“The Seattle Freeze.”
The phrase is used so often, yet I’d never heard it before I landed in Seattle in May. Maybe it’s the city’s best-kept secret — a phenomenon buried under the stereotypes of rain, pot, tech, and grunge music.
It’s the idea that people in Seattle will be nice to your face and offer to get together, but when the time comes they won’t follow through. Maybe they’ll ghost you. Maybe they’ll cancel two hours before your plans, promising to reschedule. But you’ll never hear from them again.
Urban Dictionary puts it more bluntly, saying the Freeze “concludes the majority of Seattle residents as snobby, cold, unfriendly people with a fake-polite exterior.”
Translation: A worst nightmare for an extrovert from Kentucky.
Still, Seattle is a city of transplants. I figured I couldn’t be the only person my age looking for friends in an unfamiliar place. But how could I find them when Seattle social conventions tell me to not meet people’s eyes as I walk down the sidewalk and avoid small talk with cashiers?
The answer was simple: Bumble BFF.
Bumble was founded as a dating app in 2014. What differentiated it from its online-dating counterpart Tinder was that women in heterosexual matches could message men first, and if they didn’t within 24 hours, the match would disappear.
Since then, Bumble has grown quickly and expanded to foster other kinds of relationships: friendships (Bumble BFF) and business connections (Bumble Bizz). The company, which went public in February, also made headlines recently when it announced its first brick-and-mortar cafe and offered its 650-person workforce a week off to recharge.
I wasn’t alone. During the first three months of 2021, the average amount of time spent on Bumble BFF increased by 44% for women, according to a Wall Street Journal report. It grew 83% for men.
Building a profile on BFF is nearly the same as the dating version, but with different prompts. I wrote a bio, filled in my Zodiac sign and connected my Spotify, thinking that since Nirvana was in my top artists I would win points with Seattle folks. (I didn’t.) I made sure to include photos of me with my friends back home, to show potential new friends I have a track record of friendship.
Traditional dating apps have conditioned the right swipe for “yes” and left swipe for “no” to be very fast, and, frankly, shallow — based only on appearance and instant gratification. I quickly realized that to effectively find friends, this kind of swiping won’t cut it. You have to read the bios.
I asked the friends I’ve made on the app about what their general experience has been, and several mentioned the same thing: repetitive bios. This is true — most mention being new to Seattle, loving brunch and hiking.
I was able to connect to the friends I made based on unique tidbits they put in their profile. That way, I could find more specific topics to talk about and was more likely to carry on a conversation. I also found commonality with women who were in Seattle for an internship — many of whom, like me, came from the eastern side of the country and left their home- and college-towns.
I met people to explore Seattle bars and restaurants with; hike Lake 22; eat ice cream; go bookstore hunting; and more. Every person I met from the app I saw again.
It was valuable to hear about the places they call home, including Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Canada. Bumble BFF helped make the “freeze” less icy knowing others were experiencing it, too.
Though it’s fading, there is still a stigma around meeting people online. Couples who meet on dating apps often joke about creating an elaborate, fake origin story, but it’s unclear if that social convention is extended to friendship meetups as well.
The most common response my Bumble friends and I get when people ask how we met is, “That actually works?”
The part no one wants to hear is that like with any relationship, you can’t expect instant results. You have to be patient when sending messages, diligent in reading profiles, and you have to schedule a time to meet — and you can’t cancel, or freeze friends out. You get out what you put in.
It helped remembering that everyone is using the app for the same reasons, and despite the “ice” of being new in a city which has an introverted culture, I was able to find a solid sense of community with these other transplants thanks to technology.
