You’ve probably done it yourself, or watched a friend do it: screenshot a confusing text, send it to the one guy friend you trust, and wait for him to explain what it actually means. That habit isn’t a quirky exception anymore. It’s become close to standard practice for single women navigating dating apps, according to new research from Bumble, and it points to something bigger than one text thread. Women are increasingly outsourcing the job of decoding men’s dating behavior to men themselves, because the apps alone aren’t giving them enough to go on.
The Guy Friend as Translator
Bumble’s Global Dating Trends research, based on internal polling of 41,294 members ages 18 to 35 conducted in September 2024, found that 57% of U.S. women say they rely on their male friends to help explain men’s dating behavior. Bumble’s team labeled this pattern “Guys That Get It,” and the framing fits. This isn’t women asking male friends for a second opinion on a profile photo. It’s women treating certain men in their lives as interpreters for an entire category of behavior they otherwise find genuinely hard to read.
It Goes Deeper Than Just Advice
A companion release from Bumble on the same 2025 trends cycle found the pattern runs even further into daily dating life. 31% of single women say they’re more open with their male friends about their dating lives than they used to be, 22% now ask a male friend to vet a potential date before meeting them, and a majority, 54%, say they rely on the men in their lives for honest insight into how men actually approach dating. That’s not casual venting over coffee. That’s building a screening system, with a trusted male friend acting as a kind of quality-control check before someone gets more of a woman’s time or trust.
Why the Signals Got Harder to Read
Part of what makes a translator necessary in the first place is that the signals themselves have gotten subtler. The same Global Dating Trends research found that 88% of U.S. women agree that how people show love and affection now includes small, easy-to-miss behaviors, like sending a meme, sharing a playlist, or referencing an inside joke, rather than grand or obvious gestures. That’s a meaningful shift. A bouquet of flowers or a clear declaration doesn’t require much interpretation. A meme sent at 11 p.m. with no caption does. When affection gets expressed in fragments that could plausibly mean nothing, it makes sense that women would want a second opinion from someone who has actually sent those same fragments to people he was and wasn’t interested in.
The same research found that 49% of Gen Z singles now consider geeking out over a shared interest with someone to be a form of intimacy, and that half of U.S. women say they’re drawn to dating content that shows the messier, more authentic side of dating rather than a polished highlight reel. Both findings point the same direction: the markers people used to rely on to gauge interest, big gestures, clear declarations, curated dating stories, have given way to smaller, messier, more ambiguous ones. Ambiguity is exactly the kind of thing a second reader helps resolve, which may explain why the guy-friend-as-translator role has become so common rather than staying a rare exception.
Why Dating Apps Created This Need
Part of what’s driving this shift is the apps themselves. Dating platforms have spent the past several years rewriting their own rules in response to user frustration, and Bumble is a clear example. The company, whose original model required women to send the first message, announced in 2024 that it would drop that requirement, a change CNN Business covered at the time as part of a broader industry rethink of how much structure daters actually want from an app. When the platform’s own rules of engagement are shifting, it makes sense that users would lean harder on people they already trust to help make sense of what’s left unclear on the screen.
Dating apps are also, fundamentally, thin slices of information. A bio, a handful of photos, maybe a prompt answer or two, and then a string of text messages that can be read a dozen different ways depending on tone, timing, and how much someone actually means what they typed. A male friend who has dated, been ghosted, and had his own version of these conversations can often catch context that’s invisible to someone reading the same message from outside that experience. That’s the value proposition, and it’s apparently valuable enough that more than half of women are using it regularly.
The Bigger Shift: Friendship and Dating Are Overlapping
What Bumble’s data really captures is a blurring of two categories that used to stay fairly separate: your dating life and your friendships. For a lot of women, the male friend playing translator isn’t a dating prospect at all. He’s a trusted outside voice who happens to have firsthand knowledge of how men communicate interest, disinterest, and everything in between. That friendship becomes a kind of infrastructure for dating, not a replacement for it.
The practical upside is real. Getting a second, more literal read on a confusing text can save someone weeks of overanalyzing a situation that a male friend might decode in ten seconds. But it also says something about where trust currently sits in modern dating. A majority of women are more confident in a friend’s read on a stranger’s texting habits than in their own instincts, or the profile itself, and that’s arguably the more interesting story than the swipe data alone.
