8 Best Tinder Openers (And the Science Behind Them)

Nothing is more frustrating than matching with an attractive girl on Tinder, excitedly sending her a message, and then facing eternal radio silence. You know you’re no Shakespeare, but your message sure seemed decent enough to get a mutual match to respond. Why are your opening lines getting ignored? Simple: You’re failing to trigger an emotional response that makes her want to write you back.

If you already have online dating openers that work for you, don’t just use them on Tinder. Test them out on all of the most popular dating sites and apps!

Getting more quality dates with the women you want to meet comes down to optimizing your profile and messages to the largest degree possible. What you need are some extremely effective lines that you can cut and paste to different women on Tinder. You’re in luck because I’ve already done all of the hard work for you.

In this post, I’m going to reveal 8 opening lines for Tinder that have been proven to crush the competition and get you dates. Along the way, you’ll discover the exact reasons you’re not having the success you want with your Tinder messages. And if you read carefully, you’ll be able to double your response rate and even create epic Tinder conversation starters of your own.

Capture Her Attention

If you want to start a conversation, your Tinder icebreaker needs to intrigue her. It should make her feel something because an emotional connection fuels both attraction and trust — both of which are crucial for her to say yes to a date.

And you should always ask a question because that gives her a reason to respond. This is, in part, why messages like “Hey” and “Ur hot” are doomed to fail. You have to do better than that!

It’s important to remember attractive women on Tinder get bombarded with compliments, and they don’t need another one from you. It didn’t work for those other guys, either.

Take Her Age Into Consideration

Understanding your target market isn’t just Marketing 101; it’s an essential Tinder strategy. The best opening line depends on the age of the woman of interest because something that makes a hottie in her 20s giggle will make an experienced 40-year-old roll her eyes and move on.

The data crunchers over at Hinge, a mobile app that matches users who share Facebook friends, created 100 unique opening lines and tracked their success rates. Their research confirmed taking a woman’s age into account when starting a conversation pays off with higher response rates.

Hinge also shared their top two openers in four age categories, and you can easily adapt them for even more great Tinder lines than those I’m going to share with you today:

A few of these examples have some solid humor, but Hinge clearly didn’t hire comedy writers to come up with these ideas. If they had, there’d surely be more humor in the top performers.

Funny Guys Finish First

Women of all ages like funny. In fact, 97% of single women think a sense of humor is just as attractive as good looks. But you need to actually be funny. Cheese and sleaze don’t fly, even on Tinder. If your opening line would make a seventh-grade boy giggle, it’s probably not going to work well for you.

Here’s a humorous opening line that works well with girls in their 20s:

Tinder Opener #1: Does this mean we’re exclusive? 😉

Here’s one for women in their upper 20s or lower 30s:

Tinder Opener #2: Soon there will be married couples whose how-we-met story is “we both swiped right, and then he asked me to marry him.” I’m not gonna ask, but it’s tempting 😉

GIFs are an excellent way to bring the funny to your message. For instance, you could adapt the message above to fit with this popular Jimmy Fallon GIF, and turn it into a three-message sequence that you fire off in rapid succession.

Tinder Opener #3: A Three-Message Sequence

Message 1:

Message 2: Does this mean we’re boyfriend and girlfriend now?
Message 3: P.S. If you’re the cheating type, just lie to me and say no, OK?

I just made this up while writing this article. It’s never been tested like the others have, but it’s an example of what would probably work well with women in their 20s.

Test each opening line to see what works best for you. It’s as simple as keeping track of how many times you send each message and how many times each message gets a response. The math is simple: The number of replies divided by the number of times sent for each message gives you your response rate, which you can track on a running basis in a spreadsheet.

If you’re testing 11 different opening lines on Tinder, it might look something like this:

If this were your response data, all you’d need to do is stick with messages 2, 3, 4 and 7… and you’d be golden.

GIFs Get The Girl

On average, breaking the ice with a GIF makes her 30% more likely to respond and doubles the length of your conversation, according to Tinder. Your opener needs to be more than just a GIF, though. Combine it with a strong opening line that is at least somewhat relevant to the animation.

The HAAAAAAY GIF above and the next two below are among the 20 GIFs with the highest response rate on Tinder. You’re welcome.

Whet Her Appetite For More

When it comes to topics for your Tinder opener, food is always a great option. Breakfasts, desserts and everything in between are winning conversation starters online. Women love thinking and talking about food.

Hinge recently found that women are 40% more likely to respond to messages about delicious edibles.

Here are a couple food-related openers that could work well for women in their 20s or 30s:

Tinder Opener #4: Dark chocolate, turtle cheesecake, or Cherry Garcia? If you had to choose…

Tinder Opener #5: Your Sunday breakfast personality is __? A) Waffles & pancakes, slowly savored. B) Apple & granola bar on the run. C) Aggressive mimosas. D) Sleeping til lunch.

Connect With Her Interests

Studies have shown that having something in common builds attraction. People are more comfortable around other people who remind them of themselves, so if you share an interest let her know.

Take your conversational cue from her photos, or what she’s written in her bio. If she’s got a photo or text that make it clear she’s snow skied before, send her a message like this:

Tinder Opener #6: I see we both enjoy skiing. Are you more the girl making the black diamonds look easy or the bunny slope look hard? (No judgment either way)

Travel makes an especially strong conversational opener because most women enjoy dreaming about exotic destinations. Kick-start a nice vacation fantasy, and she’s already looking forward to more messages from you. If you can tell she likes to travel from her photos or her profile, try one of these:

Tinder Opener #7: You’ve just won a free trip to anywhere in the world! (Not from me, it’s coming in the mail.) The catch is you have to leave tomorrow. Where are you headed?

Tinder Opener #8: You declare a three-day weekend. Are you heading for the mountains, the beach, or some ancient ruins?

Persistence Pays Off

Even if you hit her with literary gold, there’s a chance she won’t respond. But that doesn’t mean you can’t do anything about it. Hit her with a second message! It works. In fact, the second attempt accounts for 21% of our clients’ responses at Virtual Dating Assistants.

As my token of appreciation for your reading this far, here are a couple bonus messages. These two lines work great for women in their 20s who don’t respond the first time:

Bonus Follow-Up Tinder Line #1: Playing hard to get already? I barely even know you!

Bonus Follow-Up Tinder Line #2: We just matched and you’re already playing hard to get?!

Women appreciate persistence, and it only takes seconds to copy, paste and send. If she doesn’t respond to this second message, it’s time to move on. You can’t win ‘em all, of course.

Now that you have 8 sure-fire opening lines in your arsenal, starting a conversation on Tinder should be as easy as stealing candy from little kids. But seriously, don’t steal candy from little kids. Focus on your Tinder skills instead. It may be where it all begins, and one day you can tell your kids you met on Tinder.