Your New BFF Could Be Just A Swipe Away: There's Now A Tinder-Like App For Finding Friends

Swipe right for platonic friendship!

How do you (a woman) make friends (with other women) as an adult?

Cue silence.

You could sidle up to people at Pilates and lead with ‘good stretch?’. You could put on you’re most approachable face and sit in coffee shops resisting the urge to look at your phone. Or you could attend lots of work-related ‘networking’ events and hope more than a professional (but less than a romantic) connection sparks.

However you approach it, making friends (true friends you can count on in a crisis) isn’t simple, and there’s no infallible formula for success. Once you’re done with school and university those intense bonding opportunities are fewer and further between.

Plus, our friendship networks often shrink as we age, generally speaking we aren’t actively searching for new relationships, we’re working on nurturing the important, existing ones (in between going to work, managing domestic responsibilities and all that other time-sapping life stuff).

But what if, at some stage, that isn't the case for you, personally? What if you have to move for work, become insatiably social, or simply grow out of your old relationships?

What do you do if you find yourself searching for platonic female friendship in 2016? There’s an app to help you out, of course. An app called Hey! VINA that has much in common with Tinder. The difference is, everyone signed up is searching for female friends.

Basically, you swipe right if the person who flashes up on your phone seems to tick all your potential-pal boxes. And as with Tinder, if the feeling is mutual you can take things to chat level.

Hey! VINA is the brainchild of two female founders, one of whom relocated to a brand new city as an adult, wondering how on earth she was meant to forge a network of women she could rely on.

This is Hey! VINA’s mission statement: ‘we’re dedicated to building global communities of women who make each other feel supported, inspired, free, and above all else, happy.

‘We started this company in Summer 2015 with the belief that all it takes is one friend to change your whole life. With the right set of people to support you in your journey and a culture of community over competition, we can change the world in all the best ways.’

The app has already launched in the US, and as with many tech innovations it probably won’t be long before it arrives in the UK.

Our verdict: it’s a neat idea – as with dating apps it removes many of the obstacles you might encounter in the real world (like drastically differing intentions). It also explodes your potential friendship pool and makes your search more efficient - you don’t have to rely only on chance encounters in person.

Swiping digits at the ready! Your new BFF could be just a click away.