Tindering Without Borders

When the Los Angeles-born 34-year-old Julio Ortiz opens Tinder—or Bumble, Happn or Coffee Meets Bagel, his current dating apps of choice—in Tijuana, Mexico, the profiles that show up on his phone screen come from both sides of the border.

Dating apps show potential matches based on distance radius rather than country or city, and, for Ortiz, whose American passport and Global Entry clearance allow him to move freely and quickly between the two countries, this works out fine. He’ll swipe right, he says, regardless of nationality, ethnicity or residency “if I see somebody pretty.”

This isn’t the case for all—or even most—swipers on the 1,954 mile-long U.S.-Mexico border, which is dotted by towns near to or straddling the divide that are closely connected to each other, with shared economies and, often, families, friendships and relationships spanning the international boundary. There is the San Diego/Tijuana area, the border’s largest and most populated binational urban conurbation, with a combined population of approximately 4.9 million, as well as El Paso, Texas/Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua and Nogales, Arizona/Nogales, Sonora, among others.

But Tijuana in particular has developed a reputation as a playground for U.S. citizens in search of unsanctioned fun since Prohibition, when they drove south for the alcohol that they couldn’t consume openly at home. In later years, Tijuana developed a seedy reputation for “sex, drugs, and marijuana,” as the infamous Manu Chao song, “Welcome to Tijuana” memorialized.

Today, the city’s reputation as a destination for debauchery has been mostly replaced by one that emphasizes its revitalized local cuisine and craft beer scene. Yet the tradition of Americans crossing recreationally continues, facilitated by Mexico’s easy entry rules for American passport holders, who can enter and exit freely.

That same courtesy is not extended to Mexicans, however, for whom crossing north has more stringent visa requirements, designed to prevent them from overstaying their visas and seeking employment in the United States. According to some estimates, well over half of Tijuana’s residents are not qualified to legally enter into the United States—and this figure doesn’t even begin to take into account the growing number of would-be asylum seekers from other countries that await processing under President Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” asylum policy.

The movement restrictions created by international borders are apparently not considered in dating apps’ “matching” algorithms—nor can users choose to discriminate from among their matches based on country. And with San Diego and Tijuana’s geographic proximities—the two are only 17 miles apart, while some San Diego suburbs like Chula Vista and Imperial Beach are even closer—online daters in the border regions are, like it or not, shown potential (while potentially unattainable) matches in both the U.S. and Mexico.

Multiple requests for comment from the major dating apps for this piece went unanswered, though a 2018 Tinder statement to PLAYBOY stated: ““Tinder users select a distance-based radius for potential matches and are shown all matches that mutually meet their search criteria. If a user is based close to another country, and their distance preferences include a radius that crosses a border, they will be shown all potential matches that meet their criteria—regardless of whether a potential match is located in another country. We believe everyone deserves the right to meet their perfect match.”

And so, online daters in Tijuana and San Diego find different ways of dealing with this quirk.

Some, like Ortiz, are indiscriminate about potential matches’ locations provided that the profiles meet other checklist criteria. Other users automatically swipe left on matches from the wrong side of the border, while still others employ the strategy (common everywhere, especially among male users) of swiping right on everyone and saving their decision-making until their match likes them back.

Twenty-four-year-old Tijuana native Gabby Jimenez was 19 when she first ventured onto Tinder. The app was still relatively new, and at first she wasn’t interested in meeting anyone, but rather wanted to see who was out there—and who might find her attractive. Because she didn’t have any intention of actually meeting her matches, she set her match radius to 100 miles rather than the standard 15.

Widening her radius had immediate results. Even in her casual browsing, she found differences between potential dates in the United States and Mexico. There was, of course, the basic question of language: Profiles north of the border tended to be in English while those in the south were in Spanish, though there were also a number of bilingual profiles. (When she was ready to actually date, she used both English and Spanish in her profile, widening her potential dating pool—as did Ortiz, who explained, “almost everybody in Tijuana speaks English, but not everybody in San Diego speaks Spanish.”

But when Jimenez was ready to meet men in real life, she limited her match radius to the lowest possible option: four miles. This was an attempt to see only matches in Mexico. “I wish there was a way to block people from another country,” she said. “It was like when Google Maps tells you to go a certain way but you know that road is blocked.”

