside of technology. Bumble BFF is paving the way to creating friends strictly through technology. This changes the way we present ourselves and interact. When you meet someone in real life you give and receive a first impression. The first impression you get from someone on Bumble BFF is from the few images and details that the other person chooses to share. In a face-to-face meeting, you can pick up on aspects of a person’s personality just by observing them. The conversation is more of a responsive dialogue where you don’t have a lot of time to plan what you’re going to say next. Through Bumble BFF we deliberately decide what parts of ourselves to present. Furthermore, we can take our time responding to messages at our own pace. This can be said for any form of digital communication, like texting, but when you reach out to a person through technology, the relationship between you two is usually pre-established through real life interactions. 

Whether it’s the slow and distant notion of pen-pals, or the instantaneous swiping of potential friends on Bumble BFF, it’s human nature to connect to people outside our everyday lives. With the use of technology throughout time, we’ve been able to find new ways to make and harbor these connections. If you want to see what it’s like to make friends through the app, download Bumble for yourself and find out.