Even with a limited match radius, however, American men would continue to appear on her cell. Swiping in idle moments, has become common practice among online daters around the world, and while idling in queue to cross the border between Tijuana and San Diego, casually swiping right is, naturally, tempting.

At any rate, Jimenez found the conversations with American matches refreshing: They were more forward, flirty and responsive to her DMs than Mexican matches. They were also more likely to set up real-life dates, whereas the Mexican men that she matched with could talk for one or two full days “without even hinting at dating.” It was this intention to actually meet up that made her more open to cross-border dating.

Eventually, she matched with Phillip K., a 29-year-old San Diegan who worked in one of the city’s many craft breweries. It was, she recalled, late November 2016, just weeks after the election of President Donald Trump, who had made a “big beautiful wall” across the U.S.-Mexico border one of his key campaign promises.

Before they started dating, Phillip had matched with other women from Tijuana, but none of these connections had turned into real-life dates. “It’s a hassle to cross the border,” he said. “Especially the first time, you’re dedicating the whole day to a person that you’ve never met.”

For many would-be-daters across the divide, that hassle can be a dealbreaker. “People reject you because you live over the border,” says Ortiz, sometimes immediately, and sometimes in the course of an initial text conversation.

In the latter cases, Ortiz would try to assuage their concerns, saying, “You know girl, I have Global Entry. It takes about 10 minutes to get across.’ Dates [are] in the evening, so there’s no traffic. I’m accommodating.” Even so, it didn’t always work out.

Even when the swipe led to an initial date, the border also sometimes limited the night’s outcome. “If you’re about to get lucky on a first date, which has happened, and you’re anywhere in San Diego,” Ortiz explained, it’s not as simple as, your place or mine? Instead, he said, “if their living arrangement is not great, it’s a dead end.”

In Jimenez’s case with her now-boyfriend, she was the one who did the crossing. This trend—the person south of the border making the first move, regardless of gender or the comparative ease for Americans to pass through customs—is common among cross-border meet-ups. (It’s also a turn off for some women in Tijuana, even those who can cross and who are used to men making the first move.)

“I think a big part of it [is that] Tijuanenses are used to crossing to the U.S. for practical reasons, like shopping or for work. Americans on the other hand don’t have a need to cross to Mexico except for business or tourism,” Jimenez posits. “On top of that, you have the harsh reality that…Tijuana has a bad reputation.”

Jimenez herself grew up crossing regularly, visiting her grandmother in Chula Vista and the San Diego Zoo on school field trips, so venturing across the border to meet a stranger from the internet didn’t feel that out of the ordinary. “It was kind of thrilling,” she said, before adding with a laugh that she gave her girlfriends the date’s details, just in case.

But as the relationship got more serious, the constant crossing, and ensuing long hours waiting in line at the border—especially before Philip was approved for SENTRI, a program similar to Global Entry that allows approved travelers use of dedicated crossing lanes—put pressure on their relationship to become defined.

“Pretty quickly we had to make the decision,” Phillip recalled, of “is this purely physical or do we want a relationship?”

This took on additional urgency when Jimenez’s visa expired in 2019, leaving it up to Phillip to cross south to see her. Up to this point, the pair had been splitting their trips across the border to lessen the burden on either person. In the meantime, as they waited to see if her new visa application would be approved, they asked themselves and each other serious questions about their relationship, like whether—and how—they would continue to see each other if her visa was not approved.

“It forced us to think about, ‘What are our expectations? What do you want to do?’” she said, as well as, “More importantly, where are we going to be living?’” This final question was complicated by the fact that Phillip didn’t speak Spanish, which would make living in Tijuana difficult for him, and that salaries on the U.S. side of the border are exponentially higher.

In the end, Jimenez’s visa was approved, alleviating at least some of the pressure for the couple to figure everything out immediately.

But with President Trump’s hardline rhetoric on the border—his calls for a wall have since escalated, at various points during his presidency, to threats to shut down the border completely (a threat made real by the actual closure of the San Ysidro crossing in November 2018)—the uncertainty has not gone away.

Jimenez is circumspect about the ultimate effect of the border. “There are moments when I feel like politics (and sometimes just transportation systems and infrastructure) are keeping us apart, and then there are days when I just feel like we’re in different parts of a big city.”

And if the dating apps are the judge, for Jimenez, Ortiz, and others on the front lines of contemporary romance, there is no border at all.